American Library Association Journals
Not a member yet
5478 research outputs found
Sort by
Nurturing Little Bodies and Brains: Supporting Brain Development, Learning, and Health for Families
No full textThe first years of a child’s life are crucial for brain development—more so than any other time in their life. From the moment they enter this world, the clock starts on the critical period of cognitive, emotional, and physical development. The quantity and quality of experiences during this time have a lasting impact on a child’s ability to learn and succeed in school and life. This is supported by decades of research that emphasize the significance of these positive learning experiences.During the years from birth to age five a child’s brain goes through a significant amount of growth. All of this occurs before kindergarten, with a newborn’s brain doubling in size within the first year and reaching 80 percent of its potential size by age three. Time keeps ticking as the brain connects to long-term learning, adaptability, emotional intelligence, and school readiness. This is where the brain has the potential to create millions of synapses. While genes play a role in determining a brain’s potential and processing capacity, a child’s healthy development and the strength of their synaptic connections depend on healthy and caring relationships. However, an absence of caring relationships, limited access to quality healthcare, and a lack of early learning experiences can have a negative impact on a child’s lifelong health and learning, resulting in long-term effects on their preparation for formal learning environments
Censorship in Florida: How House Bill 1467 Harms Students and Staff
No full textSchool systems across the United States are being inundated with claims of inappropriate materials in the classroom, causing an uptick in challenged and banned books. Hiding behind the concept of parental rights in education, Florida has enacted one of the strongest laws, wherein school librarians will be forced to close their libraries, comb through the materials, and assess each title for its suitability. Should any library materials circulated be construed as harmful to minors, staff can face felony charges, forcing librarians to create homogenous collections to avoid controversy. In this paper, I intend to show how these stringent strictures lay an undue burden upon staff and the restrictions laid upon students will diminish their educational endeavors. Through first-hand testimonies, the development of legal precedence, and the rise of grassroots efforts to stave off these restrictions, I will demonstrate how Florida’s politicians have exceeded their role as lawmakers by cowing to special interest groups with an agenda to quell materials that do not meet their conservative worldview
Banning Self-Empowerment: A Case Study on Distribution of a Creative Writing Guide to Incarcerated Persons in the US
No full textThe Sentences that Create Us: Crafting a Writer’s Life in Prison is a creative writing published by Haymarket Books in early 2022 and through a grant from the Mellon Foundation, 75,000 free copies will be distributed to incarcerated people and prison-based writing programs. By mailing Sentences directly and without cost to incarcerated folx that request it, PEN America’s Prison and Justice Writing Program hoped to provide current information on publishing, best practices on developing a writing practice and support and encouragement to either initiate writing as a practice or to refine and try to publish writing. However, the distribution of the book has also highlighted the ways in which state Department of Corrections (DOC) or the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) actively seek to suppress the dissemination of self-empowering knowledge. Due to these myriad and diverse methods of censorship, delivery of The Sentences that Create Us has been hampered and many people who have requested the book have been denied the ability to read it and therefore cultivate a writer’s life inside. This article details the most major challenges to distribution of the book, which have been a statewide ban based on the book’s contents in Florida as well as a ban on distribution in Michigan because Haymarket Books was not included in the state Department of Correction’s approved list of vendors. These instances demonstrate the numerous ways carceral systems infringe on free expression, first amendment rights, and due process rights of incarcerated people. The article ends with suggestions for a multi-tiered strategy to combat the underlying logic that justifies these practices including empowering incarcerated people to challenge censorship, public awareness campaigns as well as litigation
Get to Know … Ben Aldred
No full textBen Aldred, GODORT’s immediate past chair, has many personas: folklorist, Phillies fan, novelist, role-playing game enthusiast, musician, and, of course, government information librarian. “I am the quintessential accidental gov docs librarian,” Ben, who uses they/them pronouns, explained. “I had gone back to library school because I’d gotten a PhD but there weren’t a lot of job opportunities at the time in 2009.” Needing one more class to graduate, they took the government information course. Luckily, a position as social sciences and government information librarian at Loyola University Chicago opened up when they graduated. “I started doing that and never looked back,” they said. In 2017 they moved to the University of Illinois at Chicago, where they are an associate professor and reference librarian, the FDLP coordinator and maps librarian, and the liaison to the College of Urban Planning and Public Administration and the Jane Addams College of Social Work
