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Planning and assessment are both crucial elements of a public library that functions efficiently and flexibly. So why are they often treated as separate processes? This concise book combines planning and evaluation in a holistic approach, helping public library managers and staff put library resources to work for the community. Based on a series of successful workshops, the authors present a workflow made up of manageable steps for integrating outcome-based planning and evaluation (OBPE) into the routine functions of the public library. Offering step by step guidance that's transparent and easy to follow, this book: -introduces the concept of OBPE and explains how it can be a streamlined, effective method of getting library users' feedback -defines outcomes and shows why public libraries should use them to plan and evaluate services -shares methodologies for assessing community needs and interests, including key informant interviews, surveys, focus groups, and environmental scans -demonstrates how to use community assessment data to create outcome statements that not only guide the creation of new library services, but also provide targets for measuring the effectiveness of those service -offers techniques for designing services that directly serve the community while also achieving the outcomes the library has targeted -provides tips for sharing the results with stakeholders and maximizing successful outcome-based programs to leverage the library's role in the community Featuring plentiful examples of how to proceed through each phase of the OBPE model, this book boils down planning and evaluation into an approachable, easy to understand process for public librarians, library managers, and grant writers.

While “getting it right” for kids in libraries can be a challenge—as rapid technology changes impact both library services and the needs and expectations of children—it is a goal that warrants serious attention. This visionary book by respected children’s library specialist and advocate Virginia Walter is a call to action for libraries...to consider children as vital participants in the community, as well as serious readers and technology users.

In New on the Job, experts Toor and Weisburg helped newbies make the transition to real-world school librarianship.Being Indispensable is all about staying one: without a proactive approach, school librarians, facing a severe economic downturn and budget cuts, run the risk of becoming an endangered species. In clear, simple, and practical language, this book empowers school librarians by helping them * Understand what other stakeholders in a * school need and want * Demonstrate their importance to administrators, teachers, and parents * Plan strategically in both their personal and professional lives * Master important tools like advocacy and marketing Making the case for the vital role school librarians play in learning, this book gives readers all the strategies they need to become the kind of leader their school can t do without.

Someone recognized that a door had closed, that with Ickes's death the end of something important had been entered in the books of the nation and that the necessary rituals had not been fully served by the funeral itself. . . . No one had ever quite forgotten the Easter Sunday afternoon in April 1939 when about seventy-five thousand people had put aside the wretched baggage of prejudice and freely joined at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to witness the glory of a woman's voice. Ickes had helped to make that moment possible, and it was in his memory that some ten thousand came again to the Memorial on the Sunday afternoon of April 20, 1952. . . . At 4:00 P.M. the Reverend Frederick E. Reissig . . . offered the invocation. . . . Then from behind one of the great pillars of the Monument stepped [Marian Anderson]. . . . Her accompanist began the opening bars of Bach's \"Come, Sweet Death,\" and soon that extraordinary voice rolled out over the crowd once again. After \"Come, Sweet Death,\" she sang \"Ave Maria\" as she had in 1939, then the same bittersweet spirituals, and finally, the whole audience on its feet now to sing it with her, \"America, the Beautiful.\" -- From \"Righteous Pilgrim.\" Mr. [T. H. Watkins] writes as an Ickes partisan, especially about his long and bitter campaign to wrest control of the Forest Service from the Department of Agriculture. At stake here was Ickes's dream of a new Department of Conservation and a greatly expanded system of national parks and monuments. Not unexpectedly, Mr. Watkins is an excellent guide to the political and philosophical controversy that split the conservation community and sustained Ickes's rivalry with the Secretary of Agriculture, Henry A. Wallace. The Forest Service was steeped in the utilitarian philosophy of its onetime head, Gifford Pinchot, and influenced by politically well-connected cattlemen and lumber companies. Ickes had once marched arm in arm with Pinchot, but in the 1930's the Interior Secretary came to share the ideas of such pioneering preservationists as Robert Marshall and Aldo Leopold, whose wilderness vision would prove so influential in the postwar years. By the end of his tenure, Ickes had masterminded the creation or expansion of such great national parks as Olympic, Kings Canyon and Grand Teton, but the Forest Service still remained just beyond his grasp.

The strike successfully pressured UPS management into a new round of marathon negotiations. But more important, it has roused an old-fashioned thing called \"solidarity.\"The full-time workers are fighting on behalf of the lower-paid part-timers, and the union is going all-out to protect the pensions of unionists not employed by the highly profitable UPS, who are relying upon a generation-old multi-employer fund. But in this strike the workers have a lot going for them. UPS can't hire scabs - the rank opportunists who now often go by the polite euphemism of \"replacement workers\" - because the nation's unemployment rate is at a quarter-century low. For most workers in a tight labor market, part-time UPS jobs pay wages that are nothing to write home about. It's a good investment. A transformation in the economy and a revitalization of the entire labor movement may well lie within the hands of UPS strikers. By demanding that UPS transform many of its \"part-time\" jobs - now comprising 57 percent of all UPS employees - into full-time, high-wage positions, the Teamsters have already forced managers throughout the nation's huge service economy to rethink their \"low-road,\" low-wage strategy toward ever higher profitability. The stock market, which closed last week with its second-largest one-day loss ever, is skittish over \"wage inflation\" and the prices for Wal-Mart, K-Mart, McDonald's and Fed-Ex are all going to take a hit when the extent of the Teamster victory becomes clear. But the health of the economy will be given a powerful stimulant when companies once again realize that wages have to rise with their profits and their sales.

BOTH CAMPAIGNS in the fall elections mobilized armies of intense partisans, spending millions of dollars in a tight, dramatic contest of enormous import for all Americans. Bill Clinton vs. Bob Dole? Don't kid yourself; I'm talking about the recent Teamster election in which President Ron Carey edged out challenger James P. Hoffa Jr. by just 4 percentage points. Reformer Carey, who once headed a United Parcel Service local in Queens, won election to the Teamster presidency in 1991 when the federal government stepped in to oust numerous corrupt officials and supervise the first referendum election in the union's history. Over the next five years, Carey cut the multiple salaries and lavish perks of many Teamster leaders, put 66 locals into trusteeship and took on the union's well-entrenched old guard, whose lucrative control of hundreds of locals afforded plenty of resources to fight back.

A postmodernist history of the historical novel, paying special attention to the political implications of the postmodernist toward the past. Beginning with the poetics of Sir Walter Scott, it moves via a global survey of 19th-century historical fiction to modernist innovations in the genre.

Nineteenth-Century Choral Music is an in-depth examination of the rich repertoire of choral music and the cultural phenomenon of choral music making throughout the period. The book is divided into three main sections. The first details the attraction to choral singing and the ways it was linked to different parts of society, and to the role of choral voices in the two principal large-scale genres of the period: the symphony and opera. A second section highlights ten choral-orchestral masterworks that are a central part of the repertoire. The final section presents overview and focus chapters covering composers, repertoire (both small and larger works), and performance life in an historical context from over a dozen regions of the world: Britain and Ireland, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Latin America, the Philippines, Poland, Russia, Scandinavia and Finland, Spain, and the United States. This diverse collection of essays brings together the work of 25 authors, many of whom have devoted much of their scholarly lives to the composers and music discussed, giving the reader a lively and unique perspective on this significant part of nineteenth-century musical life.