Arrowhead Library System (ALS) has a long-standing commitment to maintaining a collection of current publication titles of interest to librarians, library staff and library trustees. The collection is housed at the ALS Headquarters in Mountain Iron, but all titles can be requested via the online catalog (if you have a borrower’s card from an ALS library) or via the statewide MNLINK catalog (if you have a borrower’s card from Duluth Public Library). If you have questions about borrowing titles from the ALS Professional Collection, feel free to call ALS staff! Here are the latest additions to the ALS collection:
Elevating the School Library: Building Positive Perceptions through Brand Behavior
Susan D. Ballard & Sara Kelly Johns
ALA Editions/AASL, 2024
025.1 BAL 2024
Branding isn’t just for companies and celebrities. Your school library is a brand too, and this book will show you how powerful the concept of branding can be. You will learn how to use it as a tool for articulating the value and importance of the school library while also better defining and delineating to stakeholders who school librarians are and why having a school librarian matters. Complete with a list of guiding questions at the end of each chapter to help you put its concepts into practice, this book
- includes templates, checklists, and worksheets to assist you in undertaking school library branding, a rebrand, or a brand rehabilitation;
- offers concrete guidance and techniques for engaging effectively with your community by creating a strategic communications plan;
- walks you through incorporating the use of data and community demographics analysis to improve your practice and thus increase positive perceptions of the impact of your work;
- shows how to use existing AASL personas as well as how to develop additional learner personas (such as trauma-sensitive, special groups and non-users) through a brand audit;
- presents a focused exploration of brand behavior, emphasizing the impact, influence, and integrity of brand credibility;
- analyzes the work of Jim Collins (Good to Great), John Kotter (Our Iceberg is Melting), and others to shed light on the importance of the “business” aspects of the school library; and
- spotlights successful and unsuccessful examples of branding from the realm of both business and libraries, connecting them to the AASL Standards.
Data-Driven Decisions: A Practical Toolkit for Library and Information Professionals
Amy Stubbing
Facet Publishing, 2022
025.1 STU 2022
This jargon-free guide walks readers step-by-step through each stage of implementing, reviewing, and embedding data driven decisions in their organization, providing accessible visualizations, top tips, and downloadable tools to support readers on their data journey. Starting with the absolute basics of using data, Stubbing creates a framework for building skills and knowledge slowly until the reader is comfortable with even complex uses of data. She discusses the impact of the current financial climate on resources, theoretical foundations of data collection and analysis, and how this book can be used in practice. The next section takes readers through the data driven decisions model, providing the guidance for understanding and implementing the model. Finally, the book provides further perspectives and reading surrounding analysis and implementation of data driven decisions.
On Censorship: A Public Librarian Examines Cancel Culture in the US
James LaRue
Fulcrum Publishing, 2023
025.2 LAR 2023
In America today, more books are being banned than ever before. This censorship is part of a larger assault on such American institutions as schools, public libraries, and universities. In On Censorship: A Public Librarian Examines Cancel Culture in the US, respected long-time public librarian James LaRue issues a balanced and reasonable call to action for all citizens. LaRue, who served as director of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom and executive director of the Freedom to Read Foundation, highlights the dangers of book banning and censorship in our public and educational spaces. Synthesizing his more than twenty-five years of experience on the front lines of these issues, he takes the reader through attempts he encountered to remove or restrict access to ideas, while placing the debate in the greater context about the role of libraries and free expression in a democratic society.
Curate (Shared Foundations Series)
Daniella LaShaun Smith & Len Bryan
ALA Editions/AASL, 2024
025.2 SMI 2024
Moving the school library profession far beyond traditional collection development, Curate helps to connect learners to resources in more thoughtful, meaningful ways. Through teaching learners and other educators to curate—to overcome their own biases to find, organize, and share the best information—school librarians build connections between learners, knowledge, and the world. This practical guide features
- an examination of school library policy placing Curate in context;
- field notes from practicing school librarians implementing the Curate Shared Foundation;
- learning trajectories in grade-level bands, offering examples of Curate in action and ways to scaffold learning;
- a sample alignment of Curate Competencies in the AASL Standards Framework for Learners with the Common Core State Standards;
- lesson starters, case studies, and best practices that demonstrate inspiring and effective strategies; and
- questions to promote engagement with reflective practice.
From Cataloguing to Metadata Creation: A Cultural and Methodological Introduction
Mauro Guerrini
Facet Publishing, 2023
025.3 GUE 2023
Cataloging has always produced a catalog, while the creation of metadata has produced the metadata of given resources. However, in this digital age, the two are more connected than ever. A catalog is made up of metadata that can be searched, identified, structured, and selected. This then means the metadata creation process is adopted as a part of cataloguing. Guerrini’s book is a cultural and methodological introduction to the evolution of cataloging towards metadata creation process in the digital era. It is a journey through the founding principles and the objectives of the “information organization” service that libraries offer. The book aims to outline the new library context, highlighting continuities and innovations compared to traditional cataloging and intends to trace the path from traditional cataloging to the new metadata creation process.