From the Chair
No full textI’m writing this having just returned from LibLearnX in Baltimore, a week after the GODORT Virtual Midwinter Meetings, and have been feeling reflective on the value of relationships developed through GODORT and ALA. Professional friendships are distinct from other types of friendships, what brings you together is a complicated combination, one part shared sense of purpose, one part co-mentorship, one part venting about the same struggles, one part excitement over career developments and just a dash of shared work humor
Book Review: The Complete Guide to Open Scholarship
No full textVictoria Martin’s The Complete Guide to Open Scholarship is a timely book. The United States recently celebrated 2023 as the “Year of Open Science.” Institutions continue to adjust to changing expectations since the onset of COVID-19. Increases in remote work, hybrid classes, and general societal and economic challenges in the past few years have spurred greater interest in ease of access to materials. People want to be able to access content with little fuss from wherever they are. The open scholarship movement facilitates those desires. This book provides a brief overview of that movement
Accessibility Initiatives for Technical Services: Adding Braille Textbooks in an Academic Library
No full textWith an ongoing focus on accessibility and usability, many academic libraries have developed new ways to improve services for students with disabilities. Library technical services departments contribute to the accessibility of library resources through materials selection, cataloging, and the acquisition of assistive technologies. Library partnerships with an institution’s office of disability services have also proven particularly effective and can help libraries to better identify potential barriers to accessibility and find workable solutions. For students with visual impairments, screen readers, magnifiers, voice recognition software, and braille texts are some of the methods that libraries can use to improve accessibility. This paper offers a case study of the collaboration between the Office of Disability Resources for Students and the University Libraries at the University of Memphis to make a discrete collection of braille textbooks more widely available to students, including the collection management considerations, system configurations, and cataloging procedures that went into the process. This case study provides a simple and cost-efficient example of how libraries can improve services for users with visual impairments that readers will find easy to implement in their own libraries
Bifurcation of Semi-Automated Subject Indexing Services
No full textSemi-automated subject indexing methods use attributes from metadata descriptions as training data. A survey to shape inclusion of metadata attributes that align a machine learning model within a contextual linguistic domain generated the initial genre targets for experimentation. The second part of this study then tested the genre attributes from the survey. These bifurcations (or branching points) served as the basis for machine learning model development and evaluation. The machine learning models in semi-automated indexing systems are the drivers of the automated subject outputs. The initial results of this multipart experiment indicate that measures of the mean precision and recall (the F1 metric) improved for several—but not all—types of genres that were of interest to knowledge workers
Librarians Discuss Textbook Affordability as an Equity Issue
No full textLibrarians working in academic settings have taken different stances on providing access to materials assigned in courses. Although libraries have long offered course reserves, adding course-assigned materials to permanent library collections has been discouraged for a variety of reasons. A number of events and considerations—including COVID-19 campus shutdowns, growing online degree programs, increased support for student success, availability of open educational resources (OER), and new e-books licensing models that support multiple users—have made library provisioning of assigned materials, commonly referred to as textbooks, more mainstream. Despite differences in their scope, approach, and workflows, many library-led textbook affordability programs share the common goal of promoting equity
Text Mining Bibliographic Metadata for Inclusivity: Analyzing Most Frequent Words in Titles, Summaries, and Subjects
No full textAcademic libraries have embraced diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) principles as core tenets for serving their users. Many of these libraries have undertaken a diversity audit of their collections, evaluating content as well as authorship and amending acquisition processes to increase representation of historically marginalized groups. Techniques used in an audit can include comparison to bibliographies and peer institutions, but few libraries have used text mining of bibliographic metadata to uncover the inclusivity of their collections. This article describes one such study, performed at Raritan Valley Community College, to determine whether language displayed in the title, summary, and subject fields was inclusive and welcoming to library users. Prompted by a new functionality available for WorldCat Discovery that would allow for local updates to problematic subject headings, the process involved uploading MARC metadata to Voyant Tools to learn the most frequent terms in each bibliographic field. Results demonstrated that while the metadata includes welcoming language, improvements could be made by updating subject headings, deaccessioning outdated titles, and educating users in navigating the library catalog