Offered: Spring 2025
This course examines the skills and knowledge necessary for today’s school and public librarians to process and organize all types of media and information formats, including print, non-print, and electronic resources. Descriptive and value-added cataloging, MARC records, Resource Description and Access, virtual libraries, union catalogs, digital information sources and storage devices, automated cataloging systems, folksonomies and social classification, indexing, subject heading lists, classification systems and current organizational practices, and theories and rules are explored and evaluated.
Offered: Fall 2025
An introduction to the library and information science field, this course will cover the history, development, and evolution of libraries and their diverse roles in society. It will also provide grounding in relevant policy, legal frameworks, and ethical considerations involving foundational issues such as privacy rights, freedom of expression, equal access, copyright, and intellectual property. Finally, current cultural and social trends and conversations impacting libraries will be explored.
Offered: on demand
This course will focus on assessing community needs and determining how to best meet those needs through in-house programming, outreach efforts, and community collaborations. This course will address planning, implementation, and evaluation of public library programs as well as how to fund and market these initiatives.
Offered: on demand
This course will provide a survey of literature and media for adults. The course will include discussion of readers’ advisory tools and strategies and the promotion of the use of library resources.
Offered: Summer 2025
Course Description: Through readings, online discussions, written assignments and presentations, students will become familiar with and formulate positions on the most critical issues in youth literature. Issues to be investigated include national and international issues, ethnic and diversity issues, peace and social justice issues, new digital formats, age appropriateness, professional associations and awards, needs of children vs. needs of publishers, determination of quality in fiction and non fiction.
Offered: Fall 2025
Course Description: This course is designed for students in the General Education Program and fulfills Intercultural Literacy (ICL) curricular component of that program. This course also carries the Literary Studies designation.
We live in a country that holds freedom of speech as sacred, yet book challenges and bans are flooding our libraries and schools, fueling heated debates about information, access, control, and power. Both those who wish to ban books and those who defend those books and readers’ rights to access them claim to have the good of our communities at the heart of their arguments. The key to understanding what’s at stake in this cultural moment can be found in the books at which the censors are taking aim. What do titles topping challenged book lists have in common? Who are they written for and by? What are the perceived dangers they carry, and what are the potential benefits they hold? In addition to studying these works, we will look at the rhetoric of those on both sides of the debate, drilling down to the motivations of various groups. What can the language of their arguments tell us about what these groups prioritze and what they most fear? Finally, we will examine our own values and positions on intellectual freedom and access to information, reflecting on how we can encourage productive conversations about community values and collaboratively make decisions for the common good.