In 2020, New America embarked on a year-long initiative with librarians in children's and youth services across three library systems in Illinois. The aim was to build staff members' skills and confidence in media mentorship--the act of mentoring and providing tailored guidance to students and families in selecting, analyzing, and using media to…

The importance of early literacy to later academic achievement has been well documented, as has the positive impact of high-quality early literacy environments. One stumbling block to achieving improvements in literacy skills for school-aged children appears to be inequities in access to high-quality early literacy environments. Public libraries,…

LINQ: The Librarians' Inquiry Forum is a practitioner inquiry model for public librarian professional development whose theoretical foundations are based in New Literacy Studies, Critical Race Theory and social epistemology. This research explains the development of the LINQ methodology and design across four public librarian communities of…

Understanding how to successfully train storytime providers is crucial to the goal of offering high-quality early literacy programs in public library settings. As part of a larger study, nine early-career public library storytime providers were interviewed to learn what contextual factors are important to improve their knowledge, practice, and…

Librarianship is constantly confronted with unexpected and quickly evolving sociotechnical challenges, yet the documents that define the core professional competencies for librarians are infrequently updated. Based upon survey responses collected from 383 working librarians located in the United States, we describe a set of gaps between current…

Literature in the field investigates and debates the importance of the MLIS degree in librarianship. This information is of limited use in Maine where over 30% of public library directors have only a high school diploma. The research questions guiding this Constructivist Grounded Theory study are: How do high school educated library directors in…