Reference Skills For The School Library Media Specialist

Designed for courses that prepare LIS students for school librarianship, this title teaches basic reference processes, sources, services, and skills and provides authentic school library reference scenarios and exercises. This fourth edition of Reference Skills for the School Librarian: Tools and Tips acknowledges the vital importance of reference skills in school libraries. It focuses on new reference skills for school librarians and includes more online materials such as Webliographies and a glossary. Teaching reference skills and providing reference services to students and staff in schools are extremely important tasks and are required of librarians on a regular basis. Aimed at pre-service and in-service school librarians, this book covers all types of reference materials including almanacs, dictionaries, encyclopedias, atlases, and other standard information sources, giving extra emphasis to the online sources to which students increasingly turn. This edition addresses more online reference resources than previous editions and offers practical suggestions for use in K–12 student instruction.

Explains the fundamentals of reference services and provides suggestions, examples, and scenarios to help train prospective school library media specialists.

Explains the fundamentals of reference services and provides suggestions, examples, and scenarios to help train prospective school library media specialists.

This book is designed for courses that prepare college and university students for undergraduate or graduate degrees in school library media. It is also written as a helpful instructional manual or guidebook for practicing school library media specialists. The overall goal of this textbook is to teach library media specialists what information literacy looks like—in general, in the school, in the classroom, in your mind, in life, and in motion. Helpful scenarios and extensive annotated resources are included.

School library media specialists are now considered part of the teaching staff and are charged with integrating their library and information skills curriculum with the more general classroom curriculum. At the same time more and more special needs students are part of every school and every classroom. Thus, the media specialist must work effectively with special needs students on a regular basis to develop their information skills, and must also serve as a resource to classroom teachers. This professional reference offers practical information to school library media specialists on how to serve special needs students and their classroom teachers effectively. The first part of the book highlights the teaching role of the media specialist and discusses how and what to teach special needs students. The second part views the media specialist as an information expert who must structure the library and its resources for students with special needs. The third section treats the media specialist's role as a professional who must collaborate with other teachers.

This collection of case studies emphasizes practical management techniques designed to be used by library media specialists in elementary, middle and high school settings.

This resource encompasses terminology and techniques, research processes and models, selection, organization, evaluation and maintenance of reference sources and more.