This paper reports the findings of a small-scale qualitative study that explored the perceptions of and approaches used by UK school librarians and teachers in the design and use of reading lists. The research question was: "What is the best way to construct reading lists to maximize their benefit in the school library or classroom?" The…

This study attempts to investigate the stakeholders' perceptions of quality and prospective improvements in the learning resources centres (LRC) at Omani basic education schools. It focuses on different aspects of the LRCs: organisation, human resources, technological, and educational aspects along with the difficulties faced by these LRCs and…

Personal memories of graduate work at the Columbia University School of Library Service are presented. (SJ)

A report on the Library-College Conference. (Author)

In this article, Summer Creek High School (Harris County, Texas) librarian, Louise Lankau shares a formula for successfully integrating technology via the school library and reaching every department and teacher in a school of 2,500 students and 170 teachers. The challenge is that the teaching staff at Summer Creek increases each year to…

School librarians often wonder whether school superintendents and school board members understand and support intellectual freedom for students in K-12 schools. In this article, an administrator and a school board member discuss their thoughts and the actions they took to support access to information in the face of formal challenges to school…

What do school librarians fear most? Hands down, their biggest fear is a formal challenge to a resource in the school library. There are no accurate statistics about the number of challenges to school library resources. The staff of ALA's Office for Intellectual Freedom estimates that only about 20 percent are reported to ALA annually. For the…

Demands for the Internet in administrative, instructional, and learning tasks in schools are rising. Because adequate bandwidth in schools supports the home-school learning continuum, links to civic and governmental organizations, and situations in which home connectivity is scarce, reconsiderations in investments in connectivity supply and…

In the author's small school district of about 1,450 students and over 150 staff members, she is considered a local expert on all things social media. She has a minor presence on many of the social-media platforms including Twitter, Blogger, Pinterest, and Edmodo, and more accounts that she can remember. Interacting daily with her personal…

Library media specialists understand better than anyone else that students must learn to engage with a wide variety of information types and formats to be efficient and effective learners in the 21st century. The I-LEARN Model--Identify, Locate, Evaluate, Apply, Reflect, kNow--both describes the process of learning with information and provides a…

Four decades of research indicates that well-staffed, well-stocked, and well-used school libraries are correlated with increases in student achievement. Well-staffed school libraries have qualified teacher-librarians with qualifications in librarianship, digital technologies, and inquiry-based pedagogies. Well-stocked school libraries include…

More than 60,000 students attend over seventy schools comprising the Douglas County School District (DCSD) in Colorado. It has been a consistently high-performing district, with a reputation for being among Colorado's elite. Douglas County Libraries (DCL) is a nationally recognized state-of-the-art public library system with seven branches serving…

The highly technological environment of 21st-century schools has significantly redefined the role of school librarians by presenting the opportunity to assume leadership through technology integration. Despite the abundance of literature that has suggested the need for and the importance of school librarians to be a proactive leaders in technology…

This paper reports the implementation results of the Portuguese School Libraries Evaluation Model, more specifically the results of primary schools self-evaluation of their libraries' reading promotion and information literacy development activities. School libraries that rated their performance as either "Excellent" or "Poor"…