Makerspaces, sometimes also referred to as hackerspaces, hackspaces, and fablabs are creative, DIY spaces where people can gather to create, invent, and learn. Discover how you can create a makerspace within your own library though this step-by-step guidebook.

Are you spending money wisely? If you're a technical services manager at an academic library, an administrator, or a dean, you're tasked with proving it. Incorporate assessment and analysis work into your library's existing workflow with the guidance of this new collection from the Association of Library Collections and Technical Services (ALCTS). Contributors from several academic libraries draw from real-world practices to suggest new approaches...

"This book provides practical guidance for delivering and sustaining value and impact from digital content. Our digital presence has the power to change lives and life opportunities. We must understand digital values to consider how organizational presence within digital cultures can create change. Impact assessment is the tool to foster understanding of how strategic decisions about digital resources may be fostering change within our communities....

Being a frontline advocate requires vision, a deep understanding of the workings of the library, and a plan of relationship building and communication. Any advocacy effort will be unsuccessful without data and statistics. Data that speaks to your point is difficult to refute, and being prepared with easily accessible data lends greater authority to you and your message.

In the 1980s, a young adventurer and collector for a government library, Abdel Kader Haidara, journeyed across the Sahara Desert and along the Niger River, tracking down and salvaging tens of thousands of ancient Islamic and secular manuscripts that had fallen into obscurity. The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu tells the story of how Haidara, a mild-mannered archivist and historian from the legendary city of Timbuktu, later became one of the world's...