Discusses the value of book fairs to encourage reading and offers suggestions for planning them. Considers sponsorship, location and timing, sources to get books from, how to select books, marketing, library programs connected with the fair, volunteers, and who receives the profits. (LRW)

Today, federal laws often seem like an alphabet soup with acronyms like CIPA (Children's Internet Protection Act), CTEA (Copyright Term Extension Act), ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act), IDEA (Individuals with Disabilities Education Act), YMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act), and NC LB (No Child Left Behind). These letters stand for federal…

Assessment is generally seen as one of the key challenges in the field of self-access learning (Gardner & Miller, 1999; Champagne et al., 2001; Lai, 2001; Kinoshita Thomson, 1996). Many researchers and practitioners point to difficulties with assessing language gains in an environment in which variables cannot comprehensively be controlled…

Over 5 million students aged 6 to 21 received services under the "Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA)" during the 2000-2001 school year. In partial response to this growing population of diverse learners, the relatively recent and highly controversial "No Child Left Behind (NCLB)" legislation has served as a…

This second edition of guidelines for weeding school library media collections is addressed especially to elementary and secondary school library media centers and to community college and vocational school library resource centers in Iowa. This publication is designed for those who want weeding of all formats of materials and equipment (not just…

This practicum report describes a volunteer program that was established to resolve staff shortages in a high school media center. Three target groups were involved. The first target group was composed of the current adult volunteers. The second target group was made up of teachers who served their required duty in the media center. The third…

The first part of this directory of National Library Service (NLS) resources for the blind and physically handicapped lists NLS network libraries and machine-lending agencies, arranged alphabetically by state. The information for each library includes its address, telephone and fax numbers, librarian, hours of operation, book and special…

Students who work at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, California learn about science by explaining to the visitors from all over the world how the museum's exhibits work. The students are teen-agers who also come from all over the world to be "Explainers" for the Exploratorium. They go through a training period to learn the basics of…

Each year the Continuing Education Committee of the Library Instruction Round Table of the American Library Association selects the top 20 journal articles and publications for the previous year. This collection presents these bibliographies for nine years from 1985 to 1993. Each bibliography is annotated and offers a sampling of the 20 best or…

Library-based parent resource centers are an innovative way of providing important parenting information to families, for promoting early identification of developmental needs in preschool children, and for identifying community resources available to address these needs. The centers facilitate information and resource sharing among community…

A survey was conducted of randomly selected school library media specialists participating in the Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, South Carolina, and Texas state "child choice" book award programs to identify any censorship taking place in these programs, and the attitudes of the library media specialists toward such censorship. In most…

The study described in this report was designed to determine the dominant approach to library skills instruction in the schools of the DeKalb County School System (Georgia), and whether any relationships existed between certain demographic variables and the approach being used. Library media specialists were asked to respond to a two-part…

The purpose of this four phase quasi-experimental study was to determine if putting selected books into a display controlled by a theme in a school media center would: (1) increase the circulation of the display books; (2) cause an increase in the circulation of the entire collection; and (3) encourage children to read a type of book they did not…

This document is made up of materials supporting a presentation about a program designed to encourage freshman and sophomore high school mathematics students to use the school library to research famous mathematicians. The handouts that compose the document are: (1) a description of the assignment, "Conversations with Mathematicians"; (2) a list…

This "sampler" of how quantitative and qualitative information is gathered, compiled, and reported can be useful for media staff seeking to develop the most effective library/learning resources program and to integrate that program into the overall institutional effectiveness plan. This guide was created through contributions from 24 community…