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Despite the general consensus that field experience during library school is important for applying theory to practical situations, there is a lack of understanding about what students want from, and the barriers they face to acquire, graduate employment. A survey was sent to ALA accredited Master of Library Science programs in the United States, asking students about their library employment status and to rank factors that influenced their decision to accept their positions. Patterns emerged when results were grouped by various life factors. The results of this study show what students are looking for from employment, which could help employers recruit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the beginning of the Spring 2020 semester, academic institutions in the United States shifted rapidly to virtual instruction amid the COVID-19 pandemic. This shift forced the libraries associated with these institutions to create innovative ways to reach faculty, staff, and students in an online mode. At the University of Memphis, librarians enhanced many existing online services and developed new ones. This study tracks the utilization of these services by online instructors during the span of one year since the COVID-19 pandemic began. The methods were mixed, involving a survey soliciting information from online instructors using both qualitative and quantitative methods and follow-up interviews conducted privately and virtually with teaching faculty and staff. This article presents the findings of this research and details the plans for further action at the University of Memphis to enhance and promote library services to online faculty. The plan involves increasing the level of online marketing, involvement with faculty training, and the enhancement of existing services, specifically embedded librarianship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent developments in Canada, the United States, and beyond continue to test librarians' resolve and to redefine how we view ourselves and engage with communities. Drawing on examples from both Canada and the United States and deploying the concept of "border" as an analytical trope, we seek to probe and unsettle the geographic, professional, and ideological interfaces that librarians constantly negotiate. In a world where data know no borders but indigenous and other bodies are constrained by them, how do we respond to the "Calls to Action" of Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, to the violent displacement of millions of Syrians, to the resurgence of divisive politics and racist rhetorics, or to the surrender to data? Using the Trump election as a launching point, we explore key drivers for change in LIS in instances when politics spill into our professional purview. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the results of an online survey of access services departments at academic libraries on the responses implemented during the initial stage of COVID-19 in March–May 2020. The 33-question survey was completed by 121 respondents. The article identifies policies and procedures adopted by access services departments during the pandemic, including staffing, return of library materials, fines, due dates, quarantine periods, interlibrary loan, reserves, and retrieval of materials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article shares the author's perspectives on the collection management in academic libraries in the U.S. For him, the important element of academic libraries, which is collection, is slowly decreasing and mismanagement is prevalent in academic libraries. Furthermore, the availability of journal collections has been decreasing in libraries, however, such collections are rapidly becoming available in digital forms. In fact, studies and reports from librarians and vendors, show that digital journals are increasingly used each year. He concluded that in an increasingly digital and consortial world, the library as a place must give way to something such as the library as a mission.

