Jurisdiction refers to those tasks or responsibilities that are seen as central to and exclusively controlled by a profession. When library work is examined, what is the proper jurisdiction for professional, masters-level librarians? This study examines the definition of professional with respect to library workers by using data from a national survey of competencies for library support staff a...

Changes in the Scandinavian LIS (Library and information science) curriculum during the last decade, interacting with librarianship as well as with society at large, call for a deepened understanding of the social dynamics of librarians’ occupational identities. At least two central themes emerge studying the recent development of librarianship, namely the process of academisation and the imple...

The relationship between data literacy and business librarianship continues to grow in relevance as the conversation intensifies higher education world. Establishing shared vocabularies mappings foundational library professional documents is essential moving discourse forward. This article presents a mapping seven baseline competencies ACRL Framework for Information Literacy Higher Education.

The Journal of the Medical Library Association (JMLA) sincerely thanks the 154 reviewers in 2017 who helped vet and improve the quality of work published in our journal. The JMLA is always looking to expand our pool of reviewers who can critically comment on any topic of research or practice in health sciences librarianship. If you are interested in serving as a peer reviewer for the JMLA, plea...

This article outlines the common duties and responsibilities of systems librarians, and describes how library school students and others interested in entering the field can take advantage of freely available tools to gain relevant experience. It discusses attitudes and traits of systems librarians and their importance to potential and practicing systems librarians. It also lists and describes ...

THELIBRARYPROFESSION’S UNL)ERSTANDIK\‘Gof the Library Bill of Rights-and, in fact, American librarianship’s understanding of itself-is a product of both contemporary political discourse and of the American Library Association’s pragmatic responses to censorship challenges in the 1950s. Between the 1948 adoption of the strengthened Library Bill of Rights and 1960, ALA based its “library faith” o...

A review of selected published sources on the legitimacy of the public library shows that there is a paucity of critical thinking about public libraries and their future. The paper considers ideas generated from reading German philosopher Axel Honneth’s seminal work “Das Recht der Freiheit”. A discussion is conducted of Honneth’s theoretical perspectives, particularly the notion of social freed...

Although courses in interpersonal communication are becoming more prevalent in education for librarianship, there appears to be no systematic approach to teaching librarians how to conduct the reference interview. One fundamental reason for this may be the lack of an appropriate theoretical model for teaching interview techniques. In essence, what is available to the educator is a great deal of...