New Books in Library Science

From airport bookstores to deckchairs, as audiobooks downloaded by commuters, and on Kindles and other portable devices, twenty-first century bestsellers move in old and new ways. In Space, Place, and Bestsellers: Moving Books (Cambridge University Press Elements in Publishing and Book Culture series, 2024), Lisa Fletcher and Elizabeth Leane examine the locations and mobilities of the contemporary bestseller as a multi-format commercial object. It employs paratextual, textual, and site-based analysis of the spatiality of bestsellers and considers the centrality of geography to the commercial promise of these books. Space, Place, and Bestsellers provides analysis of the spatial logic of bestseller lists, evidence-rich accounts of the physical and digital retail sites through which bestsellers flow, and new interpretations of how affixing the label 'bestseller' individual authors and titles generates industrial, social, and textual effects. Through its multi-layered analysis, this book offers a new model for studying the spatiality of popular fiction. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Museums, Archives and Protest Memory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), Red Chidgey and Joanne Garde-Hansen address the emergence of ‘protest memory’ as a powerful contemporary shaper of ideas and practices in culture, media and heritage domains. Directly focused on the role of museum and archive practitioners in protest memory curation, they make a compelling contribution to our understanding of how social movements and activist experiences are publicly remembered and activated for social and environmental justice.Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Fate Unknown: Tracing the Missing after World War II and the Holocaust (Oxford University Press, 2023), Dan Stone tells the story of the last great unknown archive of Nazism, the International Tracing Service. Set up by the Allies at the end of World War II, the ITS has worked until today to find missing persons and to aid survivors with restitution claims or to reunite them with loved ones. From retracing the steps of the 'death marches' with the aim of discovering the burial sites of those murdered across the towns and villages of Central Europe, to knocking on doors of German foster homes to find the children of forced laborers, Fate Unknown uncovers the history of this remarkable archive and its more than 30 million documents. Under the leadership of the International Committee of the Red Cross, the tracing service became one of the most secretive of postwar institutions, unknown even to historians of the period. Delving deeply into the archival material, Stone examines the little-known sub-camps and, after the war, survivors' experience of displaced persons' camps, bringing to life remarkable stories of tracing. Fate Unknown combs the archives to reveal the real horror of the Holocaust by following survivors' horrific journeys through the Nazi camp system and its aftermath. The postwar period was an age of shortage of resources, bitterness, and revenge. Yet the ITS tells a different story: of international collaboration, of commitment to justice, and of helping survivors and their relatives in the context of Cold War suspicion. These stories speak to a remarkable attempt by the ITS, before the Holocaust was a matter of worldwide interest, to carry out a program of ethical repair and to counteract some of the worst effects of the Nazis' crimes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Indigenous Materials in Libraries and the Curriculum: Latin American and Latinx Sources (Routledge, 2024), Javier Muñoz-Díaz, Kathia Ibacache, and Leila Gómez argue for a decolonial engagement with Indigenous peoples’ creative work to build awareness of divergent epistemologies and foster healing in the learning community.This interview discusses how faculty and librarians can collaborate to develop inclusive library collections and curricula by supporting Indigenous peoples’ reclamation of lands and languages. In their book, the authors present practices to build and disseminate collections that showcase the work of Indigenous creators from Latin America and compensate for historical erasure and misrepresentation. Consideration is also given to developing a non-hegemonic curriculum in Indigenous languages and cultures for faculty and students from multicultural backgrounds, particularly Latinx students of Indigenous descent. Above all, the book aspires to facilitate the participation of Indigenous peoples in the scholarly conversation to counteract epistemic and material extractivism and transform the scaffolding of higher education in the current global climate crisis. Indigenous Materials in Libraries and the Curriculum is inspired by a transhemispheric vision to elicit conversation between Indigenous peoples from Latin America (Abiayala) and North America (Turtle Island). