Rebecca Hedreen reviews, "Review of Collaboration in Libraries and Learning Environments" edited by Maxine Melling and Margaret Weaver. This book is not about librarians collaborating with faculty in online courseware, or even the merging of library and IT desks. This book is a collection of interesting and relevant case studies, many involving what are often called Learning or Information Commons. Not all of them involve libraries, and for many that do, the library is not the focus.
This book, Studying Students: A Second Look, edited by Nancy Fried Foster is a follow-up to a 2007 publication, Studying Students: The Undergraduate Research Project at the University of Rochester that demonstrates once again the benefits of conducting ethnographic studies when designing academic library spaces and services.
Margie Ruppel reviews Charles Wankel's, "Educating Educators with Social Media." While this collection of articles will be useful to any college professor who would like to implement social media applications in their teaching, the collaborative ideas presented here are also of value to librarians wishing to use social media to connect with their patrons or other libraries.
Beth Filar-Williams reviews the program Campus Collaborative Tools Strategy at UC Berkeley. Collaboration tools are becoming popular across campuses. Many institutions are struggling with how to provide support for the multitude of diverse, ever-changing, often open source programs that are frequently used “to fly under the radar”of campus IT protocols. The University of California Berkeley Information Services and Technology (IST) division began to address this issue a few years ago. UC Berkeley recognized the need to create and to support an easy, convenient environment for people on and off campus in which to collaborate on scholarship, teaching, learning, and administrative services.
Christine Baker reviews Brian Mayer and Christopher Harris' book, "Libraries Got Game: Aligned Learning through Modern Board Games." This book is a wonderful resource for both school librarians and classroom teachers. This informative book focuses on incorporating modern board and card games into preschool and K-12 school libraries and classrooms as curriculum-aligned resources that foster student learning.
Patricia Andersen reviews Monty L. McAdoo's, "Building Bridges: Connecting Faculty, Students, and the College Library." Building Bridges gives in-depth, practical advice for librarians, new or not so new to information literacy, with tips on how to both interact with faculty and students to design successful assignments.
Ellen Mackey reviews Princeton history professor David Bell’s article “The Bookless Library” http://www.newrepublic.com/article/books-and-arts/magazine/david-bell-future-bookless-library#, July 12, 2002, accessed July 31, 2012. In this article, the question is asked, “What role will libraries have when patrons no longer need to go to them to consult or borrow books?”
Alison Hicks reviews the article, "Social Networking Tools for Academic Libraries." The authors of this paper, Samuel Kai-Wah Chu and Helen S. Du, investigate the use of social media in academic libraries across the globe.
Rick Stoddart reviews the book, "Without a Net : Librarians Bridging the Digital Divide." In this review, Stoddard states that Jessamyn West "has written a sorely needed primer on the practical issues many libraries may encounter related to the digital divide and their patrons."
In this article, Minna Sellers reviews Mary Somerville’s book, "Working Together: Collaborative Information Practices for Organizational Learning." Adaptability is a key indicator of an organization’s capacity to respond successfully to change. Library organizations are facing enormous pressures to adapt to societal changes in order to remain relevant. This book provides a useful framework for reconstructing library organizations addressing sustainable change through collaborative processes.
Anne Abate reviews the book, "Librarians as Community Partners: An Outreach Handbook." This book, edited by Carol Smallwood, is a collection of essays about library outreach programs and includes contributions from public, academic, school, and special libraries across the United States. Each of the thirty-six essays describes a specific program implemented to increase awareness of the library and services offered, the steps taken to bring it to fruition, and the benefits to the library and community.
Megan Tomeo reviews the book, "Library Mashups: Exploring New Ways to Deliver Library Data." Editor, Nichole Engard offers a compilation of successful mashups from a variety of libraries including Yale University, Temple University, and Manchester City Library as well as companies such as LibLime. Mashups are web applications that use free and/or fee data (images, citation information, maps, etc.)—perhaps even several sets of data—and combine them to create new content.
Martha E. Hardy reviews "Connect, Collaborate, and Communicate : A Report from the Value of Academic Libraries Summits." This report prepared by Karen Brown and Kara J. Malenfant, highlights the crucial importance of demonstrating and communicating the value of academic libraries and their impact on student learning, plus recommendations for action.
Dorothea Salo reviews "Managing Research Data" edited by Graham Pryor. This volume aims at providing a high-level snapshot of the current state of the art in research-data policy, planning, management, and preservation. While few readers will find occasion to read every piece included, almost everyone in research libraries will find one or more articles of considerable interest.
Joel Shields reviews Laura Solomon's book, "Doing Social Media So It Matters: A Librarian’s Guide." Shields states, "One of the dangers of writing a topical book on the fast-moving trends of the Internet and in particular, social media is becoming irrelevant before reaching publication. A popular social network of today may become outdated in six months or a new way of communicating may change the paradigm of how we think about social interaction on digital devices. Laura Solomon’s Doing Social Media So It Matters: A Librarian’s Guide approaches this topic head-on and acts as an instructional guide through the perils of successfully implementing a social media strategy within a library setting."
Laura Barnes reviews social bookmarking sites. Social bookmarking tools allow users to store, manage, search, organize, and share their bookmarks online and access them from anywhere.
Su Eckhard reviews John D. Volkman's book, "Collaborative Library Research Projects: Inquiry that Stimulates the Senses." Whether you are a fledgling or experienced teacher-librarian (school library media specialist) with or without teaching experience, this book might be helpful for you. Volkman has included everything you want to know and use to jump-start your school library program.
Barbara Pope reviews "Academic Library Outreach: Beyond the Campus Walls." This collection of essays, written by academic librarians, explores academic library outreach from several different perspectives.
Alison Hicks reviews the May 2009 issue of the journal "Library Technology Reports" (volume 45, issue 4). This special edition, “Collaboration 2.0” aims to inform library managers about potential tools in order to encourage collaborative work among staff in the library. To this end, it provides simple, easy to read introductions for several web 2.0 tools, including cloud computing and groupware, as well as the more traditional blogs, wikis, and social networking.
Christine Baker reviews, "The Anywhere Library: A Primer for the Mobile Web." The book co-authored by three public services librarians, Courtney Greene, Missy Roser, and Elizabeth Ruane, who experienced the process of creating a mobile site for their own library. The experience prompted them to write this book with the intent of providing a useful framework for other librarians who are considering entering the mobile web arena.
Ann L. O’Neill reviews, "Interdisciplinarity and Academic Libraries." This book examines the definition of interdisciplinarity and the related terms of multidisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity and cross-disciplinarity and how these can, and have, affected the work in academic libraries. The ten essays range from definitions and history of interdisciplinarity to the work implications in specific areas of today’s academic libraries.
Carol Krismann reviews Morten T. Hansen's book, "Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid the Traps, Create Unity, and Reap Big Results." The book focuses on collaborations within companies and organizations. However, some of the ideas can be used for collaborating with outside organizations. Based on the author’s fifteen years of research, it is a scholarly book with a practical orientation offering guidelines on collaboration that improves the organization and its goals.
Jimena Sagàs reviews Joron Pihl's article, "Can Library Use Enhance Intercultural Education?" This paper places the library in the spotlight as a potential resource to address the challenging issue of providing a quality education for students regardless of social, linguistic and cultural background.
Megan Welsh reviews Voyant Tools. Voyant Tools (http://voyant-tools.org/), a text analysis tool through which the written word can be understood in new ways. Voyant Tools is a free, versatile suite of web-based, text analysis and visualization tools.