There is a new buzzword in education: "MOOCs." These massively open online courses (MOOCs) can serve hundreds or thousands of students without the institutional hurdles found in classes at a university, such as acceptance requirements and physical location. Some schools are working with partners like Udacity and Coursera, while others…

Censorship challenges to books in UK public libraries have received renewed attention recently. This study sought to establish the incidence of censorship challenges to books in Scottish public libraries in the years 2005-2009 and the actions taken in response to these challenges. It was found that eight local authorities in Scotland had received…

Web 2.0 tools are often considered to be viable facilitators of learning (Gooding 2008). However, there is very little research documenting how Web 2.0 tools can be incorporated into school library programming (Libraries Worldwide, 17(2), 25-41, 2011; Library Hi Tech, 28(4), 617-631, 2010). This chapter will review findings from a study conducted…

This timely special report from ALA Editions provides a succinct but comprehensive overview of the "privatization" of public libraries. It provides a history of the trend of local and state governments privatizing public services and assets, and then examines the history of public library privatization right up to the California…

Librarians say they view the common core, with its emphasis on explanation, complex text, and cross-disciplinary synthesis, as an unprecedented opportunity for them to really strut their stuff. Adopted by all but four states, the standards have prompted coordinating discussions among the library-association divisions that represent librarians in…

This paper considers the role of the public library in ameliorating relations between communities, and the appropriateness of a multicultural or assimilationist approach via which to deliver socially inclusive services. Qualitative findings from two inductive studies, each of which focused on different aspects of the capacity of public library…

Copyright is extremely complex, and it is difficult to convey its complexities in a clear and concise form. Through decades of experience, archivists developed informal best practices for dealing with copyright in the analog world; however the application of copyright in the digital environment is evolving in response to rapidly changing…

Recently, the author spent a week at Rare Book School (RBS) immersed in a course entitled "Teaching the History of the Book;" an investigation into different ways of thinking about, designing, and conducting a course on the history of the book. The goal was to learn how to convert teaching and outreach experiences in rare book collections from a…

The access services staff at Milner Library, Illinois State University, designed a customer service assessment to evaluate how effectively the department was carrying out its mission statement. Areas of assessment included the department's waiting times, helpfulness, and courtesy. The assessment activity focused on circulation services, which is…

This two-part article considers how well some of today's search tools support scholars' work. The first part of the article reviewed Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic Search using a modified version of Carole L. Palmer, Lauren C. Teffeau, and Carrier M. Pirmann's framework (2009). Microsoft Academic Search is a strong contender when…

Across the campuses of many of our most prestigious universities, quiet and cautious negotiations are being attempted by academic librarians wishing to craft more robust and higher value service offerings to graduates in the form of access to their information resources: these negotiations are fraught with difficulties which, on first inspection,…

The society relies on institutions of higher education to produce a literate workforce; one that is able to function in a dynamic, technological, information-overload environment. In support of this new thrust, most universities have incorporated the use of new media and ICTs in the teaching learning process resulting in a multi-modal approach…

Digital repositories are new tools for documenting the accumulated scholarly work produced at academic institutions and disseminating that material broadly via the internet. Digital repositories support all file types and can be adapted to meet the custom design specifications of individual institutions. A section for community engagement…

This study used the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) prison sample to explore the predictive contributions of Print Vocabulary and Sentence Processing skills to the Literacy and Passage Comprehension performance of 461 U.S. prisoners. Both predictors were significant, but Print Vocabulary accounted for less…

Due to a perception that the quality of their certificates was in question, students of the Gaborone Technical College (GTC), along with their counterparts in similar institutions, went on a strike in 2016. Based on a subsequent case study of the college, completed in 2018, this article examines the quality question in technical education in…