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Creating a Person-Centered Library: Best Practices for Supporting High-Needs Patrons (Bloomsbury, 2023) 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. Beth Wahler and Sarah C. Johnson, 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.NBN can get 20% off Creating a Person-Centered Library by using the discount code NBN20 on the Blooomsbury.com US website.Beth Wahler, PhD, MSW is founder and principal consultant at Beth Wahler Consulting, LLC and affiliated research faculty and previous director of the School of Social Work at the University of North Carolina- Charlotte. Dr. Wahler is a social work consultant, researcher, and experienced administrator whose primary focus is trauma-informed librarianship, library strategies for addressing patrons’ or community psychosocial needs, supporting library staff with serving high-needs patrons and reducing work-related stress/trauma, and various kinds of collaborations, services, and programs to meet patron, staff, or community needs. She has also published and presented internationally on library patron and staff needs, trauma-informed librarianship, and library/social work collaborations. Sarah C. Johnson, MLIS, LMSW, is an Adjunct Lecturer at the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where she teaches a graduate course on Library Social Work. As a researcher and educator, Sarah is the creator and host of the Library Social Work podcast which aims to inform the public about interdisciplinary collaborations between social service providers and public libraries.Dr. Michael LaMagna is the Information Literacy Program & Library Services Coordinator and Professor of Library Services at Delaware County Community College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Teaching our students how to become flexible and accurate evaluators of information requires teaching them adaptable processes and not static heuristics. Our conventional information literacy teaching and learning tools are simply not up to tackling the life-long, real-world challenges and transferable applications required by today's evolving information landscape. Information Literacy and Social Media: Empowered Student Engagement with the ACRL Framework (ACRL, 2024) by Michele Santamaria and A. Nicole Pfannenstiel (2024, ACRL) provides librarians and non-librarian practitioners with ways to teach and learn with social media. It addresses how to broadly conceptualize information literacy teaching with social media and allay any student reluctance to using social media for academic purposes. It proposes how to map some of the ACRL threshold concepts onto specific social media platforms, including Facebook, X, Instagram, and TikTok, while providing general guidance for if and when those platforms change. There are eight concrete, cross-disciplinary lesson plans that factor in design, assessment, and student engagement. Finally, the book considers how up-and-coming platforms might empower students to be critical content creators and encourage librarians and faculty to support and create new information literacy initiatives on their campuses. Information Literacy and Social Media demonstrates how to engage students with and through social media platforms and teach them to embrace their role as information creators through engagement with the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education. This is the step that they must take to truly be metaliterate in the creative and ethical ways that make information literacy an essential college competency.New Books Network listener can receive 20% off this title through the ALA Store using the promo code: ACRL5456P.Michele Santamaría is the Learning Design Librarian at Millersville University.Nicole Pfannenstiel, PhD., is a student-centered faculty member of the English & World Languages department at Millersville University.Dr. Michael LaMagna is the Information Literacy Program & Library Services Coordinator and Professor of Library Services at Delaware County Community College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Often assumed to be a self-evident good, Open Access has been subject to growing criticism for perpetuating global inequities and epistemic injustices. it has been seen as imposing exploitative business and publishing models and as exacerbating exclusionary research evaluation culture and practices.Achieving Global Open Access: The Need for Scientific, Epistemic, and Participatory Openness (Taylor & Francis, 2024) engages with these issues, recognizing that the global Open Access debate is now not just about publishing and business models or academic reward structures, but also about what constitutes valid and valuable knowledge, how we know and who gets to say. the book argues that, for Open Access to deliver its potential, it first needs to be associated with "epistemic openness", a wider and more inclusive understanding of what constitutes valid and valuable knowledge. it also needs to be accompanied by "participatory openness", enabling contributions to knowledge from more diverse communities. interacting with relevant theory and current practices, the book discusses the challenges in implementing these different forms of openness, the relationship between them and their limits.Stephen Pinfield is Professor of Information Services Management at the University of Sheffield, UK, and a Senior Research Fellow at the Research on Research Institute (RoRI).Xiaoli Chen is project lead at DataCite, a non-profit organization that provides open scholarly infrastructure and supports the global research community to ensure the open availability and connectedness of research outputs. She has a background in Library and Information Science and worked with different disciplinary communities to create and integrate services and workflows for open and FAIR scholarship. She can be reached at xiaoli.chen@datacite.