Just as the Internet is likely to be one of the most disruptive overall technologies of a man's lifetime, Google Books may become one of the most disruptive technologies for academic libraries. The immediate challenge is that Google Book's deeper indexing and more advanced relevancy ranking usually works better than that of local catalogs--and it…

This article describes the opportunities out of the 2007 turmoil precipitated by the dramatic shifts that redefined the industry in 2006. The turmoil made companies that avoided major business transitions more attractive and sparked explosive interest in open source alternatives. Some companies held a steady course and benefited from the fallout.…

How librarians came to their careers is as varied as the people themselves, but despite some often highly publicized challenges for college and university librarians in the digital age, academic librarianship is good work, according to the "Library Journal's" Job Satisfaction Survey. This article presents the results of this survey. The…

In this article, the authors discuss how the University of Rochester's two-year ethnographic study reveals what students do on campus and how the library fits in. Under Nancy Fried Foster's guidance, teams of librarians and staff conducted a two-year investigation. The goal: to improve the libraries' reference services, facilities, and web pages…

Tom Peters packs 36 hours of work into the confines of a 24-hour day. Without breaking a sweat, he juggles multiple collaborative projects, which currently include an Illinois academic library shared storage facility; a multistate virtual reference and instruction service for blind and visually impaired individuals (InfoEyes); a virtual meeting…

Activities in 2006 pointed to strategic shifts in library automation. The dynamics of the business environment changed rapidly from a fragmented industry to a highly consolidated one. Though the integrated library system (ILS) continues to represent the largest portion of revenue, products that deal with electronic content and deliver better…

The ability to search and receive results in more than one database through a single interface--or metasearch--is something many users want. Google Scholar--the search engine of specifically scholarly content--and library metasearch products like Ex Libris's MetaLib, Serials Solution's Central Search, WebFeat, and products based on MuseGlobal used…

As a college student, Phil Davis intended to become a scientist. But as he studied population genetics of a family of mosses, monitoring his experiments daily, he wondered, "Is this really how I want to spend my life?" After taking time off to read philosophy and bike his way around France, his answer was, "No." Instead, he decided to advance the…

In fall 2003, Mt. Holyoke, an elite, largely undergraduate liberal arts college with a student population of roughly 2000, unveiled its take on the information commons. Located in an area known as Miles-Smith 4, the commons functions as a conduit between the main library and Dwight Hall, which houses the library offices, state-of-the-art media…

This brief article reports on the 12th national Association of College and Research Libraries' (ACRL) conference held April 7-10, 2004 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. William Mitchell, head of the media arts and sciences program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an architecture professor provided the conference attendees with the opening…

Discusses changes in library reference service that have occurred with growing Internet use. Topics include the human factor that is still needed; the nature of reference questions; the goal of user self-sufficiency; the invisible nature of much of librarians' work; and providing real-time, interactive point-of-need service to remote users. (LRW)

Open access publishing is a hot topic today. But open access publishing can have many different definitions, and pros and cons vary with the definitions. Open access publishing is especially attractive to companies and small colleges or universities that are likely to have many more readers than authors. A downside is that a membership fee sounds…

The American Library Association's (ALA) Annual Conference, June 24?30, in steamy Orlando, drew 19,575 people, including 5,739 exhibitors, the lowest total since Miami in 1994, not counting the SARS-shadowed conference in Toronto last year (see statistics, p. 15). Although this years conference was filled with exciting events, this abstract is…

On January 15, 2005, a standing-room-only crowd of librarians listened as a panel of experts, moderated by Columbia University's Jim Neal, voiced support for the National Institute of Health's (NIH) proposal to mandate free online access to the research it funds. This article briefly discusses some personal accounts where open access would have…

The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (UTC) offers student workshops that range from Cool New Web Stuff (what is on the web that can help make research or just plain life easier) and How To Use Google Scholar. These workshops are brilliant fodder for podcasting. In fact, the initial idea for its podcast project came from a student plagiarism…