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This chapter explores the provision of library services to children residing in juvenile justice facilities. The small body of scholarly literature published on the topic over the last 50 years is examined, followed by a description of the findings of a recent Australian survey of juvenile justice library provision in that country. Australia presents a very poor example of the provision of library services to children living in correctional detention. A contrast to the Australian context is provided through a case study of the library service to the South Carolina Birchwood School, in the United States. Housed in the South Carolina Juvenile Justice Centre, the Birchwood School library is presented as an example of better practice and an illustration of what can be achieved by a juvenile justice facility library when it is sufficiently staffed and funded. Opportunities for further research are identified and conclusions are drawn regarding the need for libraries in juvenile justice facilities.

This chapter presents an exploration of interrelated issues of diversity, poverty, race, and incarceration, as challenges for libraries and information professionals in certain communities.

Through the perspective of the author’s personal experiences in libraries, including a long career in prison librarianship, the chapter provides a cross-national and cross-cultural view of race and inclusion in libraries.

The chapter emphasizes the transformational impacts of libraries on their patrons, particularly in areas and situations of significant need, such as prison libraries.

This chapter highlights how effective school and public libraries not only provide resources and information about human rights but also actually ensure people’s human rights are being met through their resources and programming.

In this chapter, both human rights documents and library policies are studied to see how effective libraries help children and adults reach their full potential as human beings. Findings by other researchers in this area are also discussed. Concrete examples of human rights projects through school and public libraries in Winnipeg, Canada are identified. The benefits of collaboration are also explored.

Knowledgeable and passionate librarians in schools and public libraries are essential in providing quality education and information rights to children and adults. Through effective collaboration with teachers, other libraries and relevant organizations, children and adults have more opportunities to reach their full potential. Canada’s newest school library document called Leading Learning is explored.

This chapter provides a current snapshot of how school and public libraries are collaborating together and with various organizations in Winnipeg, Canada, to promote and ensure human rights for children and adults. Libraries are consciously blending the UN Declaration of Human Rights, the Conventions on the Rights of the Child along with national and international library policy documents to ensure effective access to quality education and information rights for everyone. Dynamic and evolving libraries are also supporting human rights by incorporating innovative concepts, programs and resources such as Universal Design for Learning, Learning Commons, Makerspaces and prison libraries.

The purposes of this paper were to find out the problematic factors in providing library and information services to Nigeria prisoners and the strategies for solving them, thereby enhancing adequate provision of the required services to these prisoners.

Seven main prisons were used for the study with a population of about 6,430 prisoners and 21 prison library/welfare workers. The sample size was 1,322 prisoners and the whole 21 workers. Questionnaires and focus group discussion (FGD) were the main instruments used for data collection. Data from the questionnaire were analyzed using frequencies and mean scores while data from FGD were analyzed descriptively.

Major findings showed that problems like funding, censorship of reading materials, restrictions due to prison policy and staffing hinder to a high extent the provision of library and information services for these prisoners. Also, improved funding of the prisons and prison libraries, services and resource sharing with other libraries, NGOs and other information providers were all seen as strategies to enhance adequate library and information services provision to the prisoners.

Library and information services are needed by everybody in today’s society. Prisoners, although incarcerated, will find useful a variety of library and information services provided to them. This paper delved into the problems of providing library and information services to Nigeria prisoners. The results of the study, if adhered to by the Nigerian prison authorities, will help a great deal in making the prisoners better citizens after release.

