Do you remember your first visit to where the wild things are? How about curling up for hours on end to discover the secret of the Sorcerer’s Stone? Combining clear, practical advice with inspiration, wisdom, tips, and curated reading lists, How to Raise a Reader shows you how to instill the joy and time-stopping pleasure of reading.   Divided into four sections, from baby through teen, and each illustrated by a different artist, this book offers something useful on every page, whether it’s how to develop rituals around reading or build a family library, or ways to engage a reluctant reader. A fifth section, “More Books to Love: By Theme and Reading Level,” is chockful of expert recommendations. Throughout, the authors debunk common myths, assuage parental fears, and deliver invaluable lessons in a positive and easy-to-act-on way.

    Today, libraries have become free-for-all entertainment complexes filled with rowdy teens, deviants, drugs, and even sex toys. Lockdowns and chaperones are often necessary. What happened? Don Borchert was a short-order cook, door-to-door salesman, telemarketer, and Christmas-tree-chopper before landing a job in a California library. He never could have predicted his encounters with the colorful kooks, touching adolescents, threatening bullies, and tricksters who fill the pages of this hilarious memoir. Borchert offers readers a ringside seat for the unlikely spectacle of mayhem and absurdity that is business as usual at the public library--cops bust drug dealers who've set up shop in the men's restroom, a burka-wearing employee suffers a curse-ridden nervous breakdown, and a lonely, neglected kid who grew up in the library and still sends postcards to his surrogate parents--the librarians. In fact, from the first page of this comic debut to the last, you'll learn everything about the world of the modern-day library that you never expected.

    A host of specialists have contributed to the collection. This new edition includes more detailed discussion of a wider range of reference-related services including interlibrary loan, document delivery, and readers' advisory services. There is also increased attention to ethical issues and a stronger focus on user-centered services, both face-to-face and mediated by technology. In addition, the authors discuss Web sites of significant value to reference services and the impact of the Internet and World Wide Web on reference services. This carefully designed and readable text explains the essential theory and provides the practical knowledge necessary for an initial reference course. Its broad scope and organizational clarity will benefit students and practitioners.

    In fact, staff at public libraries interact with almost as many homeless individuals as staff at shelters do. Empathy and understanding, along with specific actionable advice that's drawn from experience, makes all the difference in working with this group.In this book Dowd, executive director of a homeless shelter, spotlights best practices drawn from his own shelter's policies and training materials. Filled with to-the-point guidance that will help front line public library staff and managers understand and serve this population better, this resource:• includes facts about homelessness every librarian should know;• debunks widespread myths about these individuals, explaining how they see themselves, what issues they struggle with, and how libraries can shift towards supporting them;• shares de-escalation techniques like showing respect, ways to avoid making things personal, and using proper body language;• walks readers through dealing with common issues like a sleeping patron, questionable hygiene, offensive behavior, and asking a patron to leave; and• advises on how to provide backup to a colleague and when to call the police.Filled with real life stories that illustrate the effectiveness of Dowd's approach, this one-of-a-kind guide will empower library staff to treat homeless individuals with dignity.

    Featuring more than 200 full-color images of original catalog cards, first edition book covers, and photographs from the library's magnificent archives, this collection is a visual celebration of the rarely seen treasures in one of the world's most famous libraries and the brilliant catalog system that has kept it organized for hundreds of years. Packed with engaging facts on literary classics—from Ulysses to The Cat in the Hat to Shakespeare's First Folio to The Catcher in the Rye—this package is an ode to the enduring magic and importance of books.

    And as books became more common, the question of where and how to store them became more pertinent. But how did we come from continuous sheets rolled on spools to the ubiquitous portable item you are holding in your hand? And how did books come to be restored and displayed vertically and spine out on shelves? Henry Petroski answers these and virtually every other question we might have about books as he contemplates the history of the book on bookshelf with his inimitable subtle analysis and intriguing detail."After reading this book, you will not look at a book or a bookshelf in the same way." —The Seattle Times

    What is librarianship when it is unmoored from cataloging, books, buildings, and committees? In The Atlas of New Librarianship, R. David Lankes offers a guide to this new landscape for practitioners. He describes a new librarianship based not on books and artifacts but on knowledge and learning; and he suggests a new mission for librarians: to improve society through facilitating knowledge creation in their communities. The vision for a new librarianship must go beyond finding library-related uses for information technology and the Internet; it must provide a durable foundation for the field. Lankes recasts librarianship and library practice using the fundamental concept that knowledge is created though conversation. New librarians approach their work as facilitators of conversation; they seek to enrich, capture, store, and disseminate the conversations of their communities. To help librarians navigate this new terrain, Lankes offers a map, a visual representation of the field that can guide explorations of it; more than 140 Agreements, statements about librarianship that range from relevant theories to examples of practice; and Threads, arrangements of Agreements to explain key ideas, covering such topics as conceptual foundations and skills and values. Agreement Supplements at the end of the book offer expanded discussions. Although it touches on theory as well as practice, the Atlas is meant to be a tool: textbook, conversation guide, platform for social networking, and call to action.Copublished with the Association of College & Research Libraries.

    Grassian and Joan R. Kaplowitz have revised, expanded, and updated their comprehensive guide to the theory and practice of library instruction. This second edition covers all aspects and modes of information literacy instruction, including history and psychology, as well as how to create and design teaching materials, how to use new technology to support pedagogy, and how to utilize new developments in the field since the publication of the previous edition. The recommended readings and exercises at the end of each chapter help put ideas and concepts into practice. The companion CD-ROM includes institutional and library mission statements related to information literacy, a table listing pros and cons of assessment tools, a brief overview of learning styles table, examples of minimalist documentation, a sample PowerPoint slide show, a sample class outline, a two-minute yoga exercise, suggestions for further reading and the complete book bibliography, both with links to web pages.

