Why are some countries rich while others are poor? Why are some well governed while others experience frequent conflict? And how do you measure a country's true success anyways? Social scientists have attempted to answer these types of questions for decades, and have increasingly turned to data for this task. Researching Developing Countries: A Data Resource Guide for Social Scientists serves as a reference guide for social scientists and students interested in answering these complex ques...

The field of distributed learning is constantly evolving. Online technology provides instructors with the flexibility to offer meaningful instruction to students who are at a distance or in some cases right on campus, but still unable to be physically present in the classroom. This dynamic environment challenges librarians to monitor, learn, adapt, collaborate, and use new technological advances in order to make the best use of techniques to engage students and improve learning outcomes an...

Data use in the library has specific characteristics and common problems. Data Clean-up and Management addresses these, and provides methods to clean up frequently-occurring data problems using readily-available applications. The authors highlight the importance and methods of data analysis and presentation, and offer guidelines and recommendations for a data quality policy. The book gives step-by-step how-to directions for common dirty data issues. - Focused towards libraries and practici...

Cultural heritage professionals have high levels of training in metadata. However, the institutions in which they practice often depend on support staff, volunteers, and students in order to function. With limited time and funding for training in metadata creation for digital collections, there are often many questions about metadata without a reliable, direct source for answers. The Metadata Manual provides such a resource, answering basic metadata questions that may appear, and exploring...

Elements of Information Organization and Dissemination provides Information on how to organize and disseminate library and information science (LIS), a subject that is taught in many international Library Information Science university programs. While there are many books covering different areas of the subject separately, this book covers the entire subject area and incorporates the latest developments. - Presets an overview of the entire subject, covering all relevant areas of library an...

All libraries have patrons and staff members with disabilities, making equitable service a priority for these organizations as they provide diverse services to their entire communities. Although rapid technological changes in recent years have offered challenges to libraries, these same technologies provide opportunities to embrace the concept of accessible library services and create innovative new services for patrons with disabilities. Accessibility for Persons with Disabilities and the...

Creating Research Infrastructures in the 21st-Century Academic Library: Conceiving, Funding, and Building New Facilities and Staff focuses on research infrastructures, bringing together such topics as research and development in libraries, dataset management, e-science, grants and grant writing, digital scholarship, data management, library as publisher, web archiving, and the research lifecycle. Individual chapters deal with the formation of Research & Development teams; emerging scholarl...

WordPress is not only the most popular blogging software in the world, but it is also a powerful content management system that runss more than 23 percent of all websites. The current version alone has been downloaded almost 20 million times, and the WordPress community has built more than 38,000 plugins to extend and enhance the system. Libraries are using this technology to create community-oriented websites, blogs, subject guides, digital archives, and more. This hands-on, practical boo...

In this book, nine librarians from across the country describe their libraries’ best practices in this key area. Their contributions range from all-encompassing customer service policies and models any library can both adapt and be proud of to micro-approaches that emphasize offering excellent user-focused technology planning, picture book arrangement with patrons in mind, Web 2.0 tools to connect users with the library, establishing good service delivery chains, and making your library fa...

Academic, public, school, and special libraries are all institutions of human rights and social justice, with an increasingly apparent commitment to equality, to ethical principles based on rights and justice, and to programs that meet needs related to human rights and social justice. Key topics at the intersection of information, human rights, social justice, and technology include information access and literacy, digital inclusion, education, and social services, among many others. Edite...

The legal information environment is deep, wide, and dynamic with many participants, including courts, parliaments, legislatures, and administrative bodies. None exemplifies the agile, knowledge-engaging legal player better than the law firm. Current, authoritative information is essential for the successful representation of clients. The firm's most dependable resource for retrieving information is its library staff. Law Firm Librarianship introduces the reader to the challenges, qualific...

As in the second edition of Building Blocks for Planning Functional Library Space, this volume outlines the measures of space needed for the use of equipment and furniture within a library setting. It provides drawings of typical library furniture and equipment along with diagrams of the space required for their use. In addition, this volume also contains a brief text that provides an overview of the planning process, as well as details on several aspects of design and planning.