According to the 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy, it is estimated that 93 million adults in the United States have basic or below basic literacy skills. Those individuals found most lacking in literacy skills were adults living in poverty, adults lacking a high school diploma, seniors and the elderly aged 65 and older, the more than one…

The Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA), a division of the American Library Association (ALA), announced its 2010 annual lists of Fabulous Films for Young Adults and Amazing Audiobooks for Young Adults ages 12 to 18. This article presents the list of titles that were released in January 2010 during the ALA Midwinter Meeting in Boston,…

Purpose: A digital branch is just like a physical branch except that content is delivered digitally via the web. A digital branch has staff, a collection, a community, and a building. The purpose of this paper is to explore the concept of building individual spaces for different user groups, specifically children, within a digital branch.…

School librarians often see their collections and programs as vital elements of the reading program in schools. Certainly, school librarians know that library collections filled with rich and varied texts help create eager and adept readers. But what if collections were seen as a teaching resource for writing instruction? Often, today's writing…

The American Library Association's (ALA) "Library Bill of Rights" is important to school librarians because it provides the philosophical structure for intellectual freedom in school libraries and asserts the rights of minors. It states: "A person's right to use a library should not be denied or abridged because of origin, age,…

Selecting books for young children can not only be a fun and rewarding experience but also a little daunting, considering the number of books available. Frequent collaboration between an author and a public librarian has produced valuable insights about how to begin reading with very young children. Suggestions are offered for how parents and…

Learning in the library should present opportunities to enrich student learning activities to address concerns of interest and cognitive complexity, but these must be tasks that call for in-depth analysis--not merely gathering facts. Library learning experiences need to demand enough of students to keep them interested and also need to be…

In 1978, the Board of Cooperative Educational Services, a consortium of public school districts in upstate New York, was sued by the Encyclopedia Britannica Educational Corporation because the consortium taped educational programs broadcast on local public television stations and provided copies to local schools. This case, known as…

Resource discovery tops the charts as the foremost issue within the realm of library automation. As a new year commences, the author sees a more pressing need to accelerate the pace with which libraries deliver content and services in ways that users will find compelling, relevant, and convenient. The evolution of the web advances relentlessly,…

Innovations in search and retrieval have provided librarians with some of their most exciting challenges as a profession. Yet even as new tools flood the academic library commons, direct, person-to-person information counseling is still needed, some would say more than ever. Consequently, it can be very useful to study how users conduct new…

Homeschooling families are everywhere these days. They're on television, giving interviews after winning national spelling bees. They're in the paper, profiled after making Olympic trials. They're on the radio, talking about the growing popularity of homeschooling as an educational choice. And they're definitely in libraries. According to a 2003…

Since ancient times, the supernatural has captivated storytellers and their audiences. Some of the earliest surviving literary forms--myths and folktales--feature such preternatural beings as gods, ghosts, fairies, witches, or vampires living among humans. Today, this fascination exists in the current boom in urban fantasy, a genre defined by John…

For-profit schools constitute the fastest-growing sector of higher education institutions in the United States. Yet accompanying the phenomenal growth of these proprietary colleges and universities has been considerable controversy over the role that the profit motive should play in higher education. The literature of higher education contains…

Library users' evolving information needs and their choice of search methods have changed reference work profoundly. Today's reference librarian must work in a whole new way--not only service-focused and businesslike, but even entrepreneurial. Murphy innovatively rethinks the philosophy behind current library reference services in this…

In an effort to address the lack of empirical knowledge about the school librarians' role in technology, the Institute for Museum and Library Services funded Project Leadership-in-Action (LIA) to study leadership practices of school librarians. This current grant project includes a survey of the technology integration practices of school…