The Art of Relevance is your guide to mattering more to more people. You'll find inspiring examples, rags-to-relevance case studies, research-based frameworks, and practical advice on how your work can be more vital to your community. Whether you work in museums or libraries, parks or theaters, churches or afterschool programs, relevance can work for you. Break through shallow connection. Unlock meaning for yourself and others. Find true relevance and shine.

    This form of play allows infants to be in control and recognize the power of their bodies and actions. A variety of new and innovative loose parts ideas are paired with beautiful photography to inspire safe loose parts play in your infant and toddler environments. Captivating classroom stories and proven science provide the context for how this style of play supports children's development and learning. This book is perect for Montessori and Reggio-inspired programs and educators.

    Incisive, vindictive, and brutally funny, each page features a recognizable cover with the title renamed: To Kill a Mockingbird becomes My Dad Is Cooler than Your Dad; A Walk to Remember is reborn as Teen Sex Is Ok if One of Them Has Cancer. Perfect for parties, gift for fanatic book lovers, and casual bathroom reading.“Classics” (the books you’ve lied about reading). Actual Classics (Greek and Latin books people don’t even pretend to have read). Contemporary fiction (those books people talk about at parties that you’ve "definitely heard of” but never bothered to pick up). Children’s (books that say the most with the fewest number of words, i.e. “The Best Books”). Reference (Those books that were around before Google). From children’s literature, The Very Hungry Caterpillar gets the retitle Eat Until You Feel Pretty. An American classic, The Great Gatsby is switched to Drink Responsibly. And from contemporary fiction, Gone Girl is retitled A Tale of Two Shitty People. There’s something here for every reader.

    You can take it home, scribble in the margins, put in on the shelf, lend it to a friend, sell it at a garage sale. But is the same thing true for the ebooks or other digital goods you buy? Retailers and copyright holders argue that you don't own those purchases, you merely license them. That means your ebook vendor can delete the book from your device without warning or explanation -- as Amazon deleted Orwell's 1984 from the Kindles of surprised readers several years ago. These readers thought they owned their copies of 1984. Until, it turned out, they didn't. In The End of Ownership, Aaron Perzanowski and Jason Schultz explore how notions of ownership have shifted in the digital marketplace, and make an argument for the benefits of personal property.Of course, ebooks, cloud storage, streaming, and other digital goods offer users convenience and flexibility. But, Perzanowski and Schultz warn, consumers should be aware of the tradeoffs involving user constraints, permanence, and privacy. The rights of private property are clear, but few people manage to read their end user agreements. Perzanowski and Schultz argue that introducing aspects of private property and ownership into the digital marketplace would offer both legal and economic benefits. But, most important, it would affirm our sense of self-direction and autonomy. If we own our purchases, we are free to make whatever lawful use of them we please. Technology need not constrain our freedom; it can also empower us.

    When you deliver content that library users find useful and relevant, you give a compelling answer to their question, "What's in it for me?" Author of the best-selling book "The Librarian's Nitty-Gritty Guide to Social Media," Solomon speaks directly to public relations personnel, web librarians, and other staff responsible for the library's online presence. Filled with nuts-and-bolts advice on how to increase the library's value to its users, her guide: defines the essential characteristics of effective content marketing; explores methods of audience assessment; demonstrates how to optimize content for sharing; explains the elements of an editorial calendar for sustainable content, and shows how to create once and re-purpose many times; describes meaningful metrics for the library context; points out 5 common mistakes and how to avoid them; provides a template for creating personas; and includes first-hand accounts from library marketers. Making content marketing concepts bite-sized and easily digestible, this guide shows libraries how to market effectively by focusing on what library users find useful and relevant.

    Expert web design teacher Alannah Moore makes this subject accessible for everyone, even those with no technical or design experience. Avoiding technical language, Alannah provides a summary of the web platforms available, covering, among others, WordPress, Squarespace, Weebly and Shopify. From these the reader can choose the right platform for them, and very quickly get up and running.Drawing on her vast experience of what a novice website builder really needs to know, Alannah covers all the topics they will come across in their online experience: how to choose a good domain name; what content you need for your site; how to work with images and even create your own logo. The reader will also learn how to integrate social media and a blog, so they are set up and in control of their virtual presence from every aspect. This is the perfect book for anyone who doesn't want to pay for an expensive web designer. In Alannah's safe and capable hands, they will find the process of building their site easy and enjoyable, and they'll soon have a successful online presence.

    This textbook and comprehensive resource introduces students to the contexts and situations that promote the development of empathy and build cultural competence, examines the research in the areas of diversity and social justice in librarianship, explains how social responsibility is a foundational value of librarianship, and identifies potential employment and networking opportunities related to diversity and social justice in librarianship.A valuable book for students in graduate library and information science programs as well as LIS practitioners and researchers interested in knowing more about the topic of diversity in the profession, Information Services to Diverse Populations: Developing Culturally Competent Library Professionals addresses the political, social, economic, and technological divides among library patrons, covers transformative library services, and discusses outreach and services to diverse populations as well as how to evaluate such services, among many other topics. Appendices containing suggestions for exercises and assignments as well as lists of related library organizations and readings in related literature provide readers with additional resources.

