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In the novel, The Member of the Wedding, Carson McCullers probes the American malaise through the longings of a young adolescent girl. Twelve‐year‐old Frankie no longer sees the world as round and inviting as a school globe. No, the world is huge and cracked and turning a thousand miles an hour. Indeed, the world seems separate from herself. In the midst of chaos, Frankie sees her brother's upcoming wedding as a chance to feel connected, to feel that she matters. The story focuses on Frankie's efforts to be a “member of the wedding,” as she recognizes, “they are the we of me.”

Three distinct, and interrelated, events led to this article. All three actually happened to me. The first was when a young man whom I had known vaguely as a neighborhood kid approached the reference desk where I was working in August, 1974. He said, “Do you have a book on pregnancy? I'm getting married Saturday, and I want to make sure that she takes care of herself.”

The purpose of this paper is to ascertain the key journals publishing on the topic of information behaviour.

The study focusses on four key textbooks in the field to compile a list of key journals that were being cited.

The primary aim of the project discussed in this paper is to identify the serials that may be considered the core journals reporting research on young people's information behaviour, with a view to helping the information professional stay up‐to‐date with important work in this field. While the study is in progress, it emerges that the research may also be of value to practitioner researchers looking to publish their own investigations in this area since it may be assumed that the journals in the upper echelons of the ranking lists are particularly receptive to submissions relating to information behaviour.

The paper should be of interest to practitioners involved in the support of information seeking in young people.

The paper offers a useful insight for researchers and others interest in information behaviour into the journals they should focus energy in consulting.

Librarians have been urged to emphasize social justice and human rights issues in their library mission, but they may find themselves challenged to provide additional services, such as access to legal information for those who cannot afford an attorney. Social justice services in libraries are seldom adequately funded and providing services in this area is labor intensive. In addition, there is an emotional intensity in library services for social justice that is often not considered in the initial enthusiasm of providing services in this area. Yet there seems to be no limit to the need. An interesting and useful perspective on how a public agency such as a library responds in circumstances of limited resources and unlimited demand can be found in the book Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Service, by Michael Lipsky. In this perspective, lower level civil servants who interact directly with members of the general public exercise a level of discretion in the amount of services provided and how those services are administered. This chapter explores how this can generate tensions between more traditional library bureaucracy and social justice services, such as providing public access to justice resources in law libraries. However, the “street-level” response is evolving into a sustainability perspective as librarians embrace a more social justice–oriented outlook in library service planning.

Few librarians think of U.S. documents as a source for professional reading, growth, and information, yet several agencies of the government are involved with library programs, services, and research. This bibliography is a compilation of some of the most recent documents about libraries published by these agencies. It is an eclectic group, ranging from scholarly research studies to descriptions of model programs. Most of these studies are known only to a small segment of the library profession and have not received wide distribution in the field. The quality of the documents is quite good, particularly the research reports being done out of the Department of Education's Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI) Library Programs Office. Much of the information contained in the surveys and research reports is not available in any other form.