Book Reviews 581 associations, and unions can help better prepare professional librarians for the realities of the workplace and can serve as additional outlets for fostering engagement in the field outside the day-to-day work of the employing organization. This chapter also explores the concepts of professional identity and professional commitment, which will be the most useful for those supervising professional staff. The final chapter, “Evaluation and Change,” reinforces the central argument that managers have a large role to play in how staff feels about their organization and repeats the seven “conditions that nurture employee engagement” posited in the third chapter, “Increasing Employee Engagement.” These conditions include positive and effective relation- ships with managers and coworkers and supervisor support; interesting, worthwhile, and meaningful work; sufficient resources to complete work successfully; perceived organizational support; autonomy; role clarity; and organizational justice (112). Strategies for creating and sup- porting these conditions are provided throughout the book as well as in the concluding chapter. Each of the seven chapters includes reflection questions at the end that could be used for either personal reflection or discussion with others—or, perhaps ideally, both. Anecdotes from anonymous colleagues are interspersed throughout, balancing the research results and theoretical concepts with personal stories to which many of us can relate. References are provided at the end of the book, followed by a thorough index that allows you to easily search for discussions of particular concepts and mindsets, such as “Autonomy” and “Not my job.” Answering the reflection questions and reliving past difficult experiences may not be easy, but it is worthwhile and can help you and your organization move forward in new and more positive directions. A number of books have come out recently about difficult work environments, such as The Dysfunctional Library: Challenges and Solutions to Workplace Relation- ships (2017) by Jo Henry, Joe Eshleman, and Richard Moniz and Academic Libraries and Toxic Leadership (2017) by Alma Ortega. Take a moment to evaluate the environment you and your staff are working in and use this invaluable new addition to the literature to start creating the healthy and engaging environment that every employee deserves.—Kristen Cardoso, University of California, Santa Cruz Lyda Fontes McCartin and Rachel Dineen. Toward a Critical-Inclusive Assessment Practice for Library Instruction. Sacramento, CA: Library Juice Press, 2018. 149p. Paper. $18.00 (ISBN: 978-1-63400-035-2). LC: Z711.25.C65 M37. One of the core learning outcomes that information literacy (IL) instruc- tors aim to help their students achieve is to interrogate the credibility of information. Part of that process is to recognize the credibility of authors who have acquired valid information through experience and education; another part is to question hegemonic pressures in effect in the information dissemination ecosystem. Toward a Critical-Inclusive Assessment Practice for Library Instruction seeks to outline assessment methods for helping students learn both of these lessons. Information- literate individuals recognize gaps in their knowledge. Students come to educational institutions with gaps in their knowledge, which library instructors must help them to recognize and fill. However, students also have knowledge of themselves as learners that library instructors do not possess. This book outlines assessment processes for library instructors to fill the gaps in their knowledge of their students. 582 College & Research Libraries May 2019 The book’s grounding in the work of Paolo Freire and bell hooks suggests that it will be targeted toward library instructors aiming to add social justice components to their teach- ing assessment. However, this book might easily have been titled Toward a Student-Centered Assessment Practice for Library Instruction. The authors’ approach to using critical theories to shape their instructional assessment relies on an organic emergence of social justice themes from a student-centered approach to teaching. The authors describe critical IL assessment as using student experiences with information seeking to shape IL course content. Depending on the demographics and dispositions of the students and instructors involved in a course, their approach toward assessment might include much or little focus on issues of race, class, or gender. The book focuses less on these issues after the introduction of the theory in chapter 1. This book is best used in conjunction with books on delivering critical library instruction, such as Critical Library Pedagogy Handbook. Toward a Critical-Inclusive Assessment Practice for Library Instruction is organized into a preface and five chapters. The preface describes the project from the point of view of the authors. The first chapter provides their definition of critical pedagogy. Chapter 2 reviews various assessment methods for library teaching and learning. Chapter 3 provides a practical description of how one might use a variety of assessment methods to improve library instruc- tion. Chapter 4 describes the ways in which student-centered assessment depends on creating student-centered lesson plans from the planning stages of the course. Chapter 5 functions as a discussion section; it describes some future assessment plans the authors have to make library instruction more student centered. The book contains appendices that provide examples of methods for instructional assessment. Other appendices