A review of the development of the United Kingdom obsession with "value for money", and the performance indicators that have led to the current "best value" approach that is working through the public sector in the United Kingdom. I hope to identify the values and problems with the approach offering a salutary warning to those…

This paper discusses the concept of visual literacy and its implications for librarians teaching information literacy components. The author concludes that, while visual teaching methods should be incorporated in library instruction, teaching visual literacy competencies is most effectively done in connection with discipline-specific content and…

Studies show that recent generations of college students have a learning style with identifiable characteristics. Library instruction efforts must adapt to these learning styles. Course management software (CMS), such as Blackboard, is one resource available to academic librarians to meet the challenges posed by the ''Net Generation.'' At Stetson…

The relationship of the academic library with the campus computing center has been an issue since at least the late 1970s. The issue was discussed at length in the 1980s with little effect on existing organizations. Interest in the issue was rekindled in the 1990s, when a number of institutions merged or aligned the library and the computer…

In 1999, the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI) of the United States Department of Education charged the RAND Reading Study Group (RRSG) with developing a research agenda to address pressing literacy issues. Published in 2002 after much investigation, the RRSG concluded that evidence-based practices in the teaching of reading…

In today's society, how many people just want to know the answer? How many students are satisfied with accepting their first Internet hit without comparing information and validating sources? How many adults do the same? With today's technology, instant gratification and completing a task as quickly as possible seem to be the norm. This article…

Librarians seldom give enough thought to the needs of potential Web-site visitors. Few librarians, for example, stop to consider how they can make their sites easy to use or more attractive. As a result, many sites have awful color schemes, hard-to-find navigation buttons, inappropriate font sizes, and confusing layouts. No wonder they don't…

Several initiatives were announced at the Special Libraries Association (d.b.a. SLA) conference, June 4-9, at the Gaylord Opryland Hotel in Nashville. A petition drive resulted in formation of a Competitive Intelligence (CI) Division from the former CI Section of the Leadership and Management Division. The board encouraged the member-driven…

Based on his personal experience as vice principal of Fuller Middle School and a former school librarian, and participating in a school-wide initiative that focuses on strengthening students' math skills, the author of this article provides suggestions of various ways librarians can integrate math skills into their library lessons. Math is…

The future is around the corner. Succession planning will only happen when the right ingredients are there at the start. This article describes thirteen succession planning ingredients that will aid in the future succession of library systems.

Making magic in the classroom or library media center is as simple as imitating what choreographers do. Just as they demonstrate and teach a dance routine a few steps at a time before asking the performers to put all the steps together for a presentation, many teachers find that breaking a unit of study into several parts, or mini-lessons, is a…

Every day everyone drives by local burying grounds and cemeteries, glancing at history while everyone passes. All over America valuable information is being washed away by acid rain, destroyed by vandalism, or simply forgotten and neglected. Students can help stop this destruction and loss of data with a cemetery project-based experience. For many…

Differentiation has a goal, which is to bring the ideas and concepts of the curriculum to the learner at the pace, and depth that is appropriate for the ability of each student. The group of students are divided into three groups according to their own pace and at their instructional level with the classroom teacher working with one group, the…

Handheld computers give students access to the larger world of information beyond the classroom. Wireless access allows students real time access to all networks resources, including downloading e-books and documents, searching the library media centres catalog and searching databases to which the library has subscribed.

This study explores the perceptions of male librarians working in an academic library. Underpinning the methodology of this paper is a series of in depth interviews conducted over several years with a group of selected male librarians. This paper suggests that the meanings constructed by male librarians in the non-traditional work environment have…