Customer Reviews

The Portable MLIS: Insights from the Experts

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I recently completed my MLIS and used this book as one of many tools to review for my comprehensive exam. I found the text most useful in summarizing and highlighting ethics issues, especially those discussed in the ALA's labyrinthine Intellectual Freedom Manual. Still, if you're looking for depth and substantial context, you're better off using the authors' original works (especially Rubin and Taylor). If you're thinking about going to library school, this is a good overview of what you'll be learning in the core courses. You may find it to be very relevant material, especially if you've never worked in a library before (which, personally, I HIGHLY recommend before you commit to a graduate school program). Overall, I'd recommend checking this book out from the library before committing to buying it at such a steep cover price.

This review is for the Kindle version. I'm using this book for my intro class in library school. This book is better than the other ones I've read (i.e., Foundations of Library Science; Libraries in the Information Age), which were painfully dull and largely theoretical. Of the couple of chapters I've read, I could tell that this book is different. I especially liked Laura Kane's contributions, which made me laugh, a first for me while reading a library textbook!

However, aside from the need for more proofreading of this book, the Kindle version was annoyingly cumbersome to use. I thought the TOC was hyperlinked because the chapter titles were underlined, but was I wrong. I had to use the Search function to get to a specific chapter. Also, if I press the Prev Page button more than twice, I end up at the beginning of the chapter!

I appreciate the convenience of having this title on Kindle, but for the price, I wish it had better navigation.

I chose my class based on how this textbook looked and was reviewed, and I chose well. I love this textbook. Each chapter is written by a different professional librarian, and they are informative, engaging, interesting, and fun to read. It is a great introduction to the field of librarianship and truly enjoyable reading. It does not feel like a textbook at all, more like fun reading. If you are considering becoming a librarian, this would be a great introduction to the field.
I have found some typos in the text, basic grammatical errors and homynym errors (i.e. their instead of there) but hopefully future edits of this book will clean up those errors.

This was a good companion book to Librarianship: An Introduction. It was a much easier read than Librarianship.