are focused on peer feedback among instructors, and another focuses on encouraging student-centered learning. The authors, Lyda McCartin and Rachel Dineen, are colleagues at the University of North- ern Colorado Libraries. McCartin is the Head of Information Literacy Instruction at UNC and holds an MLIS from the University of Alabama. Dineen is an Information Literacy Librarian and holds an MLIS from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Prior to her affilia- tion with UNC, she held librarian positions at Oakland University and Baker College, both outside of Detroit, Michigan. Both authors have a strong background in library instruction. Throughout the book, the authors offer a diagram adapted from Saran Stewart to represent the critical-inclusive assessment consciousness they outline in the text. This diagram contains five major concepts: Dialogical Professor-Student Interaction, Faculty-Student Interaction, Shar- ing Power, Utilization of Personal Narrative, and Activation of Student Voice. These concepts are not fully fleshed out for the reader. It is unclear how these concepts differ from or relate to one another. For instance, in what ways is Dialogical Professor-Student Interaction different from Faculty-Student Interaction? Doesn’t Sharing Power encompass Activation of Student Voice? These concepts in Stewart’s diagram originally derive from a chapter by Frank Tuitt in Race and Higher Education. Readers may benefit from reading that chapter to understand the diagram used throughout this book. The basic premise of this book is that instruction and assessment are only effective when they consider students. That is true, but it is also true that instruction and assessment are not effective when they focus only on student input. Instruction and assessment must also take into account faculty strengths, diverse educational resources, institutional mission, accredi- tation requirements, job markets, and the larger cultural environment in which education is embedded. Student-centered learning will only bring about social change and growth when the Book Reviews 583 participants involved in a course are diverse and the course and institutional structures impel students to question existing norms based on their diverse backgrounds. One shortcoming of the book is that it does not address the possibility that students may represent oppressive ideas in a classroom while instructors may represent oppressed identities in the classroom. While the book does not engage in depth with social justice concepts, it is a strong overview of conducting student-centered assessment of library instruction.—Sarah Rose Fitzgerald, University of Alabama Sally Gardner Reed. The Good, the Great, and the Unfriendly: A Librarian’s Guide to Working with Friends Groups. Chicago: American Library Association, 2017. 157p. Paper, $57.00 (ISBN: 978-0838914984). Librarians can be a discerning and, at times, impossible audience to please. We read widely and voraciously, in print and online, in every genre and format: books, blogs, newspapers, social media posts, Sun- day flyers, you name it. Librarians also claim a sort of superpower that authorizes us to distinguish between appropriate formats. We might agree that, in most cases, an online search delivers decent and convenient information. Despite that, most librarians still maintain an awareness (and appreciation) of print-only sources for instruction, research, and professional guidance. For those of us working with rural or elderly populations, in communities with an abundance of low and moderate income households, or in deeply academic and historical fields, print sources might win the day. Books written for librarians then, particularly guides and manuals, walk a precarious path. In this day and age, does a narrowly focused manual need to exist in print? Especially one aimed at an expert audience with deep familiarity of the competing online sources? Sally Gardner Reed’s slim book, The Good, the Great, and the Unfriendly: A Librarian’s Guide to Working with Friends Groups is well aware of these hazards and works hard to present current information to a shrewd audience who knows whether to Google a solution or to look for one in the pages of a book. Reed’s expertise and professional experience are formidable. She has been publishing books and leading organizations focused on library friends groups, fundraising, and com- munity advocacy for three decades. Her earlier books, like Making the Case for Your Library: A How-To-Do-It Manual from 2001, or her 2004 guidebook, 101+ Great Ideas for Libraries and Friends: Marketing, Fundraising, Friends Development, and More predate iPhones, Facebook, and blogs as we know them. Her publishing oeuvre (that is, manuals and textbooks tailored specifically to public and academic library directors) was born in a print-based world of text- books and how-to manuals. She describes these “good ol’ days” in the opening pages of her book, recounting a simpler library, before online catalogs and digital resources. It was “easy peasy!” Reed exclaims, to deliver library services before things got complicated. As the cost of operating a library increased, and as social and economic inequalities deepened, the historical funding sources for libraries—like taxpayer funds, government allocations, or institutional commitments—fell short of the library’s goals to remain at the social and intellectual center of its community or campus. Friends groups materialized to bridge this gap, and Reed divides her book into three main sections to help build and maintain these relationships. _GoBack _GoBack _GoBack