There are many intersections between public and community college libraries, both in the populations they serve and their functions within their local communities. Both types of libraries play a crucial role in supporting the diverse needs of their communities, serving as hubs for education, information, and essential services. Maximizing…

School and public librarians both strive to offer resources and services to their communities, often with limited budgets. School and public libraries offer different business hours, diverse resources, different online databases, unique facilities and makerspaces, and varying services. Both also collect materials and provide programming for many…

The American Association of School Librarians (AASL) Standards are an invitation to explore the endless possibilities of "why." The standards provide permission to take risks, to step beyond the comfort of four walls to truly stretch and grow. The AASL Standards provide a common language for school library stakeholders that bring into…

Innovation often means finding new ways to make better use of resources that already exist in our communities. A new initiative to connect schools and libraries was just the right catalyst to enhance family engagement. The New York Public Library (NYPL), which has 88 neighborhood branches across The Bronx, Manhattan, and Staten Island, was one…

How can we teach inter-organizational collaboration? Reflecting on series of experimental library and information science courses taught from 2011-2015, the Youth Services Community Engagement courses grew out of an IMLS-funded grant focused on innovative services to youth. The course required service-learning experiences in organizations other…

The purpose of the research was to explore the collaboration between public libraries and schools in Hong Kong from the perspective of school librarians. Three school librarians were interviewed (semi-structured), and their responses were thematically analyzed. Collaboration between public libraries and the three schools was well received and…

In this article, we introduce the case of a makerspace program that provides a "systemwide approach to making" rather than a singular face-to-face or online place. This makerspace, called Bubbler, extends across a public library system of a mid-sized Midwestern city (Madison, Wisconsin) and incorporates nine neighborhood libraries and…

Youth are natural scientists at birth, discovering and exploring their world and trying to make sense of it (Bers, 2008). A child's education is not limited to just the time they spend in the classroom. Children learn at home with their families, in public libraries, or through out-of-school-time (OST) experiences provided at community centers and…

Public libraries are ideal contexts for supporting child development and family involvement (Families and Work Institute, 2015; IMLS, 2013). Families with children often attend public libraries to participate in educational programming and experiences, yet university-based developmental scientists who study how people develop and adapt across the…

Students look to their school library to find new books, seek information, creatively solve problems, and use technology. School libraries play an essential role in students' academic growth and development of lifelong learning skills. All of the wonderful resources and services that school libraries provide are easily accessible to the population…

Collaboration in the digital domain offers an opportunity to provide enhanced digital services and extended reach to the community. This article adopts a service-oriented perspective through which it considers environmental drivers for digital library collaboration; discusses emergent collaborative partnerships across UK educational institutions,…

Matthew Lighthart and Creedence Spreder, librarians, describe a partnership that proved successful for the school and library in their community of Pungo, nestled in Virginia Beach's vast but sparsely populated agricultural center. This community was facing a dual challenge: their only elementary school (Creeds) was in dire need of renovation and…

Partnerships and collaborations among libraries are proven to enhance collective resources. The collaboration of multi-type libraries offers a unique opportunity to explore the potential of different libraries working together to provide the best possible service to their community members. This article provides a detailed report of a multi-type…

More than 60,000 students attend over seventy schools comprising the Douglas County School District (DCSD) in Colorado. It has been a consistently high-performing district, with a reputation for being among Colorado's elite. Douglas County Libraries (DCL) is a nationally recognized state-of-the-art public library system with seven branches serving…

While recreational reading material was once an integral part of the academic library collection and librarians were seen as guides in reading development for students, this has not been the case in the last 50 years. Fiscal constraints have forced library professionals to make choices so that leisure reading material has not been viewed as a high…