EVEN if library work with the young is the most written, and over‐written, subject in librarianship as is sometimes alleged, it still is the foundation of all library activity and must therefore come under continuous review. To some the subject is as dull as the essay questions set in the Entrance Examinations were alleged to be by a writer in The Library Assistant. To which we reply that all things have a certain dullness to those without sufficient imagination to look at them in other than the most conventional darkness. A Chesterton discourses entrancingly on a piece of chalk and brown paper, an empty train, a piece of string. So with our subject. We therefore make no other apology than this for a number of THE LIBRARY WORLD in which it is our main interest. Our children's libraries are, as yet, far from perfect; they issue too many drivelling books written by authors whose first essays in writing are children's books because they think them to be the easiest to write. The difference between a Ransome and—well, a thousand slush children's books—is as great as the difference between The Vicar of Wakefield and worst railway bookstall novelette. There is a great field being examined here by the more progressive children's librarians. There are many other questions, administrative and personal that have been and are under discussion. The writer of Letters on Our Affairs this month deals with some of these although, we may at once say, his views are not wholly those of THE LIBRARY WORLD.

THE regular search for the good book for the child will continue so long as there are children's libraries. A recent report on an enquiry has reached us from Bethnal Green and follows the familiar lines of getting the children to vote on what they like; with the result that the “William” books, which should be making all concerned in their production a fortune, head the list, and the simple “small”‐child books, the Milly‐Molly, Mandy series, come next. The field surveyed was small, for “William” polled only 34 votes; only 800 of the 6,000 children registered as borrowers participated. It is questionable if such enquiries, however much they interest us as librarians, can effectively help to improve child reading, unless some method of finding and providing high literature in the type the youngsters prefer can be devised. Mr. George F. Vale prefaces his brief list of books chosen with a really interesting discussion on the subject, but a quotation from it indicates part of the problem. He writes, speaking of Tom Sawyer, Alice and The Wafer Babies, “What elements go to make a permanent children's book is one of the mysteries of literature, but evidently these books possess some quality which overrides all the chances and changes of time. It is not merely the appeal of a good story; there are many better stories than The Water Babies. The secret seems to be some mysterious rapport between the author's mind and that of the readers, an ability to see and to think upon the level of the child mind.” All this is true, but it is more than that, we think; it is the power of recording what is, has been or may be, within the child's own range of experience; that is, it is true in that it realises the conditions of the world of childhood. It is curious, and possibly significant, that a book for children in these enquiries means a story. An enquiry is overdue into the type and quality of non‐fiction read by them, the sort of child who reads and in what circumstances: Real information here might reveal gaps and surpluses in book provision that are not now widely recognized!

This exploratory study, a Ph.D. dissertation completed at the University of Western Ontario in 2013, examines the materially embedded relations of power between library users and staff in public libraries and how building design regulates spatial behavior according to organizational objectives. It considers three public library buildings as organization spaces (Dale & Burrell, 2008) and determines the extent to which their spatial organizations reproduce the relations of power between the library and its public that originated with the modern public library building type ca. 1900. Adopting a multicase study design, I conducted site visits to three, purposefully selected public library buildings of similar size but various ages. Site visits included: blueprint analysis; organizational document analysis; in-depth, semi-structured interviews with library users and library staff; cognitive mapping exercises; observations; and photography.

Despite newer approaches to designing public library buildings, the use of newer information technologies, and the emergence of newer paradigms of library service delivery (e.g., the user-centered model), findings strongly suggest that the library as an organization still relies on many of the same socio-spatial models of control as it did one century ago when public library design first became standardized. The three public libraries examined show spatial organizations that were designed primarily with the librarian, library materials, and library operations in mind far more than the library user or the user’s many needs. This not only calls into question the public library’s progressiveness over the last century but also hints at its ability to survive in the new century.

IF we count the University of Strathclyde School of Librarianship as a “new” school—rather than simply an old school transferred from a College of Commerce to a university—then four “new” schools were established between 1963 and 1964, three of the four in universities and the other closely linked with a university, though remaining independent. All four schools have their special features but I consider the more significant of Belfast's features to be its right, from the outset, to conduct all its own examinations for graduates and non‐graduates. Queen's was also the first British university to provide non‐graduates with courses in librarianship. (Strathclyde is the second.) All successful students are eligible for admission to the Register of Chartered Librarians (ALA) after they have completed the prescribed period of practical experience.