    But with the rise of digital networked media, a multitude of self-designated archivists—fans, pirates, hackers—have become practitioners of cultural preservation on the Internet. These nonprofessional archivists have democratized cultural memory, building freely accessible online archives of whatever content they consider suitable for digital preservation. In Rogue Archives, Abigail De Kosnik examines the practice of archiving in the transition from print to digital media, looking in particular at Internet fan fiction archives.De Kosnik explains that media users today regard all of mass culture as an archive, from which they can redeploy content for their own creations. Hence, “remix culture” and fan fiction are core genres of digital cultural production. De Kosnik explores, among other things, the anticanonical archiving styles of Internet preservationists; the volunteer labor of online archiving; how fan archives serve women and queer users as cultural resources; archivists' efforts to attract racially and sexually diverse content; and how digital archives adhere to the logics of performance more than the logics of print. She also considers the similarities and differences among free culture, free software, and fan communities, and uses digital humanities tools to quantify and visualize the size, user base, and rate of growth of several online fan archives.

    Dale Dougherty, creator of MAKE: magazine and the Maker Faire, provides a guided tour of the....

    While a smattering of journal articles and a small number of books have been published on the topic, the conversation around CIL has mostly taken place online, at conferences, in individual libraries, and in personal dialogues. This book explores that conversation and provides a snapshot of the current state of CIL as it is enacted and understood by academic librarians. It introduces the ideas and concepts behind CIL and helps librarians make more informed decisions about how to design, teach, and implement programs. It also informs library science scholars and policy makers in terms of knowing how CIL is being taught and supported at the institutional level.

    Yet a comprehensive but concise roadmap specifically for librarians who are new to instruction, or who are charged with training someone who is, has remained elusive. Until now. This book cuts through the jargon and rhetoric to ease the transition into library instruction, offering support to all those involved, including library supervisors, colleagues, and trainees. Grounded in research on teaching and learning from numerous disciplines, not just library literature, this bookshows how to set up new instruction librarians for success, with advice on completing an environmental scan, strategies for recruiting efficiently, and a training checklist; walks readers step by step through training a new hire or someone new to instruction, complete with hands-on activities and examples; explores the different roles an instruction librarian is usually expected to play, such as educator, project manager, instructional designer, and teaching partner; demonstrates the importance of performance evaluation and management, including assessment and continuing education, both formal and informal; and provides guided reading lists for further in-depth study of a topic. A starter kit for librarians new to instruction, this resource will be useful for training coordinators as well as for self-training.

    The book imagines, and enacts, the library as both keeper of books and curator of ideas—as a platform of the future. One essay occupies the right-hand page of a two-page spread while interviews scrolls independently on the left. Bibliophilic artworks intersect both throughout the book-as-exhibition. A photo essay, “Reading Rooms Reading Machines” further interrupts the book in order to display images of libraries (old and new, real and imagined), and readers (human and machine) and features work by artists including Kader Atta, Wafaa Bilal, Mark Dion, Rodney Graham, Katie Paterson, Veronika Spierenburg, and others.The book includes an essay on the institutional ordering principles of book collections; a conversation with the proprietors of the Prelinger Library in San Francisco; reflections on the role of cultural memory and the archive; and a dialogue with a new media theorist about experiments at the intersection of curatorial practice and open source ebooks. The reader emerges from this book-as-exhibition with the growing conviction that the library is not only a curatorial space but a bibliological imaginary, ripe for the exploration of consequential paginated affairs. The physicality of the book—and this book—“resists the digital,” argues coeditor Etienne Turpin, “but not in a nostalgic way.”

    Not of the physical world but rather one that serves up appropriate resources for your library's researchers, thanks to advancements in handling metadata, natural language processing, and keyword searching. For you, Discovery might be shorthand for single-index products such as Serials' Solutions Summon, EBSCO Discovery, and OCLC's WorldCat Discovery. Yet even those tools require adjustments to meet your institution's specific needs. With first-hand profiles of 19 library projects, Varnum and his roster of contributors offer guidance on the complete range of discovery services, from the broad sweep of vendors' products to the fine points of specialized holdings.Topics include: migrating from a traditional ILS to a library services platform; creating a task list for usability testing of discovery; managing internal development requirements within the constraints of a small or mid-sized library; applying agile software methodology to a Blacklight implementation; real-world examples of usability testing, including a small liberal arts college's implementation of VuFind; meeting the challenge of three different metadata formats; practices in the Primo community for integrating open access content into the front end; serving mobile users with an app and responsive Web design; analyzing the use of facets in search; using a single discovery tool across a library, museum, and archive; and implementing discovery with geospatial datasets.Easy to dip into as needed, this comprehensive examination of discovery services will prove invaluable to IT, web development, electronic resource management, and technical services staff.

