Public libraries, public policies, and political processes: Serving and transforming communities in times of economic and political constraint

Instead of encouraging librarians to focus only on collaboration between themselves and academic staff, this text discusses how the liaison librarian can and should work towards building similar long-term ‘personal’ relationships with individual students over the entire period of a student’s degree programme. Such relationships are intended to provide students with the confidence and ability to seek for information independently and should also provide them with an ongoing and approachable means of support. The chapters of this collection are arranged in a logical order and serve to scaffold the concepts covered in an extremely well-organised and clear manner. Context and background are provided in earlier chapters, as well as detail on the development and case studies of implementation of the personal librarian concept. Further chapters discuss how it relates to information literacy, embedded librarianship and the academic library environment. Later chapters incorporate a ‘real-world’ perspective in that they provide relevant insight from businesses and other academic service areas and cleverly include a ‘faculty perspective’ on the personal librarian. Overall I found this book to be clever and insightful. I would recommend this text, particularly the checklist and best practice chapters, to academic librarians and any other librarians.