ABSTRACT: For residents of St. Louis, the name "Pruitt-Igoe" invokes mental images of forbidding urban blight. A large government-subsidized housing development, Pruitt-Igoe was built with fanfare from the architectural community in the late 1950s, but it quickly deteriorated and was demolished in the 1970s. This study sheds new light on the Crunden Branch Library, which was intentionally built adjacent to Pruitt-Igoe to serve its residents and the surrounding neighborhood. Even during the housing development's hardest years, the library was recognized as a safe space for reading, learning, and cultural programming, and it often served as a space for community action. The story of the Crunden Branch is necessarily intertwined with local and national social and economic trends, contentious federal funding, and the purpose-driven urban librarianship of the late 1950s through the 1970s. It also provides a new perspective on St. Louis and the housing development itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A dedication to service is often cited as a hallmark of a profession. Service is included as one of eleven Core Values in the American Library Association's "Core Values of Librarianship" (2004). For librarians, service includes helping people find information resources to meet their educational, recreational, and work needs. Reporting findings from a larger study into the professional identity of librarians, this paper explores the centrality of service, with specific attention to how librarians advocate for their services and, ultimately, for librarianship. Using a discourse analysis approach, this study examines the roles that Service as a Core Value and advocacy play in the construction of professional identity. Three different data sources were used: professional journals, e-mail discussion lists, and research interviews. The data were analyzed for the discourses librarians use when describing librarians, librarianship, and professionalism and their connection to advocacy. When librarians advocate for the services they offer, they are in fact advocating for the value of the profession. Discursively, speaking or writing about advocacy positioned librarians as active participants in their own identity formation. By making advocacy a central activity of the profession, librarians not only challenged others' perception of librarianship, they challenged their own understanding as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Big data, like MOOCs, altmetrics and open access, is a term that has been commonplace in the library community for some time yet, despite its prevalence, many in the library and information sector remain unsure of the relationship between big data and their roles. This editorial explores what big data could mean for the day-to-day practice of health library and information workers, presenting examples of big data in action, considering the ethics of accessing big data sets and the potential for new roles for library and information workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The accumulation of large collections by members of the American Association of Research Libraries is seen by them as fundamental to their research support role. This article outlines collection development and management practice and policy of the association members between 1945 and 1979. The study is a critical history where narrative is accompanied by analysis and context. Collecting policy and practice is reviewed with a focus on the strategies adopted to cope with the consequences of growth which led to pressure on capacity. A critique of collections policy reviews three significant causal factors: institutional competition, the conception of the role of librarian as a "bookman" as opposed to manager, and the belief that collections would be of longer-term value to the university in that they transcended immediate needs. The advent of usage studies is examined, and the implications of the study for current policy concerning printed collections are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reprints excerpts from Aaron Trehub's piece about the relationship between Slavic studies and Slavic librarianship in the United States in the immediate aftermath of the end of the Cold War. The author, who at the time was Slavic librarian and bibliographer (and former Soviet affairs analyst), notes that through a curious quirk of history, the collapse of communism coincided with the birth of a powerful new communications medium (the World Wide Web). Together, these geopolitical and technological developments have fundamentally changed librarianship in general and Slavic librarianship in particular. Trehub's discussion of the various day-to-day difficulties experienced by Slavic librarians in the post-Cold War period pays special attention to the challenges that new information technologies create for patrons, as well as the instructional burden that this places on librarians. He suggests that excessive reliance on the Web may erode the capacity to reason critically, but admits that the long-term effects of digitization on education and research are unclear. In effect, Trehub's essay provides the historical background for re-evaluating what competencies constitute Slavic information literacy in the twenty-first century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many librarians, lawyers, and law students express interest in becoming foreign, comparative, and international law (FCIL,) librarians. This paper answers common questions about the job duties, salaries, qualifications, satisfactions, and frustrations of FCIL librarians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article highlights a project conducted at the Washingtoniana Division, D.C. Public Library to improve collections security for unique materials. As part of planning for these improvements, staff conducted a survey of similar public library settings and their special-collections practices. Seventy-three surveys were sent to U.S. public libraries, and 47 were completed and returned. Results showed a wide variation in practices, but common concerns included balancing open access with special-collections limitations, and with working with public library communities and users. An appendix details the survey results. The authors contend that special collections in public libraries differ from those in private and/or academic libraries because public library collections must address the mandate for open access. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Currently, in the United States, the Library of Congress (LC) is involved in two programs that are of particular importance to it and potentially of importance to all who care about maximizing the benefits of digital technology for information service. Both programs have acronymic names that are, at best, mysterious, and, at worst, weird. One is called the DODL and the other is the NDIIPP. DODL stands for Distributed Open Digital Library, and NDIIPP stands for National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program. The Digital Library Federation, which is supported primarily by its members including the Library of Congress, is in the process of generating financing for the DODL, of appointing a coordinator for it, of forming a collections development working group to plan development of the DODL's content, and of forming a technical working group that will develop an enabling infrastructure for the collaborative library. There is widespread concern about how to preserve, long-term, all the digital materials that publishers, libraries, scholars, and others are creating.

Effie Louise Power (1873-1969) represented the high standard of collaboration among children's librarians that characterized the entire development of youth services work. This article examines Power's role in U.S. library history as a practitioner, library and information science educator, national and regional professional leader, and author. Particular emphasis is given to Power's place in the network of children's librarians in the early twentieth century, her professional authority as the librarian selected by the American Library Association to write the first textbook for children's librarianship, and her success as one of the many librarians who have written and edited children's books, especially folktale collections for use in storytelling programs. Emerging most notably from this research is the discovery of how energetically, albeit quietly, Power influenced not only her contemporaries but also the next several generations of children's librarians who have followed in her professional footsteps. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THE AMERICAN ANTIQUARIAN SOCIETY (AAS), founded in 1812, is the nation's oldest historical organization. Its library of books, serials, manuscripts, and graphic arts extends from the colonial period through the late nineteenth century. Generations of scholars, graduate students, bibliographers, and independent researchers have studied at the library, "under its generous dome." This article explores elements of the institution's history, the evolution of its collections, and the relationship between its staff and readers that make it a leading humanities research center. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the collections, carefully and aggressively acquired for two centuries, are extraordinarily supportive for new trends in research. Comments offered by several recent scholars working in a variety of fresh historical, literary, and interdisciplinary projects illustrate how the depth and breath of AAS collections proved indispensable for their research, Sometimes referred to as "the stuff of everyday life." AAS resources not only support new trends in research, but the expansive range of primary documents has enabled the institution to foster a new area of study--the history of the book. An overview of its Program in the History of the Book in American Culture provides examples of the AAS leadership role in this academic discipline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This section offers news briefs related to library service in the U.S. The American Library Association held its annual meeting in San Francisco, California in June 2001. Blackwell's Book Services released Blackwell's Online Bookshop (BOB) in a U.S. version. A report from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) focuses on the economic and logistical issues associated with creating a shared library depository.

The LibQUAL+ survey is a web-based instrument that can be administered annually to enable libraries to determine their users' level of satisfaction with the quality of collections, facilities, and library services. This article examines the Texas Tech University Libraries' LibQUAL+ survey results for 2001 in the area of Access to Collections. The institution's results are compared with average survey scores from 20,416 respondents at 43 institutions, chiefly Association of Research Libraries members. Implications for collection management and ideas for “best practices” investigation are outlined. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]