Bowker and Susan Leigh Star explore the role of categories and standards in shaping the modern world. In a clear and lively style, they investigate a variety of classification systems, including the International Classification of Diseases, the Nursing Interventions Classification, race classification under apartheid in South Africa, and the classification of viruses and of tuberculosis.The authors emphasize the role of invisibility in the process by which classification orders human interaction. They examine how categories are made and kept invisible, and how people can change this invisibility when necessary. They also explore systems of classification as part of the built information environment. Much as an urban historian would review highway permits and zoning decisions to tell a city's story, the authors review archives of classification design to understand how decisions have been made. Sorting Things Out has a moral agenda, for each standard and category valorizes some point of view and silences another. Standards and classifications produce advantage or suffering. Jobs are made and lost; some regions benefit at the expense of others. How these choices are made and how we think about that process are at the moral and political core of this work. The book is an important empirical source for understanding the building of information infrastructures.

    Created with the input of hundreds of early literacy teachers, it compiles more than 7000 caption books, natural language texts, series books, and children's literature for kindergarten through grade three.

    Learning the craft and secrets of a master book-binder

    

    It includes the text for almost 100 fingerplays and nursery rhymes, as well as bilingual puppet shows and ready-to-go programmes for use in public libraries and schools.

    In this book you will find explanations of indexing techniques along with examples of each topic discussed. Since it is not an exhaustive study of indexing, the bibliographies at the end of most chapters contain many suggestions for further reading and study. In this third edition of the Handbook, Cynthia Bertelsen has completely revised her four chapters on reference works for indexers. All information in the remaining chapters has also been updated.

    From 1924 to 1948--a period of restricted immigration--the mission of the American public library in its work with immigrants was to educate the adult immigrant and to internationalize the American community. Together, the public library and the immigrant community have shaped and perpetuated the national understanding of the value of ethnicity and internationalism to American society. The American public librarians took on the roles of advocates for immigrant rights, social workers, propagandists for the American way, and educators.At the end of the twentieth century, as at the beginning, Americans are still debating the place of immigrants in American society. Public librarians are now as they were then, going about their duties and responsibilities of providing advice and materials to help immigrants, legal and illegal, cope with everyday life in America. The American public library has remained a sovereign alchemist, turning the base metal of immigrant potentialities into the gold of American realities.