This piece focuses on creating a safe space for several subsets of the elementary school student population, including Muslim students, children with autism spectrum disorder, and students with social-emotional challenges. These groups do overlap and intersect, and they are united in their reliance on the library as a refuge. However, school…

Student workers are a well-established component of academic library operations. Recently, their traditional role has expanded to include responsibilities that were previously assigned to librarians, including in-person and virtual reference support. This trend has raised concerns about service quality and highlighted the importance of adequate…

Graduate students across disciplines feel pressure to publish their scholarship, but they are often unsure how to go about it, partly due to a lack of explicit training in this area. This article discusses the collaborative development of a semester-long Publishing Academy, designed to promote knowledge of scholarly publishing and increase the…

The story of John Henry, dating back to the late nineteenth century, is one of the most enduring folktales of American culture. As the legend goes, John Henry was an African American "steel-driving man" whose job was to drive spikes through rocks in the construction of a railroad tunnel. So powerful was John Henry that he defeated a…

East Tennessee State University developed a workflow to add journal publications to their institutional repository and faculty profiles using three tools: Zotero for entering metadata, SHERPA/RoMEO for checking copyright permissions, and Unpaywall for locating full-text documents. This study evaluates the availability and accuracy of the…

Advances in Information and Communication Technology have significantly affected the way information is acquired, processed, stored, retrieved, communicated as well as secured. This has changed the way Librarians handle and secure information systems while users are expected to have some level of information and communication technology skills to…

Kelly Klober, the school librarian for Danville's (Arkansas) sole elementary school, provides school library services for the school's three hundred and twenty-five students. With the help and support of the learners, faculty and staff, and the community-at-large, together they have transformed the school library from a place that houses books…

Few librarians have examined the implications of Rolf Norgaard's theory of "writing information literacy," a rhetoric-based concept that situates research practices in context. Because the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education emphasizes research as a social practice,…

The passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) offered a significant opportunity for school librarians; it also created opportunities to partner with school librarians on their efforts to be included in their states' educational plans. This three-part article explores the development and rollout of the American Association of School…

In reflective practice, librarians think back on their instruction to improve it, and this study addresses guidance provided for reflection on citation management instruction. We refined a previously developed reflective practice template for citation management instruction by asking instructors to critique the template's set of reflective…

Carmen Redding writes of her professional journey from teacher to school librarianship to state-level specialist. She begins by describing a common view of school librarians as non-teachers as being an old phenomenon that continues to have life. Being relegated to the position of school librarian was, most certainly in the eyes of some teachers, a…

As information becomes readily available at an instant, library users today have a high expectation of how quickly books are available for use. Therefore, librarians must evaluate purchasing models and how they meet the needs of today's patrons. A study was done at the University of Mississippi Libraries comparing usage statistics between patron…

This article reports the results of a 2015 survey that updates and extends the authors' 2010 survey of academic librarians, to learn of the current state of their attitudes, involvement, and perceived capabilities in the research process. A key change in the 2015 survey is the use of an expanded research confidence scale, designed by the authors.…

Based on a comparison of two nearly identical surveys in 2010 and 2016, this study examines the deepening practitioner concern over the use of social tagging within digital collections during the past six years. While participants reported a greater level of experience and increased use of social tagging, concerns regarding control, consistency,…

This article considers the evolution of the professional librarian from a collection-centered liaison librarian to a service-oriented, embedded specialist. It analyzes the competencies required to provide embedded library services and describes a process for establishing an embedded librarian model in a university library in an "Expert…