This study investigated as to how the school librarian acts as a change agent for effective integration of technology in the school curriculum. Four teachers from a Midwestern junior high school participated in this project. The research was conducted as a case study using grounded theory methods for generating theory and analyzing data. To inform…

Adolescents who receive current, accurate, reliable, and balanced sexual-health information are more likely to express healthier sexual attitudes and engage in healthier sexual behaviors than adolescents receiving limited or no sexual-health information. High school librarians have the potential to help meet sexual-health information needs of…

School library and youth services professionals must develop and display a strong sense of cultural competence to effectively serve their patrons. Cultural competence is defined here as one's ability to understand the needs of populations different from their own. This paper reports on the perceptions of school library and youth services students…

La Trobe University Library has embarked on an institution-wide project with the objective of enabling students to engage with scholarly and credible information from the first year. This initiative by the library is in response to La Trobe curriculum reform. In particular, it aligns information literacy with the inquiry/research graduate…

In this Best of "Knowledge Quest" monograph, the editors have collected seminal articles to support pre-service and in-service school librarians in developing and strengthening the instructional partner role. "Instructional Partnerships: A Pathway to Leadership" provides readers with background knowledge, research-based…

In the fall of 2010 the author received an e-mail informing her that she has been selected as a Gale/Cengage New Leader, which was a true honor. Not only would she be joining four dynamic school librarians from around the country at the School Library Journal Summit on the Future of Reading, she was also being paired with a mentor to navigate her…

This article presents an inside look at concurrent session planning for the AASL 15th national conference. Planning for the AASL National Conference and Exhibition can be compared to accepting one's first school library position: Even with all the knowledge, the job is daunting. To add to the stress, most of those on the committee had never met…

Purpose: The People's Collection Wales aims to collect, interpret, distribute and discuss Wales' cultural heritage in an online environment. Individual users or local history societies are able to create their own digital collections, contribute relevant content, as well as access digital resources from heritage institutions. This paper aims to…

The face of reading is changing, and it is happening at a much faster rate than most people had imagined. Where is it all going? What factors are driving the most significant developments? And what role do librarians play in this rapidly evolving world? These are some of the key questions that stakeholders--including educators, publishers,…

It's time for a sweeping new approach to information literacy learning! The sad truth is that few, if any, information literacy efforts in schools have fulfilled the promise of a "comprehensive" information literacy program: (1) A comprehensive program should reach "all" students in the school; (2) A comprehensive program should be "predictable"…

Although issues related to the role of librarians have long been discussed in the literature on academic librarianship, there has been little attempt to incorporate the extensive psychological theory and research on role-related issues. In the current article we review the empirical literature on the role of librarians, with a particular focus on…

This research presents the results of a project that investigated how students use a library developed mobile app to locate books in the library. The study employed a methodology of formative evaluation so that the development of the mobile app would be informed by user preferences for next generation wayfinding systems. A key finding is the…

This article examines the connection between ACRL information literacy standards and constructivist pedagogy. This connection is used to support use of Web 2.0 tools for information literacy instruction. Sample exercises using these tools are provided for each ACRL learning outcome, and the tools' suitability for the constructivist approach is…

Charles E. Bracker was a professor of botany and plant pathology at Purdue University from 1964 to 1999. His late wife, Anri, was an orchid enthusiast who began collecting and housing orchids in the 1980s. In 2009, Bracker's 30,000 digital orchid photographs were donated to Ball State University Libraries, where both of this article's authors…

Purpose: The prevalence of virtual learning environments (VLEs) in higher education is well documented and has been promoted in the UK by government funded projects, but there has been little empirical research on the level of involvement of subject librarians with VLEs. A survey was designed to investigate how VLEs are affecting the work of…