These terms will each have a 5-50 word description that allow the users of this extensive research source to learn the language and terminology of the field. These articles are enhanced by special attention that is paid to over 5,000 technical and managerial terms. This encyclopedia includes articles highlighting current concepts, issues and emerging technologies. It is the most comprehensive, research-based encyclopedia consisting of contributions from over 900 noted researchers in over 50 countries. The Encyclopedia of Information Science and Technology is the first work to map this ever-changing field. In this ever-evolving environment, educators, researchers and professionals of the discipline need access to the most comprehensive knowledge about the concepts, issues, trends and technologies in this hi-tech field. Technology is constantly changing what is cutting edge today is obsolete tomorrow. Although it touches on theory as well as practice, the Atlas is meant to be a tool: textbook, conversation guide, platform for social networking, and call to action.

Agreement Supplements at the end of the book offer expanded discussions. To help librarians navigate this new terrain, Lankes offers a map, a visual representation of the field that can guide explorations of it more than 140 Agreements, statements about librarianship that range from relevant theories to examples of practice and Threads, arrangements of Agreements to explain key ideas, covering such topics as conceptual foundations and skills and values. New librarians approach their work as facilitators of conversation they seek to enrich, capture, store, and disseminate the conversations of their communities.

Lankes recasts librarianship and library practice using the fundamental concept that knowledge is created though conversation. The vision for a new librarianship must go beyond finding library-related uses for information technology and the Internet it must provide a durable foundation for the field. He describes a new librarianship based not on books and artifacts but on knowledge and learning and he suggests a new mission for librarians: to improve society through facilitating knowledge creation in their communities. David Lankes offers a guide to this new landscape for practitioners. What is librarianship when it is unmoored from cataloging, books, buildings, and committees? In The Atlas of New Librarianship, R. Libraries have existed for millennia, but today the library field is searching for solid footing in an increasingly fragmented (and increasingly digital) information environment.

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