Middle school is a time of many changes for young adolescents. They are "searching for individual identity, struggling with society's norms, and grappling with moral issues." They are changing and maturing physically, cognitively, socially, and psychologically as they develop their identities; establish, maintain, and end friendships and social…

Good school libraries influence student achievement and there are studies from 15 states to prove it. Several reports provide evidence that access to a good school library has positive correlation to reading scores. Higher test scores have also been linked to the presence of quality libraries in schools. Professional librarians are an essential…

Just like an engaging teacher sets the pace for a conducive classroom learning environment, it is the library media specialist who "sells" the idea of what a library media center is and what a library media center can be to all patrons who walk through its doors. How can library media specialists break up and shake up the ruts that both library…

This article discusses what SUSHI is and how it works. SUSHI stands for standardized usage statistics harvesting initiative. It was created specifically to solve the very problem of retrieving and having to reformat the usage reports. The promise of SUSHI is that, with wide adoption, it will drastically reduce the time spent collecting usage data…

Advocacy is not optional for libraries. Libraries need advocacy because so much of what goes on in them is invisible to the public eye. If the public thinks that circulating books is all that librarians do and all that they have to do, then how can they expect them to be impressed by the influence within the school community? If those people are…

Disaster planning focuses on future function and recovery, on helping libraries expeditiously return to their original states of operation. It all but ignores the concept of continuous function throughout a disaster. This is not true in the private and government sectors, however, which have managed to cover a wider load of disaster response…

Once the pristine pastime of blue bloods tracing their pedigrees back to the "Mayflower," genealogy--from hobby to serious endeavor--has broadened and deepened into a democratic avocation. It was Alex Haley's "Roots," published 30 years ago, with the hugely popular TV miniseries coming a year later, that likely started the boom. Television still…

Many a bar fight has broken out over punk rock's birth. Fans tend to split into two camps: those who credit the Ramones' first appearance at CBGB in New York City circa 1974 and those who point to the early galvanizing Sex Pistols shows in London around 1975-76. It is probably more accurate to say the New York and London scenes are two sides of…

In 1989 the American Library Association defined information literacy as a set of abilities requiring individuals to recognize when information is needed and have the ability to locate, evaluate, and use effectively the needed information. While these fundamental skills are still at the heart of information literacy instruction, the nature of that…

The aim of this research was to investigate current issues faced by public library staff in rural South Australia and to examine some of the reasons why people choose to work in rural libraries. The study took a mixed methods approach, combining interviews and questionnaires to gain a fuller understanding of the issues and experiences of rural…

The article is an introduction to The Ohio Department of Youth Services librarians and the services they provide. Information about each juvenile prison facility is revealed and provides an explanation of guidelines and standards for prison libraries. Sixty-eight questions were asked in four in-person interviews to present a profile of the…

This article investigates how psychology graduate students find information for coursework and research, who teaches them how to find it, and whether differences emerge over the course of their graduate careers. Findings indicate that these graduate students are comfortable using campus libraries, prefer electronic resources, ask supervisors when…

This article reviews the recent literature about the essential but often uneasy alliances made between content experts (archivists and librarians) and technology experts. Differing professional cultures, misunderstandings of one another, limited abilities to envision change, and lack of support from top-level administrators are the most often…

There is a growing interest in making available and making sense of the data on the Web and trapped in databases. Rather than a web of unstructured documents, full of information understandable only to humans, there is a movement whose intention is to make these data structured, reusable, machine-readable, and interrelated. This approach to Web…