This updated edition enables readers to understand how academic libraries deliver information, offer services, and provide learning spaces in new ways to better meet the needs of today's students, faculty, and other communities of academic library users.

Introduction to Health Sciences Librarianship covers a wide range of areas beyond traditional medical libraries. This helpful guide provides an overview of the health care environment, academic health sciences, hospital libraries, health informatics, and more. This single volume provides a sound foundation on health sciences libraries to students, beginning, and practicing librarians alike.

Successfully managing rare book collections requires very specific knowledge and skills. This handbook provides that essential information in a single volume. Rare Book Librarianship for the 21st Century is the first new rare books handbook of practice in 25 years. Authored by two special collections experts with extensive field experience, this book is also the first to discuss the role of digital technologies in managing a rare book collection. After a fascinating discussion of the history and current state of rare book libraries, this handbook provides a comprehensive account of the core skills and knowledge needed to be a successful rare book librarian. Topics include best practices for handling, housing, and conserving rare materials; collection development techniques; and user education and outreach. This book will serve as a handbook for practitioners in academic settings, large public libraries, and special libraries, and as a textbook for students in MLIS courses on rare book librarianship and curatorship.

"Provides information about librarianship as a career, including types of libraries, types of jobs within libraries, professional issues, and educational requirements"--Provided by publisher.

Whole Person Librarianship guides librarians through the practical process of facilitating connections among libraries, social workers, and social services; explains why those connections are important; and puts them in the context of a national movement. Collaboration between libraries and social workers is an exploding trend that will continue to be relevant to the future of public and academic libraries. Whole Person Librarianship incorporates practical examples with insights from librarians and social workers. The result is a new vision of library services. The authors provide multiple examples of how public and academic librarians are connecting their patrons with social services. They explore skills and techniques librarians can learn from social workers, such as how to set healthy boundaries and work with patrons experiencing homelessness; they also offer ideas for how librarians can self-educate on these topics. The book additionally provides insights for social work partners on how they can benefit from working with librarians. While librarians and social workers share social justice motivations, their methods are complementary and yet still distinct—librarians do not have to become social workers. Librarian readers will come away with many practical ideas for collaboration as well as the ability to explain why collaboration with social workers is important for the future of librarianship.

This book features original research, reflective essays and conversations, and dialogues that consider the relationships between theory, practice, and critical librarianship through the lenses of the histories of librarianship, intellectual and activist communities, professional practices, and underexplored epistemologies and ways of knowing.

“While full of tales of innovation, ideas that challenge our practice, and a regular dose of critical thinking, these pages are likewise full of humanism and heart.” Brian Kenney, Director at White Plains Public Library (NY); from the Foreword Adaptation to change that’s based on thoughtful planning and grounded in the mission of libraries: it’s a model that respected LIS thinker and educator Michael Stephens terms “hyperlinked librarianship.” And the result, for librarians in leadership positions as well as those working on the front lines, is flexible librarianship that’s able to stay closely aligned with the needs and wants of library users. In this collection of essays from his “Office Hours” columns in Library Journal, Stephens explores the issues and emerging trends that are transforming the profession. Among the topics he discusses are: the importance of accessible, welcoming, and responsive library environments that invite open and equitable participation, and which factors are preventing many libraries from ramping up community engagement and user-focused services;challenges, developments, and emerging opportunities in the field, including new ways to reach users and harness curiosity;considerations for prospective librarians, from knowing what you want out of the profession to learning how to aim for it;why LIS curriculum and teaching styles need to evolve;mentoring and collaboration; andthe concept of the library as classroom, a participatory space to experiment with new professional roles, new technologies, and new ways of interacting with patrons.Bringing together ideas for practice, supporting evidence from recent research, and insights into what lies ahead, this book will inform and inspire librarians of all types.

This book offers a timely mix of thought-provoking chapters bringing together national and global studies on critical librarianship, and conveying the kind of research which current library managers and researchers need, mixing theory with a good dose of pragmatism.

These papers examine library policies and organizational structures in light of the literature of ergonomics, high reliability organizations, joint cognitive systems and integrational linguistics. Bade argues that many policies and structures have been designed and implemented on the basis of assumptions about technical possibilities, ignoring entirely the political dimensions of local determination of goals and purposes as well as the lessons from ergonomics, such as the recognition that people are the primary agents of reliability in all technical systems. Because libraries are understood to be loci of human interaction and communication rather than purely technical systems at the disposal of an abstract user, Bade insists on looking at problems of meaning and communication in the construction and use of the library catalog. Looking at various policies for metadata creation and the results of those policies forces the question: is there a responsible human being behind the library web site and catalog, or have we abandoned the responsibilities of thinking and judgment in favor of procedures, algorithms and machines?

Taking a broadly Marxist approach, Confronting the Democratic Discourse of Librarianship traces the connections between library history and the larger history of capitalist development.