Traditionally, school libraries have been evaluated primarily in terms of library management; the impact they have on teaching and learning has rarely been a focus. For this reason, they have often been omitted from whole school self-evaluation. Self-evaluation can help schools to prepare for inspection, but more importantly to identify strengths…

A library media specialist describes the way in which she and her assistant re-evaluated the library media center program so that they could help students in finding books of their choice, easily. Library media center orientation includes remainders for students that there are often variations in library arrangements and formal and informal…

When recently asked by an administrator for some realistic questions and "recommended" responses to expect while interviewing candidates for school library positions, the author grouped the questions into three categories: library management, information skills and teaching skills. In this article are the questions she suggested, along with topics…

Three months after Darcy Cahill was promoted to head the Randallstown branch of the Baltimore County Public Library (BCPL), at 6 a.m. on a Saturday morning, the branch suffered a devastating fire. When firefighters finally contained the blaze, she was shocked to see the building drenched and in disarray. This article gives a detailed description…

This article describes a qualitative upward evaluation of the leadership performance of library managers. Follow-up studies were conducted, focusing on the advantages and disadvantages of the qualitative approach to upward appraisal. The authors discuss pros and cons to guide others who might use this methodology for upward appraisals in the…

When a university acquires the library of a national institute and the institute's active and worldwide membership expects continued and uninterrupted access to services from the collection, shockwaves can reverberate throughout the university's main library and among its staff. This was especially true for the Reference Department of the…

"ARL" is the bimonthly report on research library issues and actions from ARL (Association of Research Libraries), CNI (Coalition of Networked Information), and SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition). "ARL" reports on current issues of interest to academic and research library administrators, staff and users; higher…

Librarians often cringe when they hear the word copyright, when it is combined with electronic reserves the immediate impulse is to run away as far and as fast as possible. This paper presents the process used by the Armacost Library staff at the University of Redlands to develop and implement a copyright policy for the electronic reserve…

When the author ran into other recent graduates at the American Library Association (ALA) annual conference in New Orleans in 2006, several told her they were not happy with their jobs. After months of searching, they settled for positions in isolated rural libraries, have jobs with little responsibility, or are expected to manage their staff…

This article explains a two-part plan, created by the people at the Public Library of Charlotte & Mecklenburg County (PLCMC), to help staff members keep up with the sea change of technology. A core competencies training program was developed. This keeps workers afloat by providing them with the technology skills they need to support the change…

In this article, the author recounts her experience in 2005 as a library director at the Mount Laurel Library in New Jersey. She thought her people at the library were in fairly good shape in terms of the professional staff's understanding of the confidentiality rules governing their customer information. However, she was wrong. This was driven…

From the ascendance of the reference database and web sites offering endless opportunities for cyber-promotion to the crowds swarming through the doors to avail themselves of new computers, the Internet has transformed the way public libraries do business. That is not news. What is exciting, though, is how the Internet continues to change public…

When a challenge gets difficult, it's hard to believe that people challenge instructional materials because they care. It's even harder to remember that educators want the general public, legislators, taxpayers, and parents to care about education. Library media specialists and administrators have the same lens of stress that all adults have,…

Factors discussed include the amount of time that library faculty members devote to supervision, the interaction of the library faculty and the library administration, and the role of the library faculty in participative management. (Author/PF)

Explores the increasing difficulty that library decision-makers will face in proving the value of libraries to society, and suggests appropriate questions that they will want to ask in their use of community analysis. (Author/PF)