The New Librarianship Field Guide

The main thesis of this book is that librarians are people who work on improving their communities through knowledge creation. The first section of the book, talking through the various conceptions of librarianship and making an argument for his view, was OK, but later sections on various types of libraries were repetitive, taken up with manufacturing straw men, poorly edited, and generally not edifying to read. I gave up in the Excursus when I saw the word “Liberians” where it was obvious that it should have been “librarians.”

The best thing about this book were the stories about what individual librarians had done to facilitate a more vibrant community in their libraries.