    But without a roadmap, sifting through the sheer quantity of information to find the right answers is foolhardy. The first edition of this text is well established as an essential navigational tool for both LIS students and professionals; now this newly revised, peer-reviewed update is even more attuned to new sources and types of government information and how best to locate them. Unmatched in its scope, this book covers such key topics as the history of government information, from its colorful beginnings to the era of Wikileaks, Edward Snowden, and data breaches; how to think like a government documents librarian in order to find information efficiently, plus other research tips; all types of law resources and information, including public laws and the U.S. Code, Case Law and the judicial branch, and regulations; Congressional literature, from bills and committee hearings to the U.S. Congressional Serial Set; patents, trademarks, and intellectual property; census data, educational information, and other statistical resources; health information, with an in-depth look at the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and the trend toward and impact of online medical records; and science, environmental, and energy resources from agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy. Exercises throughout the text support instruction, while the approachable and well-organized style make it ideal for day-to-day reference use.

    Prison libraries violate many tenets of librarianship, with the justification of maintaining order. The field is de-professionalized--many positions are filled by persons without degrees in library science, and corrections administrators often write policy for services. Critics cite the need to implement public library service models despite practical difficulties. This book investigates state, national and international policies on prison libraries, reviews literature on the topic and describes partnerships between prisons and public libraries. Results from a national survey and follow-up interviews are included, providing a full narrative of policy outcomes in U.S. prisons.

    That includes Spanish-speaking children, who need opportunities to hear their home and school languages spoken, and to see their lives validated through engaging cuentos (stories) that reflect their cultural experiences. Additionally, when combined with other forms of targeted outreach, offering bilingual storytimes in English and Spanish is an effective strategy to attract Latino and Spanish-speaking families to your library. This all-in-one resource, written by two experienced specialists who understand the nuances of library services, collections, and outreach to this population, shows you how. Suitable for libraries just getting started as well as those with programs already in place, this guide discusses the importance of bilingual programming in the lives of Latino and Spanish-speaking children, addressing the unique educational and informational needs of bilingual children; provides 18 ready-to-use program plans for bilingual storytimes, suitable even for storytime leaders who don't speak Spanish; includes several templates for designing bilingual storytimes, arranged by specific age groups; recommends numerous children's books, songs, and professional resources to assist librarians as they plan their bilingual programs; explores the opportunity for digital media usage in storytimes for Latino and Spanish-speaking families, with examples of apps that can help meet the multiple literacy needs of bilingual children; and suggests ways to perform outreach to Spanish-speaking and Latino communities, emphasizing the importance of relationship-building and community collaboration. Enhanced with interviews and advice from experts affiliated with REFORMA (The National Association to Promote Library and Information Services to Latinos and the Spanish-Speaking), this book will become a trusted resource for children's librarians, school library media specialists, outreach and programming librarians, ESL educators, teachers, and professionals in child-care agencies.

    This edited volume includes papers that explore intersections between critical theory and social justice in LIS while focusing on social relevance and community involvement to promote progressive community-wide changes. Contributors include LIS researchers, practitioners, educators, social justice advocates, and community leaders who identify theories, methods, approaches, strategies, and case studies that apply these intersections in mobilizing community action to deliver tangible community building and development outcomes. The frame of study is inclusive of (though not limited to) academic, public, school, and special libraries, museums, archives, and other information-related settings. An international context of analysis is included along with a focus on social impact and community involvement in LIS practice and research, education, policy development, service design, and program implementation.

    Whether you're starting from scratch and don't know where to begin, or you're an experienced grant writer looking to tap into new funding sources, this resource offers a proven, easy-to-understand process for grant success. Loaded with a wide variety of forms, worksheets, and checklists to help you stay organized, this book:summarizes the grant process cycle and outlines a clear path to success; shares inspiring grant success stories in action from diverse libraries; offers guidance on gathering knowledge and conducting research, with updated resource lists and links to the various types of funders; covers every stage of planning, including how to cultivate community involvement, methods for needs assessment, advice on organizing the grant team, and exercises to help you write realistic goals and objectives; gives tips on writing the proposal, such as where to find the best statistics and census data to support your statement of needs; advises how to announce a successful grant to the community, and other first steps of implementation, including the basic principles of project management; provides guidance on what to do when you're turned down and how to conduct an effective review session that keeps the process moving forward; highlights ways to stay current through online discussion groups, blogs, networking groups, and more; and features sample RFPs, budget templates, grant partnership documents, and many other helpful tools. Written by two librarians who are experts in grantsmanship, this all-in-one toolkit for winning grants is a must-have for library directors, grant writers, board members, consultants, and anyone else involved in planning library programs and services.