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Predatory publishing is a complex problem that harms a broad array of stakeholders and concerns across the scholarly communications system. It shines a light on the inadequacies of scholarly assessment and related rewards systems, contributes to the marginalization of scholarship from less developed countries, and negatively impacts the acceptance of open access. To fix what is broken in scholarly communications, academic librarians must act as both teachers and advocates and partner with other stakeholders who have the agency to change how scholarship is produced, assessed, and rewarded. Predatory Publishing and Global Scholarly Communications (ACRL, 2024) by Monica Berger is a unique and comprehensive exploration of predatory publishing in four parts: Background; Characteristics and Research; The Geopolitics of Scholarly Publishing; and Responses and Solutions. It examines the history of predatory publishing and basics of scholarly assessment; identifies types of research misconduct and unethical scholarly behaviors; provides critical context to predatory publishing and scholarly communications beyond the Global North; and offers structural and pedagogical solutions and teaching materials for librarians to use in their work with authors, students, faculty, and other stakeholders. Predatory Publishing and Global Scholarly Communications gives powerful insight into predatory publishing across the world, inside and outside of the library community, and provides tools for understanding and teaching its impact and contributing to its improvement.Monica Berger is the Instruction and Scholarly Communications Librarian and Professor at the New York City College of Technology, City University of New York.Dr. Michael LaMagna is the Information Literacy Program & Library Services Coordinator and Professor of Library Services at Delaware County Community College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“Stories of archives are always stories of phantoms, of the death or disappearance or erasure of something, the preservation of what remains, and its possible reappearance—feared by some, desired by others,” writes Thomas Keenan. Archiving the Commons: Looking Through the Lens of bak.ma (DPR Barcelona, June 2024) is about those stories and much more. Özge Çelikaslan uses bak.ma, a digital media archive born out of the social movements in Turkey, to guide us through a journey in which archives become sites of other kinds of stories—some of solidarity, activism, and the commons. Çelikaslan uses the concept of archives of the commons reimagining archives as dynamic spaces of commoning in which creative, autonomous platforms are generated collectively to perpetuate knowledge and sociopolitical relations grounded in solidarity and an ethics of care, not in some distant future but in the here and now.Özge Çelikaslan is a scholar and practitioner whose research interests encompass media historiography, critical audiovisual archival studies, and research-based film/video practices.Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This interview with Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz about Grabbing Tea: Queer Conversations on Identity and Libraries and Grabbing Tea: Queer Conversations on Archives and Practice (available in 2024 from the Litwin Books Series on Gender and Sexuality in Library and Information Studies) explores how queerness is centered within library and archival theory and practice. Smith-Cruz and co-editor Sara A. Howard invited library and archives workers to share conversations which became the chapters for these two volumes. These conversations explore a huge range of topics: identity, community practice and outreach, visibility and coming out or being outed in the library, as well as the archive as a site for reclamation, narrative storytelling, ancestral recalling, and historical revisioning within LGBTQ+ communities. Contributions to these volumes integrate interpersonal experiences of professionalism for queer folks in the field, dive into their relationships and points of connection with each other and the communities they serve, and engage with the implications of race and sexuality in archival practice. Readers are invited to listen in and join these conversations that consider the fluidity of our bodies as queer bodies, and our lives as queer lives inside of the library and the archive.Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz is a volunteer archivist at the Lesbian Herstory Archives, and an Assistant Curator, and Associate Dean for Teaching, Learning, and Engagement at New York University Division of Libraries.Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices