Coverage of heritage and archeology in formal education is typically limited. These subjects are typically taught through specific and anecdotal activities that do not respond to a specific methodological foundation. School-museum relationships offer numerous benefits for design participation experiences with long-term perspectives in conducting…

Many academic librarians are revising their instructional practice to integrate ACRL's "Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education." The authors collaborated with science faculty to develop and pilot lesson plans with learning goals derived from the "Framework." We implemented the lesson plans in both…

This overview demonstrates the need for school librarians to consider supplementing coding instruction with ethical discussions. School librarians are increasingly incorporating coding into library instruction through play, tutorials, collaboration in content areas, and design thinking projects. To enhance students' ethical decision making and…

Students in STEM and the health sciences have unique learning needs, including preparation for exams required for entering a STEM or health sciences profession. Students in these areas thus often seek, in addition to or instead of traditional course materials and library resources, digital study tools that utilize techniques such as spaced…

Since 2014, the University Libraries at the University of Oklahoma in Norman has been a member of the Software Carpentry Foundation (now part of "The Carpentries"), a nonprofit organization dedicated to teaching basic computing skills to researchers. Through this partnership, we have taught over a dozen introductory programming workshops…

This paper encourages educators in library and information science (LIS) to adopt the "creative deliverable," that is, an assignment that gives students the freedom to display their understanding of course material in an almost unrestricted range of alternative formats and genres, while retaining some key features of traditional…

Public libraries are heavily affected by political and policy-making processes that shape the funding, activities, and roles of libraries in society, with the explosion of information policy decisions in the past two decades significantly increasing the responsibilities of libraries while also increasing limitations on their activities. Research…

Library and Information Science (LIS) as a discipline is guided by core values that emphasize equal access to information, freedom of expression, democracy, and education. Importantly, diversity and social responsibility are specifically called out as foundations of the profession (American Library Association, 2004). Following from this, there…

Big Data is an increasingly popular term across scholarly and popular literature but lacks a formal definition (Lohr 2012). This is beneficial in that it keeps the term flexible. For librarians, Big Data represents a few important ideas. One idea is the idea of balancing accessibility with privacy. Librarians tend to want information to be as open…

Practitioners in informal science settings--museums, after-school programs, science and technology centers, media enterprises, libraries, aquariums, zoos, and botanical gardens--are interested in finding out what learning looks like, how to measure it, and what they can do to ensure that people of all ages, from different backgrounds and cultures,…

This essay challenges traditional assumptions about the small-town American public library and the roles it has played in its community. Conventional thinking and professional rhetoric grounded on a "user in the life of the library" perspective identifies the public library as a neutral agency "essential to democracy" that…

A hundred years after Marie Curie received her Nobel Prize in Chemistry, this arm of science is pointing the way to a more sustainable future. Growing movements like green chemistry, which strives to create alternative and new chemical reactions that produce no harmful waste products, and molecular engineering hold great potential for industry,…

Two members of the library faculty at Seton Hall University teamed up with a respected professor of mathematics and computer science, in order to create an online course that introduces information literacy both from the perspectives of the computer scientist and from the instruction librarian. This collaboration is unique in that it addresses the…

Prior to retiring from full-time librarianship to concentrate on readers' advisory (RA) consulting, teaching, and book and media discussions, Ted Balcom, longtime administrator of the Villa Park Public Library (VPPL), Illinois, repeatedly demonstrated a particularly effective approach to shoring up essential library support. Balcom, 1996 winner of…

The processes of creation and expression of scientific, social, and humanistic inspirations are culminating in a vast corpus of stunning and even life-changing documents, films, recordings, Web sites, and other media, including software. Advances in technology have enabled new kinds of scholarship--the most obvious and profound impact is occurring…