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  • Lean Library Management: Eleven Strategies for Reducing Costs and Improving Customer Services, and: Teaching Information Literacy Online, and: Scholarly Practice, Participatory Design, and the eXtensible Catalog, and: Embedded Librarians: Moving Beyond One-Shot Instruction

Lean Library Management: Eleven Strategies for Reducing Costs and Improving Customer Services, John J. Huber. New York: Neal-Schuman, 2011. 197p. $70 (ISBN 978-1-55570-732-3)

The title of this book is a bit of a gimmick. The so-called eleven strategies are actually all part of a sequence of processes derived from the “lean manufacturing” technique and adapted for library services. Huber, a veteran business consultant with an excellent understanding of library operations and culture, explains how to improve service by transforming “your change-resistant culture” and streamlining delivery service chains to better serve customers and outdo competitors. In some cases, the goal is to streamline the internal processes that make books and digital resources available to users. Viewing Google and Amazon as major competitors, Huber also offers suggestions for improving the user experience by accessing digital content through federated searching, link resolvers, and e-book purchase and leasing. (JA)

Teaching Information Literacy Online, ed. Thomas P. Mackey and Trudi E. Jacobson. New York: Neal-Schuman, 2011. 200p. $80 (ISBN 978-1-55570-735-4)

This collection of eight case studies from the United States and United Kingdom adheres to a standard format in presenting the experiences of librarian-faculty collaborative teams. Each chapter starts with a literature review and institutional profile, then proceeds to discuss the collaborative process, program planning, online learning module, impact on student learning, and assessment. Undergraduate and graduate courses are included, both hybrid and entirely online, representing a wide range of subject areas from literature and history to business, social work, and education. The pedagogical approaches and tools employed are as diverse as the subject areas. If these projects have anything in common, it is their faith in the constructivist approach to learning, by which the learners construct their own meaning and participate actively in the process of learning. There is no easy road to developing an effective online course using this or any other methodology, but librarians looking for models should find this collection useful. (JA)

Scholarly Practice, Participatory Design, and the eXtensible Catalog, ed. Nancy Fried Foster, Katie Clark, Kornelia Tancheva, and Rebekah Kilzer. Chicago: ACRL, 2011. 176p. $40 (ISBN 978-0-8389-8574-8)

Scholarly Practice, Participatory Design, and the eXtensible Catalog is an anthology of articles describing insights from the participatory design research carried out to inform the development of the eXtensible Catalog, “an open source, user-centered, next generation software for libraries.” (http://www.extensiblecatalog.org/) Librarians and researchers associated with four universities – Cornell University, Ohio State University, University of Rochester, and Yale University – carried out more than eighty interviews with faculty and students to gain a deeper understanding of current research practices. The Introduction and first chapter describe the eXtensible Catalog Project and the motivations for undertaking extensive user research. The following chapters discuss stumbling blocks in the research process, the new invisible colleges in the networked environment, journal use by faculty, archives and special collections, and, finally, the personal research collections developed by faculty. This is not a book on the eXtensible [End Page 1013] Catalog, but a valuable collection of insights on user behavior that provides interesting and practical information for librarians. (FR)

Embedded Librarians: Moving Beyond One-Shot Instruction, ed. Cassandra Kvenild and Kaijsa Calkins. Chicago: ACRL, 2011. 248 p. $48 (ISBN 978-0-8389-8587-8)

Embedded librarianship can mean a lot of things. Editors Cassandra Kvenild and Kaijsa Calkins explain in their introduction that what they have tried to do in this collection is to provide numerous examples of characteristics that the many different types of embedded librarianship share. Mathew Brower describes these characteristics in the first chapter, some of which include collaboration with users, partnerships with departments, needs-based services that often take place outside the library, and an understanding of the disciplines, cultures, and spaces where research takes place. The topics in this collection are broad, ranging from assisting at-risk students, first-year instruction, and distance education, to librarian-faculty collaboration and...

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