This article presents Oregon State University's experience launching an innovative Open Textbook initiative in spring 2014. The partners, Open Oregon State and the Oregon State University Libraries and Press, aimed to reduce the cost of course materials for students while ensuring the content created was peer-reviewed and employed multimedia…

Despite the clear negative impact of high textbook costs on students, limits--including space, funding, and policies--prevent many academic libraries from fully supporting textbook collections. Partnering with other campus units on textbook lending requires creative thinking but can provide students access to other services in addition to the…

Games and other forms of play are used in today's libraries to attract underserved patrons, to introduce patrons to other library resources and services, and to facilitate engagement between library patrons. While many perceive gaming as a new library service, gaming services have been part of librarianship since the nineteenth century through…

Support for the modular system of building construction, touted in the second half of the 20th century as the best basis for academic library building design, appears to be waning. A study of "green" libraries in 2008 revealed that not only has energy conservation become important, but that spaces designed for users rather than books…

As future professionals, graduate students must be information literate; however, information literacy instruction of graduate students is often neglected. To address this need, we created literature review workshops to serve graduate students from a wide range of subject disciplines at a point of shared need. Not only did this strategy prove to…

Oregon State University (OSU) libraries, where the author serves as lead programmer, have developed a tool to make it easier for librarians to build and maintain interactive course assignment pages (ICAPs) and subject research guides (SRGs). That tool, Library a la Carte, enables librarians with minimal technical expertise to create dynamic…

We should be grateful that Terry Reese had to work his way through college. As a work-study student, taught to do cartographic cataloging in the University, of Oregon's map library, he discovered the mental challenges libraries offered. Later he became Oregon State University (OSU)'s cataloger for networked resources and digital unit production…

Ongoing discussion between the Oregon State University (OSU) libraries' acting instruction coordinator and the Assistant Composition Coordinator focuses on improving collaboration between our programs and more effectively integrating the research process into the English composition curriculum. We briefly describe a qualitative analysis of the…

This article features MarcEdit, a free, Windows-based, metadata editing software suite that is developed and supported by the author as part of his contribution to the library profession. MarcEdit Suite is a tool that helps one with MARC coding and conversion and to perform database cleanups, to generate temporary electronic journal holdings, or…

Since 2001, librarians at Oregon State University's Valley Library have been working to build a "teaching library" supported by a clearly articulated instruction program. From the start, we believed that we needed to assess the teaching library's impact, not only to determine the success or failure of our efforts but also to demonstrate…

Describes the Pacific Northwest Conspectus Database, a regional resource assessment tool which includes information about library collections in Alaska, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, and Washington. Use of the database by academic, public, and special librarians to better manage their collections and to coordinate planning and purchasing with other…

Discusses Oregon library automation projects, including Internet connectivity and a statewide multitype library network; a bibliographic information system with college and university libraries, including a union catalog; a Portland Area Library System that connects multitype libraries; and library staff training for the Internet. (LRW)