The Library‐Classroom Partnership: 2nd edition: Teaching Library Media Skills in Middle and Junior High Schools

This work comes from the vigorous library media skills and programmes tradition in the USA and published by people like Scarecrow. All are of interest, many are of value, and some are good international travellers (mainly for their ideas). Often readers elsewhere have to identify and incorporate their own bibliographical materials, and, in the USA and elsewhere, there is always the challenge of customising the programme to your own library and its clientele. This second edition tries to reflect how curricula and IT have changed things in recent years, and emphasises the importance of library media skills for lifelong learning. A useful digest of these skills is provided (such as locating and selecting and using resources, doing research, taking notes, using information for making decisions). After a “general” section devoted to library related issues (locating texts, using reference books, finding facts) and information‐handling and using skills (like notetaking and using bibliographies) come 12 thematic sections full of ideas and applications which librarians in schools and educationalists may wish to use or adapt. Typically, under “English” comes looking at magazines, at poetic devices like alliteration, at mythology and folklore, at favourite authors, with lots of questions and information about support materials (for example Twentieth Century Authors, McGraw‐Hill Encyclopedia of World Biography) and ideas for researching authors. Other themes are art and foreign languages, health and maths, physical education and science. Technology picks up space, inventions and the future; science looks at organisms, classification, science in the news, and famous scientists. There is advice for integrated subjects too and a classified listing of resources at the back. Much of the material here is distinctively American, and non‐American readers will have to think quite hard about credible links with the curriculum, let alone feasible initiatives in their own library. For the price, then, some good ideas, but nothing an imaginative and competent librarian might not have developed for herself. The authors are such media specialists and they have simply written it down.