Library Conversations

This is Volume XII of thirty-two in a collection on Developmental Psychology. Originally published in 1936, this study looks at the conversations of the authors’ own children that were recorded as they grew up. Over time they realised they were unusually rich material for investigation into child- psychology was contained in them, and despite the intimate nature of the material formulated this work.

Creating a Person-Centered Library provides a comprehensive overview of various services, programs, and collaborations to help libraries serve high-needs patrons as well as strategies for supporting staff working with these individuals. While public libraries are struggling to address growing numbers of high-needs patrons experiencing homelessness, food insecurity, mental health problems, substance abuse, and poverty-related needs, this book will help librarians build or contribute to library services that will best address patrons' psychosocial needs. The authors, experienced in both library and social work, begin by providing an overview of patrons' psychosocial needs, structural and societal reasons for the shift in these needs, and how these changes impact libraries and library staff. Chapters focus on best practices for libraries providing person-centered services and share lessons learned, including information about special considerations for certain patron populations that might be served by individual libraries. The book concludes with information about how library organizations can support public library staff. Librarians and library students who are concerned about both patrons and library staff will find the practical advice in this book invaluable.

Authored by cataloging librarians, educators, and information system experts, this book of essays addresses ideas and methods for tackling the modern challenges of cataloging and metadata practices. Library specialists in the cataloging and metadata professions have a greater purpose than simply managing information and connecting users to resources. There is a deeper and more profound impact that comes of their work: preservation of the human record. Conversations with Catalogers in the 21st Century contains four chapters addressing broad categories of issues that catalogers and metadata librarians are currently facing. Every important topic is covered, such as changing metadata practices, standards, data record structures, data platforms, and user expectations, providing both theoretical and practical information. Guidelines for dealing with present challenges are based on fundamentals from the past. Recommendations on training staff, building new information platforms of digital library resources, documenting new cataloging and metadata competencies, and establishing new workflows enable a real-world game plan for improvement.

Cultural institutions must reimagine their roles as education facilities for their communities and address the public need for conversations in safe and fair places, thereby renewing their essential place in democratic society. This book explains how. Open Conversations: Public Learning in Libraries and Museums is a provocative book, one that is designed to offer courage to cultural institution administrators and staff even as it opens their eyes to the possibility that their facilities can offer more than they are. Rather than offering prescriptive answers, the author invites readers to consider museums and libraries in fresh ways. Author David Carr believes professionals in libraries and museums need to think more broadly. He challenges them to address communities, national social change, psychology, and learning, and to think about ways to frame their institutions, not as repositories or research chambers, but as instruments for human thinking. Now is the time for these institutions to recover their integrity and purpose as fundamental, informing structures in a struggling democracy. Based on lectures and previously published writings by the author, and drawing on new scholarship and research, the essays here will inspire professionals to understand their collections and institutions as instruments of personal, social, and cultural change.

This book is based on a series of informative interviews with a number of music librarians working for different leading symphony orchestras and opera companies throughout the world. In these interviews, librarians share with the readers what kind of professional skills, knowledge and personality that are required to supply music to the performers onstage, as well as information to these world-famous performing arts organizations. Interviewees also discuss in details about their professional lives, i.e., including their personal stories and working relationships with various legendary conductors and star soloists, e.g., Claudio Abbado, Simon Rattle, James Levine, Donald Runnicles, Bernard Haitink, Zubin Mehta, Sir Colin Davis, etc. Via the interviewees’ stories, one can also get a glimpse of the different inside operations and the unique management styles behind the backstage of these internationally renowned performing arts organizations. There are fourteen conversations including interviews with the Chief Librarian at the Metropolitan Opera and the Orchestra Librarians at the San Francisco Ballet, the Berlin Philharmonic, and Israel Philharmonic Orchestra.