    There has been a growing concern with the 'skills gap' required to exploit the data surfeit; the ability to collect, compute and crunch data, for economic, social and scientific purposes. This book, written by two working data librarians based at the Universities of Oxford and Edinburgh aims to help fill this skills gap by providing a nuts and bolts guide to research data support. The Data Librarian's Handbook draws on a combination of over 30 years' experience providing data support services to create the 'must-read' book for all entrants to this field. This book 'zooms in' to the actual library service level, where the interaction between the researcher and the librarian takes place. Both engaging and practical, this book draws the reader in through story-telling and suggested activities, linking concepts from one chapter to another. This book is for the practising data librarian, possibly new in their post with little experience of providing data support. It is also for managers and policy-makers, public service librarians, research data management "coordinators" and data support staff.0It will also appeal to students and lecturers in iSchools and other library and information degree programmes where academic research support is taught.

    Packed with both colorful patterned pages and black and white printed pages that can be cut out, colored in, or customized and embellished, as well as pages full of stickers, you have everything you need to create your own collage masterpieces. There are loads of ideas and suggestions for getting the most out of the materials provided in the book, from making beautiful bird collages, to creating a charming cityscape or nautical collage, to designs that can be used to create cards for your family and friends. Plus, some pages are perforated so they can be cut out, or folded and glued. There's even two 4-page double-sided fold-out spreads inside for you to customize and display, so your home, office, or locker will be the envy of all!

    R. David Lankes, author of The Atlas of New Librarianship, reminds librarians of their mission: to improve society by facilitating knowledge creation in their communities. In this book, he provides tools, arguments, resources, and ideas for fulfilling this mission. Librarians will be prepared to become radical positive change agents in their communities, and other readers will learn to understand libraries in a new way.The librarians of Ferguson, Missouri, famously became positive change agents in August 2014 when they opened library doors when schools were closed because of civil unrest after the shooting of an unarmed teen by police. Working with other local organizations, they provided children and their parents a space for learning, lunch, and peace. But other libraries serve other communities--students, faculty, scholars, law firms--in other ways. All libraries are about community, writes Lankes; that is just librarianship.In concise chapters, Lankes addresses the mission of libraries and explains what constitutes a library. He offers practical advice for librarian training; provides teaching notes for each chapter; and answers "Frequently Argued Questions" about the new librarianship.

    Researchers and students will appreciate the book's unhurried pace and thorough, friendly presentation. Opening with an introduction to Excel 2016, including coverage of how to use functions and formulas, this edition also shows students how to install the Excel Data Analysis Tools option to access a host of useful analytical techniques. The book walks readers through various statistical procedures, beginning with simple descriptive statistics, correlations, and graphical representations of data, and ending with inferential techniques, analysis of variance, and a new introductory chapter on working with large datasets and data mining using Excel.

    Much more so than their forebears, modern librarians must grapple daily with questions of how best to implement innovative new services, while also maintaining and updating the old. The efforts undertaken are immense, but how best to evaluate their success?In this groundbreaking new book from Routledge, library practitioners, anthropologists, and design experts combine to advocate a new focus on User Experience (or 'UX') research methods. Through a combination of theoretical discussion and applied case studies, they argue that this ethnographic and human-centred design approach enables library professionals to gather rich evidence-based insights into what is really going on in their libraries, allowing them to look beyond what library users say they do to what they actually do.　Edited by the team behind the international UX in Libraries conference, User Experience in Libraries will ignite new interest in a rapidly emerging and game-changing area of research. Clearly written and passionately argued, it is essential reading for all library professionals and students of Library and Information Science. It will also be welcomed by anthropologists and design professionals working in related fields.

    

    In this collection of essays from his "Office Hours" columns in Library Journal, Stephens explores the issues and emerging trends that are transforming the profession. Among the topics he discusses are: the importance of accessible, welcoming, and responsive library environments that invite open and equitable participation, and which factors are preventing many libraries from ramping up community engagement and user-focused services; challenges, developments, and emerging opportunities in the field, including new ways to reach users and harness curiosity; considerations for prospective librarians, from knowing what you want out of the profession to learning how to aim for it; why LIS curriculum and teaching styles need to evolve; mentoring and collaboration; and the concept of the library as classroom, a participatory space to experiment with new professional roles, new technologies, and new ways of interacting with patrons. Bringing together ideas for practice, supporting evidence from recent research, and insights into what lies ahead, this book will inform and inspire librarians of all types.

    In our own discipline - Library and Information Science - voices and ideas that have long been confined to the critical margins have been given buoyancy as forms of critique have gained traction. This volume allows for a fresh look at at the interaction of information, labor, capital, class, and librarianship.