This article presents K-12 motivational strategies that focus on different ideas school library media specialists can use to gain and sustain attention in the research topic. Some have come from recent submissions to the S.O.S. database of lesson plans and teaching ideas. A student-directed searching activity for college level library instruction…

Developing lifelong readers is integral to the role of the librarian. Facilitating, encouraging, and promoting reading is not an add-on to the job. Consider the role librarians play in developing readers in school. They know they are contributors; they must make sure the school community is aware of their valuable role in supporting the five…

Creating a tendency for their students to act in a certain manner under a given circumstance is exactly what library media specialists are about. This is something they do teach. They have two main purposes as library media specialists. One purpose is to create and support the love of literature. A second purpose is to develop ethical users of…

Reading4Life @ your library[R] (R4L) significantly extends the role of school librarians in the areas of classroom-library collaboration, reading instruction during the inquiry process, and evidence-based practice. With this position paper, AASL clearly places a greater value than it has in the past on the instructional partnership role of the…

This article features an open letter written by the author to her school library media colleagues, applauding those who are providing informative and interesting staff development activities for teachers, administrators, and their library media peers. She reminds her colleagues about their role in staff development and not to underestimate the…

It's not always easy to get teens talking. But when the author became a young adult specialist at the Wilbraham (Massachusetts) Public Library four years ago, that's exactly what she had to do. Her main mission was to bring in as many high schoolers as possible. She needed to find out exactly what they wanted from the library. when she asked them…

Twenty scholarly papers and fifteen abstracts comprise the content of the sixteenth annual Brick and Click Libraries Conference, held annually at Northwest Missouri State University in Maryville, Missouri. The proceedings, authored by academic librarians and presented at the symposium, portray the contemporary and future face of librarianship. The…

This study examines library media teachers' perception of information literacy, their current levels of information literacy competencies, and the factors affecting information literacy implementation in secondary schools. 36 library media teachers from Selangor, Negeri Sembilan and Kuala Lumpur participated in this self-report questionnaire-based…

In this article, the author shares her experience in assisting seniors and two teachers at Kalamazoo (Michigan) Central High School when they joined a national contest to have the President of the United States deliver the commencement address to the class of 2010. One of the author's favorite memories surrounds the distribution of commencement…

Web 2.0 is more than an Internet buzzword. This new platform provides transition from static informational pages to dynamic portals for connecting and sharing of information. School library media specialists can use the read/write tools to ensure students are prepared to work in digital environments that are already commonplace. Blogs, wikis,…

Research studies reveal that many administrators, classroom teachers, students, and parents have misconceptions about the role of library media specialists (LMSs) and how they impact student learning. Conversely, there is a growing body of evidence that demonstrates a strong correlation between quality school library media programs staffed by…

During the 1990's, the Ohio DeRolph Supreme Court case resulted in Ohio's educational funding system being declared unconstitutional. The Ohio Educational Library Media Association (OELMA) knew the state could not reinstate a mandate for teacher-librarians without the state funding the positions. Leadership for School Libraries (L4SL) was formed…

The topic of the appropriate job title for school library administrators has been written about in earlier literature but has not addressed the issue from the perspective of future school library administrators. This article presents the results of a pilot study that was guided by the research question: What do future school library administrators…

Engaging students to learn through play is not a new idea, and, based on how many animals learn that way, the connection is probably instinctual. For some educators, however, this concept is a radical notion that threatens to topple the wall that they have carefully constructed to separate work and play. Just as some media specialists, teachers,…

The federal School and Staffing Survey (SASS) and Teacher Follow-up Survey (TFS) were used to examine the impacts of induction activities on beginning teacher turnover. This study excluded those teachers who moved or left schools for unavoidable and involuntary reasons, a confounding factor in previous research. This analysis revealed that three…