Library Partnerships: Making Connections Between School and Public Libraries

Citation

Calvert, P. (2009), "Library Partnerships: Making Connections Between School and Public Libraries", The Electronic Library, Vol. 27 No. 4, pp. 740-740. https://doi.org/10.1108/02640470910979705

Librarians might complain about having a lack of time, money and resources, but they seldom look beyond their own organisation for assistance. That is the theme of this concise and readable book. It is essentially a practical book for those working in school and public libraries who believe there could be some benefit to their own, and possibly to other libraries, in a partnership. In this book, the partnerships will fall short of full joint‐use libraries and consortia.

The book does not assume that a partnership is necessarily a good idea, so it offers some suggestions on how to seek out a natural partner. Then it enters territory probably not covered before, which is to explain the whole courtship process and how it takes some effort to make a relationship work. Possible ways that public and school libraries can work together are considered in turn, such as sharing spaces, author visits, book discussion groups, joint promotional activities, making videos and podcasts and many others.

In the single chapter on technology, Tasha Squires covers familiar territory with e‐mail lists and instant messaging. She then deal with blogs and wikis, suggesting blogs for shared teen reading sites, wikis for collecting answers to frequently asked reference questions and so on. She briefly discusses the potential uses of MySpace (for which, we assume, we can also read Facebook and Bebo). Finally, she introduces the use of videos on YouTube, and the potential of podcasts. The content here is rather simple but the purpose is to point librarians to the possibilities of the available technologies for use in partnerships, rather than explain in detail how to use them.

There have been a few books on this subject published over the last ten years. This is a good one for the relative novice to read because it gives sound practical advice and never expects too much of the reader. There is a list of recommended reading and a decent index.