According to a 2021 Pew Research report, over 80 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds use social media. Studies also show that higher education students use social media in both academic and everyday life. However, there is minimal research about how, or whether, librarians utilize social media in their library instruction as a source of information for…

Librarians at a community college in New York City identified that, unassisted, undergraduate students often find it difficult to categorize the various information formats they are locating and citing, such as a newspaper article, a book, a scholarly article, a blog or wiki entry, or a reference source. Due to their untrained approach defining…

This study reports faculty experiences regarding the discovery of scholarly content, highlighting similarities and differences across a range of academic disciplines. The authors interviewed twenty-five faculty members at a public, high-research university in the Midwest to explore the intersections of discovery, browsing, and format from diverse…

Difficulties with academic writing tasks, such as the literature review, impact students' timely completion of graduate degrees. A better understanding of graduate students' perceptions of writing the literature review could enable supervisors, administrators, service providers, and graduate students themselves to overcome these difficulties. This…

This paper reports the findings of a survey administered to a large academic university student population, assessing students' self-reported motivations, difficulties, and methods used in finding and using financial information. Results discussed include information types and sources students consult for financial information. The survey also…

This study aimed to determine which information resources Grand Valley State University (GVSU) alumni from four health science programs utilize in clinical practice. It also explored alumni opinions of their educational experiences at GVSU in relation to information literacy and library resources. A survey was administered to alumni who had…

This study establishes baseline information about the ways library publishing services integrate user studies of their readers, as well as common barriers to doing so. The Library Publishing Coalition defines library publishing as "the set of activities led by college and university libraries to support the creation, dissemination, and…

Researchers at Brigham Young University studied first-year students' information evaluation behaviours of open-access, popular news-based, non-academic source material on a variety of subjects. Using think-aloud protocols and screen-recording, researchers coded most and least used evaluation behaviours. Students most used an article's sources,…

We test whether and how well the presence of an embedded librarian improves the quality of student research. Students in introductory-level courses tend to have very low levels of research skills and experience. Though faculty are frustrated by this lack of skills, both students and faculty tend to have only a peripheral knowledge of the role…

In 2011, researchers at Bucknell University and Illinois Wesleyan University compared the search efficacy of Serial Solutions Summon, EBSCO Discovery Service, Google Scholar, and conventional library databases. Using a mixed-methods approach, qualitative and quantitative data were gathered on students' usage of these tools. Regardless of the…

An online survey of institutional repository (IR) managers identified copyright clearance trends in staffing and workflows. The majority of respondents followed a mediated deposit model, and reported that library personnel, instead of authors, engaged in copyright clearance activities for IRs. The most common "information gaps" pertained to the…

This article focuses on how electronic information resources influence the information-seeking process in the social sciences and humanities. It examines the information-seeking behavior of scholars in these fields, and extends the David Ellis model of information-seeking behavior for social scientists, which includes six characteristics:…

This report presents tabulations for the 2006 Academic Libraries Survey (ALS) conducted by the United States Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), within the Institute of Education Sciences. An academic library is defined as an entity in a postsecondary institution that provides all of the following: An…

This report presents tabulations for the 2004 Academic Libraries Survey (ALS) conducted by the United States Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). An academic library is defined as an entity in a postsecondary institution that provides all of the following: An organized collection of printed or other materials,…

This SPEC Kit, published six times per year, examines how Association of Research Libraries (ARL) libraries have structured themselves to identify networked information resources in the market, to evaluate them for purchase, to make purchasing decisions, to publicize them, and to assess their continued utility. In the summer of 1999, the survey…