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...

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...

This book reviews the role of information literacy (IL) in developing employability skills, personal health management and informal learning from a variety of areas including: information policy issues, information usage and training needs and skills development. Early years education, lifelong learning and the role of IL in relevant organisations, including government departments, skills agencies, and professional bodies will also be considered. With a UK focus, this book also considers t...

Have you ever looked at your Library's key performance indicators and said to yourself "so what!"? Have you found yourself making decisions in a void due to the lack of useful and easily accessible operational data? Have you ever worried that you are being left behind with the emergence of data analytics? Do you feel there are important stories in your operational data that need to be told, but you have no idea how to find these stories? If you answered yes to any of these questions, then ...

In the last two decades, advancement in technology has transformed every aspect of librarianship. Law Librarianship in Academic Law Libraries discusses issues and model practices in academic law libraries. This text will help librarians and library school students understand the operation, resources and facilities that are available in the academic law library. It explains the practices and trends that are widely practiced in different parts of the world. This book describes the expectatio...

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...

Are academic branch libraries going to be extinct in the near future? In these difficult economic times, when collections are digitized rapidly, is there still a need for a separate unit within proximity to the department, school, or college with a subject-based or subject-specific collection? Academic Branch Libraries in Changing Times gives a brief historical overview of the role of a branch academic library. It reviews the current situation from a practitioner's point of view and sugges...

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...

This enlightening new book in the Practical Guides for Librarians series presents the practicalities of developing, implementing, and evaluating use-driven acquisition (UDA) in academic and special libraries, from the multi-dimensional perspectives of collections, acquisitions, and e-resources. Now that UDA is a proven method of collection management being utilized by an array of libraries around the globe, the need for a straightforward, uncomplicated guidebook is more essential than ever...

Preservation involves a complex of activities including climate, air-quality, and surface control, as well as microbiological control, which is a key part of preserving and protecting library collections. The Preservation and Protection of Library Collections examines microbiological control for preservation of library and archival collections. A supporting tool for conservators, this title should be integrated into conservation and preservation policy. The book comprises nine sections tha...

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...

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...