Resulting from the collaboration between five practicing professionals and an LIS faculty member, this article illuminates the experiences of librarians and archivists who engage with LIS students on a continuous basis as guest speakers in LIS classrooms. The phenomenological approach helps to elicit first-hand accounts that encapsulate…

The scope of this article is to address the possibilities and challenges librarians concerned with social justice may face when working with the ACRL "Framework." While the "Framework" recognizes that information emerges from varied contexts that reflect uneven distributions of power, privilege, and authority, it is missing a…

As educational and research needs have changed, libraries have changed as well. They must meet ever-increasing demand for access to online media, subscriptions to archives, video, audio, and other content. The way a user/patron accesses this information has also changed. Gone are the days of a few hardwired desktops or computer carts. While…

Discusses the lack of minorities in the library profession and suggests steps to help increase the number of minorities in higher education and librarianship, in the areas of hiring practices, monetary incentives, recruitment, and academic and social environment. A sidebar reports statistics on degrees awarded and students enrolled in library and…

Employees are valuable. The cost of hiring, training, and retaining staff--not just librarians, but all staff--generally makes up the largest part of a library's budget. Since library support staff usually comprise 60-80 percent of the work force, it makes perfect fiscal sense to motivate this segment of employees to stay. There is an even more…

Suggests that writing for children (and being a children's librarian) is held in low esteem because the field is dominated by women and the focus is on children. Concludes that the values that children's literature is assumed to contain--nurturing values associated with women--threaten the dominant culture. (NKA)

Identifies strategies for attaining minorities and for improving the current status of underrepresented minorities in academic libraries. A plan for action is presented which includes internships for minorities, the Targets of Opportunity Program (TOPS) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, recruiting by networking, and a mentoring…

Looks at the issue of professional relationships between teachers and librarians and how those relationships affect curricular decisions. Suggests teachers and librarians see each other as team-teachers who support each other's programs. (MG)

For gay students, some always feel like they are wearing a mask. They cannot let their family, even their friends, see the real them. According to researchers, the road to adulthood for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered teens is riddled with more potholes than for other teens. For starters, gay teens are two to three times more likely to…

Examines factors of philosophical significance to college librarianship that provide direction for daily decisions: growth of bibliographic instruction--role of metaphysical and metaphorical; need to integrate values of liberal education; understanding of social context--humanistic roots; and understanding of librarian's role of intervenor,…

Looks at the social and psychological effects on users of the introduction of online catalogs in libraries, examines several major changes in public and professional use of the catalog that result from online systems, and examines some of the unintended social effects of each of these changes. Three references are listed. (EJS)

While the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act (IDEA) and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) have made it easier for those with impairments to use public facilities, there's still much that can be done to help students with special needs access their own schools, including the library. That doesn't necessarily…

Ways the education and training of information professionals can adapt to the rapidly changing information environment are addressed in this paper, which describes a project undertaken by King Research ("New Directions in Library and Information Science Education") to identify current and future competency requirements of librarians and…

Argues that the educational problems of librarianship cannot be examined realistically without a concern for knowledge about the social conditions within which libraries exist. The nature of these social realities is discussed, as well as their influence on library education. Extensive references are provided. (Author/BK)

Reviews four articles from the "Phi Delta Kappan" that describe the educational context impacting the school library media profession. Topics covered include the educational system from the viewpoint of the National Commission on Excellence in Education report "A Nation at Risk"; strengths and weaknesses of American education;…