    Since then, the ways we process written language have changed dramatically with many concerned about both their own changes and that of children. New research on the reading brain chronicles these changes in the brains of children and adults as they learn to read while immersed in a digitally dominated medium.Drawing deeply on this research, this book comprises a series of letters Wolf writes to us—her beloved readers—to describe her concerns and her hopes about what is happening to the reading brain as it unavoidably changes to adapt to digital mediums. Wolf raises difficult questions, including:Will children learn to incorporate the full range of "deep reading" processes that are at the core of the expert reading brain?Will the mix of a seemingly infinite set of distractions for children’s attention and their quick access to immediate, voluminous information alter their ability to think for themselves?With information at their fingertips, will the next generation learn to build their own storehouse of knowledge, which could impede the ability to make analogies and draw inferences from what they know?Will all these influences, in turn, change the formation in children and the use in adults of "slower" cognitive processes like critical thinking, personal reflection, imagination, and empathy that comprise deep reading and that influence both how we think and how we live our lives?Will the chain of digital influences ultimately influence the use of the critical analytical and empathic capacities necessary for a democratic society?How can we preserve deep reading processes in future iterations of the reading brain?Who are the "good readers" of every epoch?Concerns about attention span, critical reasoning, and over-reliance on technology are never just about children—Wolf herself has found that, though she is a reading expert, her ability to read deeply has been impacted as she has become, inevitably, increasingly dependent on screens.Wolf draws on neuroscience, literature, education, technology, and philosophy and blends historical, literary, and scientific facts with down-to-earth examples and warm anecdotes to illuminate complex ideas that culminate in a proposal for a biliterate reading brain. Provocative and intriguing, Reader, Come Home is a roadmap that provides a cautionary but hopeful perspective on the impact of technology on our brains and our most essential intellectual capacities—and what this could mean for our future.

    Written before the emergence of the Internet but newly updated for the twenty-first century reader, A Gentle Madness captures that last moment in time when collectors frequented dusty bookshops, street stalls, and high-stakes auctions, conducting themselves with the subterfuge befitting a true bibliomaniac. A Gentle Madness is vividly anecdotal and thoroughly researched. Nicholas A. Basbanes brings an investigative reporter’s heart and instincts to the task of chronicling collectors past and present in pursuit of bibliomania. Now a classic of collecting, A Gentle Madness is a book lover’s delight.

    

    (No doubt seminars were organized by the Alexandria Librarians Association on the future of the scroll and what to do about the rising barbarian tide.) At no time in our memory, though, have these discussions and conversations been so profound and critical. Here one of today's leading thinkers and speakers about the future of libraries brings together 30 leaders from all types of libraries and from outside librarianship to describe their vision of what the library will be in 2020. Contributors including Stephen Abram, Susan Hildreth, Marie Radford, Clifford Lynch, and Library Journal's The Annoyed Librarian were asked to describe the "library of 2020," in whatever terms they wanted, either a specific library or situation or libraries in general. They were told: "be bold, be inspirational, be hopeful, be true, be provocative, be realistic, be depressing, be light-hearted, be thoughtful, be fun...be yourself, and for heaven's sake, don't be boring." Not that they could be. Broadly representative of important perspectives and aspects within the profession as well as featuring important voices beyond the professional realm, Library 2020 presents thought-provoking and illuminating visions from many points of view. It is both required reading for library leaders and trustees as well as an ideal supplemental text for LIS classes looking at the future of the profession.

    Throughout these pages, she catalogs her encounters with local eccentrics as well as the questions that plague her, such as, "What is the standard length of eyebrow hairs?" Whether she's helping someone scan his face onto an online dating site or explaining why the library doesn't have any dragon autobiographies, Sheridan's bizarre tales prove that she's truly seen it all.Stacked high with hundreds of strange-but-true stories, I Work at a Public Library celebrates librarians and the unforgettable patrons that roam the stacks every day.

    Hoping to explore the “real ground of literature,” she reads her way through a somewhat randomly chosen shelf of fiction, from LEQ to LES.The shelf has everything Rose could wish for—a classic she has not read, a remarkable variety of authors, and a range of literary styles. The early nineteenth-century Russian classic A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov is spine by spine with The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux. Stories of French Canadian farmers sit beside those about aristocratic Austrians. California detective novels abut a picaresque novel from the seventeenth century. There are several novels by a wonderful, funny, contemporary novelist who has turned to raising dogs because of the tepid response to her work.In The Shelf, Rose investigates the books on her shelf with exuberance, candor, and wit while pondering the many questions her experiment raises and measuring her discoveries against her own inner shelf—those texts that accompany us through life. “Fairly sure that no one in the history of the world has read exactly this series of novels,” she sustains a sense of excitement as she creates a refreshingly original and generous portrait of the literary enterprise.

    This is not an encyclopedic reference book of the past--but rather a cutting edge resource for teachers who want to connect with their techno-savvy 21st century students and in turn connect them to the literature of today. Using themes of exploration and connecting to literature--the authors emphasize actual reading of books, rather than reading about them. The authors also encourage using the Internet to expand our knowledge and interest of literature. Finally, the text contains the most current materials that will get adolescents reading-horror, humor, mystery, science fiction, fantasy, graphic novels and comic books.