Six Issues Facing Libraries Today

John M. Budd is professor emeritus at the University of Missouri, where he taught for twenty-two years, and was also on the faculties of the University of Arizona and Louisiana State University. He worked for several years as an academic librarian and is the author of more than one hundred journal articles and book chapters. He has also written a number of books, including Democracy, Economics, and the Public Good and The Changing Academic Library. He continues to be very active in association duties and is still an active writer.

Contemporary libraries face myriad persistent challenges, and Budd—a long-standing observer and scholar of librarianship—attempts to inject new perspectives into the ways library and information science (LIS) professionals address such challenges. The book's six chapters center on the nature of information, the evolution of information literacy, the role of libraries in higher education, the education of librarians, moral and ethical issues in the LIS professions, and the future of librarianship itself. Budd examines many complex issues by drawing on literature from a variety of disciplines, fleshing out the gaps that cannot be solely addressed by LIS offerings. He maintains focus on the contemporary aspect of these issues by paring down historical context to essential information and offering suggestions for further readings....Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students; professionals/practitioners.

• Chapter 1: What Is Information?Chapter 2: What Is Information Literacy?Chapter 3: What Roles Do Academic Libraries Play in Higher Education Today? Chapter 4: How Can We Effectively Educate Librarians?Chapter 5: What Are the Ethical and Moral Bases of the Library and Information Professions?Chapter 6: What is the Future of Librarianship?