Situated in a review of rural, cultural, and youth geographies, this article reports on a qualitative study of the role of reading and libraries in the lives of older rural teenagers. The primary method of data collection was the use of in-depth, flexibly structured interviews with twenty-seven youth between the ages of fifteen and nineteen years,…

In this article, the author discusses the most important thing she thinks school libraries should work toward. It is important for a school librarian to know and understand the mission of the school. It is also important to formulate a mission for the school library program. School librarians must think about and reflect on their own beliefs. What…

With the creation of the Office of Scholarly Communication (OSC) in 1990, the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) launched an initiative to focus widespread attention on the dysfunctions in the scholarly publishing system. Through the collection and dissemination of data documenting the serials crisis, a bias for action that led to the…

Electronic communication technologies continue to change the landscape of reference services. For many users, virtual communication is the preferred means of conversing. Synchronous virtual reference, similar to other synchronous means of communication, is an important method for reaching students and for providing teaching and learning…

The United States no longer has a workforce dependent on operating machinery and performing repetitive tasks. Educators are therefore challenged to change the way students learn and to provide a workforce that is innovative and that has the ability to design new jobs. To do this, students must learn to be problem solvers, to create products that…

Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21) is a comprehensive plan sponsored by thirty-one organizations and businesses. Involved are organizations such as Apple, Microsoft, Dell, and Verizon, to name a few, and such organizations as the National Education Association, the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, and the American…

The article explores the concept of baby boomers as a "crossover" generation, one that embodies characteristics of previous and later generations. The context is the retirement of the baby boomers and its potential impact on the public library. Ethnographic method within a constructivist framework was used, employing the techniques of…

In order to best serve the needs of students with disabilities, school librarians must be aware of best practice in special education. They must communicate and collaborate with general education teachers and special education professionals to provide targeted curricular, instructional supports as well as appropriate resources and technology. This…

If Google represents the first flicker of information technology, the development of additional tools has continued to enhance access to information but with the unfortunate downside of decreasing information literacy. Todd Gilman, librarian for literature in English at Yale University's Sterling Memorial Library, decries the resulting disconnect…

Libraries have been around for thousands of years. Many of them are considered great because of their magnificent architecture or because of the size of their collections. This paper offers ten case studies of libraries that have used technology to achieve greatness. Because almost any library can implement technology, a library does not have to…

A report of findings from 2,318 respondents to a survey carried out among college students on six campuses distributed across the U.S. in the spring of 2009, as part of Project Information Literacy. Respondents, while curious in the beginning stages of research, employed a consistent and predictable research strategy for finding information,…

In today's schools and library media centers, emotion-laden concerns about new modes of information and communication technology can hijack librarians' attention, even taking center stage. Something about the online revolution and, more recently, the advent of Web 2.0 tools and their ability to create connections among users, as well as between…

Recent surveys indicate that many colleges and universities have reached a pivotal moment in assessing the function and future development of their institutional repositories. Other surveys convey that archivists are participating in the development and implementation of institutional repositories at a variety of levels and have contributed to the…

Archivists are challenged by many competing demands on their time. The rise of institutional repositories, often located in libraries rather than archives, and the concurrent increase in attention to the changes in scholarly communication may be perceived by archivists as being a demand that is too far from the archives' core mission to warrant…

The author recently asked his colleagues, "How can libraries determine the value in collecting, managing, preserving, and/or cataloging e-resources?" hoping to challenge readers to come up with some thoughtful opinions and useful tips. Not surprisingly, he received a handful of substantially different but uniformly provocative and creative…