The Librarian’s Guide to Learning Theory: Practical Applications in Library Settings
Ann Medaille
ALA Editions, 2024
025.5 MED 2024
From makerspaces to book clubs, from media facilities to group study spaces, from special events to book displays, libraries support learning in numerous ways. In this accessible handbook, Medaille unchains the field of learning theory from its verbose and dense underpinnings to show how libraries can use its concepts and principles to better serve the needs of their users. Readers will discover
- concrete ways to improve library instruction, spaces, services, resources, and technologies;
- succinct overviews of major learning theories drawn from the fields of psychology, education, philosophy, and anthropology, among others;
- summaries of the most relevant aspects of each theory and instructional methods, showing how the various theories interact and support each other;
- chapters organized into 14 learning topics, including motivation, self-regulation, collaboration, and inquiry;
- discussion of a range of instruction situations from information literacy instruction to the teaching of maker or media skills; and
- teaching librarian’s tips, reflection questions, and suggestions for further reading at the end of each chapter.
The Social Future of Academic Libraries: New Perspectives on Communities, Networks, and Engagement
Tim Schlak, Sheila Corrall, and Paul J. Bracke
Facet Publishing, 2022
027.7 SOC 2022
The current focus in higher education on student engagement, holistic education, social responsibility, and community partnerships demands a significant mindshift for academic libraries to reclaim their place at the heart of academic institutions that are reinventing themselves as social enterprises. The professional response to social trends in the academy and society includes moves such as converged services, embedded librarians, relationship management, inside-out libraries, and design thinking. But such work is often confined to small parts of the library and has not created the large-scale change in strategy and culture required to turn libraries into dynamic social organizations in the connected digital world. Incremental enhancement of services, spaces and structures is not enough. The present context calls for radical rethinking of library mission and service philosophy to realign resources, processes, and practices to institutional needs. New ways of working must be guided by new ways of thinking that empower librarians to view practices holistically through a social lens. Intellectual and social capital theories offer new perspectives on library work and a proven conceptual framework for the reset needed to keep academic libraries relevant in the 21st century.
The Social Future of Academic Libraries starts with the developments in thinking and practice that constitute the “social turn” in communities, professions, the economy, the academy, and libraries, while also introducing the core concepts of intellectual and social capital and networks. Part II presents nine case studies illustrating how social capital perspectives and social network theory can facilitate organizational learning, service development, and collaborative relationships across different areas of library practice. Examples cover collection development, data services, information literacy, liaison librarians, library fundraising, service design, space utilization, subject specialists, and student success. The volume is accompanied by a keyword guide to the concepts, theories, and models referenced in the text via two downloadable glossaries with related bibliographies to inform current reading and future work.
Foundations of Information Literacy
Natalie Greene Taylor & Paul T. Jaeger
ALA Neal-Schuman, 2022
028.7 TAY 2022
It’s not hyperbole to conclude that in today’s world, information literacy is essential for survival and success; and also that, if left unchecked, the social consequences of widespread misinformation and information illiteracy will only continue to grow more dire. Thus its study must be at the core of every education. But while many books have been written on information literacy, this text is the first to examine information literacy from a cross-national, cross-cultural, and cross-institutional perspective. From this book, readers will
- learn about information literacy in a wide variety of contexts, including academic and school libraries, public libraries, special libraries, and archives, through research and literature that has previously been siloed in specialized publications;
- come to understand why information literacy is not just an issue of information and technology, but also a broader community and societal issue;
- get an historical overview of advertising, propaganda, disinformation, misinformation, and illiteracy;
- gain knowledge of both applied strategies for working with individuals and for addressing the issues in community contexts;
- find methods for combating urgent societal ills caused and exacerbated by misinformation; and
- get tools and techniques for advocacy, activism, and self-reflection throughout one’s career.
Practicing Privacy Literacy in Academic Libraries: Theories, Methods, and Cases
Edited by Sarah Hartman-Caverly & Alexandria Chisholm
Association of College and Research Libraries, 2023
174.9092 PRA 2023
Privacy is not dead: Students care deeply about their privacy and the rights it safeguards. They need a way to articulate their concerns and guidance on how to act within the complexity of our current information ecosystem and culture of surveillance capitalism. Practicing Privacy Literacy in Academic Libraries: Theories, Methods, and Cases can help you teach privacy literacy, evolve the privacy practices at your institution, and re-center the individuals behind the data and the ethics behind library work. Divided into four sections:
- What is Privacy Literacy?
- Protecting Privacy
- Educating about Privacy
- Advocating for Privacy
Chapters cover topics including privacy literacy frameworks; digital wellness; embedding a privacy review into digital library workflows; using privacy literacy to challenge price discrimination; privacy pedagogy; and promoting privacy literacy and positive digital citizenship through credit-bearing courses, co-curricular partnerships, and faculty development and continuing education initiatives. Practicing Privacy Literacy in Academic Libraries provides theory-informed, practical ways to incorporate privacy literacy into library instruction and other areas of academic library practice.
