Professionally, school librarians are faced with an explosion of choices--search engines, online catalogs, media types, subscription databases, and Web tools--all requiring scrutiny, evaluation, and selection. In turn, this support "stuff" forms a basis for making additional choices about how and what they teach and what they assess. Whereas once…

From its earliest beginnings to the post war information explosion, this text traces the history of the world's largest library, the Library of Congress (LC). The library's creation in 1800 for use by members of Congress is comprehensively discussed along with its development into a world wide service. Library methodology is covered in chapters on…

Researchers and statistics educators consistently suggest that students will learn statistics more effectively by conducting projects through which they actively engage in a broad spectrum of tasks integral to statistical inquiry, in the authentic context of a real-world application. In keeping with these findings, we share an implementation of…

Describes the modern library situation on Bombay, India.

The background section discusses the current status of library development in New York State including: (1) school libraries, (2) public libraries, (3) college and university libraries, (4) special libraries, (5) systems and networks and (6) library functions at the state level. The committee's recommendations cover: (1) user access to library…

Thirty librarians from Great Britain attended the Seminar on Human Aspects of Library Instruction. This document is a transcript of the tape from the Seminar. It provides the text of the papers presented, and the verbatim oral questions and answers of the group discussions. The two papers presented are: (1) "Instruction or Induction: The…

A survey of the status of the federal library community and its involvement with automation was undertaken; the results are summarized in this report. The study sought to define which library operations were susceptible to automation, to describe potentially useful automation techniques and to establish criteria for decisions about automation.…

Background information about libraries in Washington State, and a series of recommendations for consideration by the legislature and the libraries of the State are outlined in this report. The Appendices include: (1) Brief Historical Review and Statement of Objectives, (2) Public Libraries of Washington by Size of Population Served in 1969, (3)…

In an age of experimentation, library users from Cerritos, California, to Salt Lake City to Seattle are experiencing public libraries the likes of which they have never before seen. While the 1990s may be remembered as the era of the anchor facility, when libraries were called upon to define and support a community's renaissance, this decade's…

Preservation has long been considered a fundamental responsibility of research libraries. Data on preservation activities by its members has been collected by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) since 1987, but changing digital technologies and the research, teaching, and learning environments in which research libraries are engaged…

Librarians build collections. To do this they use tools that help them identify, organize, and retrieve items for the collection. Zotero (zoh-TAIR-oh) is such a tool that helps the user build a library of useful books, articles, web sites, blogs, etc., discovered while surfing online. A visit to Zotero's homepage, www.zotero.org, shows a number of…

Bradford's Law has been the subject of much discussion and analysis in library and information science since its formulation in the 1930s and remains frequently debated to this day. It has been applied to various practices within the discipline, especially with regard to collection development, but its relevance to researchers and the potential it…

Educational standards continue to be hot topics of discussion for this year and, no doubt, beyond. The Council of Chief State School Officials (CCSSO) and the National Governors' Association Center for Best Practices (NGA Center) has initiated a study based on "Common Core" English/Language Arts and Mathematics Standards. The release of…

Ask most men or women in the street who Charles Darwin was and the chances are that they will know something of the work he did: the work that has revolutionised our understanding of the living world and our place in it. The 200th centenary of his birth was in February 2009. Over the 150 years since the publication of his seminal work On the…

Passed in 2000, the Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA) mandates Internet filtering for all public schools and libraries. Challenges to the law have been raised on constitutional grounds by free-speech advocates such as the American Library Association and the American Civil Liberties Union. After losing one such challenge in district court,…