The Image and Role of the Librarian addresses all aspects of professional identity for librarians, including professional roles, cultural images, popular perceptions, and future trends. The book examines historical representations, stereotypes, and popular culture icons and the role each plays in the relationship between librarian and patron. The book also looks at the profound impact the Internet has had on the services librarians provide and how electronic resources have transformed the roles and responsibilities of librarians.

The Image and Role of the Librarian addresses all aspects of professional identity for librarians, including professional roles, cultural images, popular perceptions, and future trends. The book examines historical representations, stereotypes, and popular culture icons and the role each plays in the relationship between librarian and patron. The book also looks at the profound impact the Internet has had on the services librarians provide and how electronic resources have transformed the roles and responsibilities of librarians.

Libraries today are more important than ever. More than just book repositories, libraries can become bulwarks against some of the most crucial challenges of our age: unequal access to education, jobs, and information. In BiblioTech, educator and technology expert John Palfrey argues that anyone seeking to participate in the 21st century needs to understand how to find and use the vast stores of information available online. And libraries, which play a crucial role in making these skills and information available, are at risk. In order to survive our rapidly modernizing world and dwindling government funding, libraries must make the transition to a digital future as soon as possible -- by digitizing print material and ensuring that born-digital material is publicly available online. Not all of these changes will be easy for libraries to implement. But as Palfrey boldly argues, these modifications are vital if we hope to save libraries and, through them, the American democratic ideal.

This book will give you an understanding of how images fit into your critical practice and how you can advance student learning with your own visual literacy. The importance of images and visual media in today's culture is changing what it means to be literate in the 21st century. Digital technologies have made it possible for almost anyone to create and share visual media. Yet the pervasiveness of images and visual media does not necessarily mean that individuals are able to critically view, use, and produce visual content. This book provides you with the tools, strategies, and confidence to apply visual literacy in a library context. You will learn ways to develop students' visual literacy and how to use visual materials to make your own teaching more engaging. Ideal for the busy librarian who needs ideas, activities, and teaching strategies that are ready to implement, this book shows how to challenge students to delve into finding images, using images in the research process, interpreting and analysing images, creating visual communications, and using visual content ethically provides ready-to-use learning activities for engaging critically with visual materials offers tools and techniques for increasing one's own visual literacy confidence gives strategies for integrating, engaging with and advocating for visual literacy in libraries. With this book's guidance, you can help students master visual literacy, a key competency in today's media-saturated world, while also enlivening your teaching with visual materials. Visual Literacy for Libraries will be essential reading for librarians, information professionals and managers in all sectors, students of library and information science, school and higher education teachers and researchers.

From its earliest days to the present, the onscreen image of the librarian has remained largely the same. A silent 1921 film set the precedent for two female librarian characters: a dowdy spinster wears glasses and a bun hairstyle, and an attractive young woman is overworked and underpaid. Silent films, however, employed a variety of characteristics for librarians, showed them at work on many different tasks, and featured them in a range of dramatic, romantic, and comedic situations. The sound era (during which librarians appeared in more than 200 films) frequently exaggerated these characteristics and situations, strongly influencing the general image of librarians. This chronologically arranged work analyzes the stereotypical image of librarians, male and female, in primarily American and British motion pictures from the silent era to the 21st century. The work briefly describes each film, offering some critical commentary, and then examines its librarian, considering every aspect of the total character from socio-economic conditions and motivations for leaving or not leaving the library, to personal attributes (such as clothing, hair, and age) and entanglements with the opposite sex, to commonly used props, plot situations and lines ("Shush!"). The work comments on whether librarians and library work are depicted accurately and analyzes the development of the public's image of a librarian. The accompanying filmography lists librarian characters and notes stereotypes such as buns and eyeglasses. With bibliography and index.