"Examines the academic library's position as a culturally and historically situated producer and curator of knowledge and its instrumental role in driving social reproduction and the status quo"--

Academic librarians working in instruction are at the crux of professional, higher educational, and societal change. While they work with disciplinary faculty to ensure learners are critical information consumers and producers in 21st century ways, how do academic librarians develop a sense of their own identities as post-secondary instructors? Using both broad and in-depth data from practicing instruction librarians, this book identifies the catalysts and influences in academic librarians’ perspective development process. From these factors, then, instruction librarians and librarians-to-be can hone their own instructional identities and transform their teaching practices. This focus on understanding this perspective transformation process around instructional identities offers both working academic librarians and LIS graduate students an innovative way to think about their roles as educators. While many books explore the practical or how-to aspects of teaching in libraries, Transforming Academic Librarianship: How to Hone Your Instructional Identity and Adopt Best Teaching Practice takes a step up and examines how academic librarians think about or approach instruction as a part of their work. Through explicating this metacognitive process, this book helps both academic librarians and librarians-to-be to more intentionally consider their teaching practices and professional identities.

A must-read for progressive librarians everywhere, Our Enduring Values will help you to define your role in the library of the future.

"The Changing Academic Library is a revision of Budd's The Academic Library: Its Context, Its Purpose, and Its Operation. This book has been completely updated and revised to reflect the dynamic states of higher education and academic libraries. It presents a critical examination of major issues facing colleges and universities and the unique challenges that their libraries must come to grips with. Current practice is reviewed, but it is examined in the broader context of educational needs, scholarly communication, politics and economics, technology, and the nature of complex organizations."--Publisher's description.

This book offers a timely mix of thought-provoking chapters bringing together national and global studies on critical librarianship, and conveying the kind of research which current library managers and researchers need, mixing theory with a good dose of pragmatism.

This book advances the belief that the library--more than any other cultural institution--collects, curates and distributes the results of human thought. Essays broaden the debate about academic libraries beyond only professional circles, promoting the library as a vital resource for the whole of higher education. Topics range from library histories to explorations of changing media. Essayists connect modern libraries to the remarkable dream of Alexandria's ancient library--facilitating groundbreaking research in every imaginable field of human interest, past, present and future. Academic librarians who are most familiar with historical traditions are best qualified to promote the library as an important aspect of teaching and learning, as well as to develop resources that will enlighten future generations of readers. The intellectual tools for compelling, constructive conversation come from the narrative of the library in its many iterations, from the largest research university to the smallest liberal arts or community college.

Although they may not have always been explicitly stated, library work has always had normative goals. Until recently, such goals have largely been abstract; they are things like knowledge creation, education, forwarding science, preserving history, supporting democracy, and safeguarding civilization. The modern spirit of social and cultural critique, however, has focused our attention on the concrete, material relationships that determine human potentiality and opportunity, and library workers are increasingly seeing the institution of the library, as well as library work, as embedded in a web of relations that extends beyond the library's traditional sphere of influence. In light of this critical consciousness, more and more library and information science professionals are coming to see themselves as change agents and front-line advocates of social justice issues. This book will serve as a guide for those library workers and related information professionals that disregard traditional ideas of "library neutrality" and static, idealized conceptions of Western culture. The book will work as an entry point for those just forming a consciousness oriented towards social justice work and will be also be of value to more experienced "transformative library workers" as an up-to-date supplement to their praxis. - Justifies the use of a variety of theoretical and practical resources for effecting positive change - Explores the role of the librarian as change agents