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Introduction to Public Librarianship, Second Edition, by Kathleen de la Peña McCook. New York: Neal-Schuman, 2011.
When the first edition of Kathleen de la Peña McCook's Introduction to Public Librarianship was published in 2005, it filled a great void in the scholarly and practical literature of the field, and it remains the most rigorous, comprehensive and thoughtful overview available on the subject. In that first edition, McCook articulated a vision of the public library as a community-building institution, dedicated to sustaining and expanding the public sphere by developing diverse collections, programs and services that promote reflective reading and lifelong learning and thus empower poor, working-class and culturally excluded people to enter the dialogue of the commons. McCook traced the philosophical shift regarding collection development and intellectual freedom from the First World War, during which librarians in the United States willingly engaged...