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Public libraries can help immigrants adjust to life in the USA, including maintaining health and well-being. The purpose of this study was to understand how immigrants use public libraries and how library staff provide health-related information and services for immigrant audiences.

This study used semistructured interviews with library staff (n = 9) and immigrant library patrons (n = 10), representing multiple first languages and countries of origin from two different library locations within a large public library system in a US mid-Atlantic city.

Staff reported offering many health-related programs and services, but only one of the 10 patron respondents had used them. Patrons more commonly used the library in ways indirectly related to health (e.g. learning English) than direct health-related services. Staff reported comfort interacting with immigrant patrons, but lacked consensus on navigating language barriers and determining community needs.

This qualitative study provides insights from a specific geographic and cultural setting. It focused on immigrants using the library and may have excluded vulnerable populations of immigrants who encounter barriers to using the library. Future research and practice should focus on how public libraries can better meet the health information needs of immigrant populations, including navigating controversial social and political topics, as well as emerging health-related information during a pandemic.

Public health practitioners often overlook public libraries as community collaborators. This research identifies that while there is important and essential work happening in public libraries to improve immigrant health, more can be done, especially in collaboration with public health professionals.

While public libraries are well-established as a place to borrow books and use reference materials, they are less recognized for the services and programs they offer to their local communities. These programs and services often directly or indirectly impact the health of patrons and the larger community.

While some public libraries offer programs that address patron health in collaboration with other health professionals, such as those at local universities, public health departments, and other health-related organizations, these collaborations are often informal, offered for an indefinite period of time, and rely on finite funding. While public health professionals and organizations are often overlooked in public library collaborations, they are a natural fit for collaboration.

As public libraries serve the needs of vital and often vulnerable members of our communities, it is important to build sustainable community partnerships when offering programs and services that impact patron health. This will not only identify organizations committed to improving the health of these populations and those that provide reliable resources; it will also streamline information and provide consistent information to identify safe and reliable resources on social media, the internet, and in the community.

This chapter serves as a reflective narrative which explores how public libraries and community organizations can collaborate, identifies anticipated challenges, and describes considerations and strategies for addressing these challenges. The ultimate goal is to identify how libraries can expand the depth and breadth of both library services and public health organizations to sustainably improve the health of the local community.

This paper describes studies of the ICAN Intervention and their implications.

We adapted the ICAN intervention to support the science interest and learning of at-risk, middle-school-age youth, who were participants in entry-level, out-of-school, inquiry-informed, science workshops. The intervention is a brief ungraded writing assignment that is integrated into science activities on a daily basis in order to encourage workshop participants to reflect on science: what participants understand, the skills they have acquired, and what they still want to figure out.

Findings indicate that the use of the ICAN Intervention in science inquiry supports the development of science interest and science problem solving that is sustained 5 weeks following the workshop. Moreover, participants who write more responses to the ICAN probes are more likely to evidence changes in science learning, regardless of their initial level of interest in science. Participants with less-developed and with more-developed science interest at the beginning of the workshop all progress. The findings further suggest that when the intervention is coupled with an inquiry-informed integrated science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (iSTEM) curriculum, it provides an additional boost for the development of science interest and learning.

The ICAN Intervention as adapted provides a solution to questions raised about whether inquiry-based instruction can promote learning. Our findings indicate that it can. Our findings also demonstrate that when undertaken in a concept and idea-rich environment, the structure of a motivation-based intervention is open-ended enough that all participants will progress, continuing to develop their interest and their learning of disciplinary content.

Communications regarding this column should be addressed to Mrs. Cheney, Peabody Library School, Nashville, Term. 37203. Mrs. Cheney does not sell the books listed here. They are available through normal trade sources. Mrs. Cheney, being a member of the editorial board of Pierian Press, will not review Pierian Press reference books in this column. Descriptions of Pierian Press reference books will be included elsewhere in this publication.

Teams are best positioned for success when certain enabling conditions are in place such as the right mix of individuals. Effective team staffing considers team members’ knowledge, skills, abilities, and other characteristics (KSAOs) as well as the configuration of team member KSAOs and their relations, called team composition. In practice, however, how to integrate team composition considerations into team staffing to facilitate outcomes such as team cohesion can seem nebulous. The purpose of this chapter is to describe how team member KSAOs and their configurations and relations affect team cohesion, and suggest how this information can inform team staffing. We frame team cohesion as an aspect of team human capital to understand when it may be an important consideration for staffing. We describe multilevel considerations in staffing cohesive teams. We summarize theories that link team composition to team cohesion via interpersonal attraction, a shared team identity, and team task commitment. Finally, we propose a six-step approach for staffing cohesive teams, and describe a few areas for future research.

The purpose of this study is to explore the mediating effect of moral disengagement in the relationship between mindfulness and unethical behaviors. The authors also explored the moderating effect of perceptions of politics on the mediational chain.

The authors administrated time-lagged surveys at two time periods separated by six weeks. Respondents were 206 full-time employees working in the USA. Hierarchical, moderated multiple regression analyzes were used to test the mediation and moderation effects.

Results showed that mindfulness reduced destructive deviant behavior and unethical pro-organizational behavior through moral disengagement and the mediation effects were weaker when employees’ perceptions of politics were stronger.

The results indicate that mindfulness and perceptions of organizational politics combine to have profound impacts on employee unethical behaviors. Organizations seeking to minimize the occurrence of deviance and unethical behaviors may do well to support employee mindfulness and as well as minimizing organizational politics. The findings suggest that the political context has a negative impact on even the behavior of mindful employees. Therefore, building mindfulness while simultaneously reducing politics are equally important goals.

Our study extends the theoretical development of mindfulness research by examining the interactive effects of perceptions of organizational politics and mindfulness and broadens the theoretical rationale for explaining the linkages between mindfulness and unethical behaviors.