An M.A. in divinity is an uncommon qualification in librarianship, and so is experience in leaching job skills to homeless women. But Cynthia Chadwick, the Arapahoe Library District's manager of outreach services, thinks her background is a good match for library work. Libraries not only "have a duty to serve the marginalized of our society," she…

He may be fated to look boyish when he's collecting social security, but Steven M. Cohen, proprietor of the blog Library Stuff, is as grownup and dedicated a librarian as one will ever meet. His first library job was as a reference librarian and Internet trainer in a public library. He loved its "overall feeling of democracy in action"…

This article details the work of Jeffrey Gegner o the Hennepin County Library in Minnetonka, Minnesota. For Jeffrey Gegner, his day job as Adult Materials Selection Specialist for the Hennepin County Library is not that different from his evening job as a country and western nightclub DJ. Gegner is opposed to a literary snobbery he believes is…

This article details the work of Lorena Mata of the San Jose Public Library. Fresh out of library school, Lorena Mata has already made a mark on her community. At the San Jose Public Library (SJPL) she conducts public Internet classes in Spanish and English and gives quarterly English and Spanish-language presentations at neighborhood academies.…

In this month's column, the author discusses his work on the Library Technology Guides site, additions he has made to the lib-web-cats online directory of libraries, and applications he has created for managing home projects such as family photographs.

Leisure has been contested as a valid role of public libraries in the UK since their introduction in 1850 yet it has been a major reason for the public's use of libraries. Where the educational role and information provision function of libraries have been seen as purposeful and worthwhile, the leisure role has been generally valued less with the…

This is the second of two articles examining the leisure role of public libraries. The first article examined the leisure role of public libraries in the UK from a historical perspective. This examines the value of the public library service in providing leisure opportunities from a user point of view. The results demonstrate that public libraries…

A study by the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) found that in 2003, the number of students being homeschooled was about 1.1 million. That's a whopping 29 percent increase from 1999, when the department first collected information on the subject. In this article, the author shares her experience being a…

This article takes a look at WritersCorps, a program that aims to provide opportunities for youth to discover, develop, and share their writing. The program's success depends on contracting with teaching artists who have the skills, knowledge, and heart to encourage youth to write well. All its teachers are published writers, active community…

Kick into Reading (KiR) aims to support literacy work among families and professionals such as teachers, librarians and other community workers by using male role models from football clubs to nurture an interest in reading and storytelling. The main planned outcomes are to deliver 18 KiR projects based at football clubs, bringing high-quality…

In this article, the author discusses how her sixth-grade students gained writing skills and learned to "dream big dreams." She wanted to celebrate literacy, and also create something that could raise funds to support literacy projects, so she challenged her students to write to their favorite authors and ask each for a recipe. The end result of…

This article presents findings from the "Library Journal's" Job Satisfaction Survey among 3,095 library staffers from public, academic, special, and school libraries. A whopping 85.6 percent of the respondents said they would choose a career in librarianship again if they had to start over. Workers in all types of libraries--and across…

The dynamic and rapidly expanding field of neuroscience traditionally has involved the study of the nervous system from a biological/medical standpoint. In recent years, however, the science has become multidisciplinary, attracting researchers from computer science, psychology, sociology, philosophy, and even the humanities. For public and college…

A library building consultant discusses ways in which public libraries can plan for the participation of their libraries in the National Information Infrastructure (NII). With participants ranging from schools to agencies of local government, large volumes of information will be passing through the NII network. Public libraries will be engaged in…

This reading program theme deals with mysteries in their broadest sense. The mystery theme is not limited to who-done-its although they are a place to start. The library is full of solutions to other kinds of mysteries. Craft and program ideas, clip art, press releases, a planning time line, and calendars were developed to assist in the…