Purposeful assessment of space for the understanding and improvement of the academic library is a relatively new area of inquiry. This essay offers a framework to consider different factors affecting such an assessment and insights for undertaking a meaningful inquiry about the relationship of space to an academic library's evolving purpose as…

When library education was institutionalized at universities, it pursued a social scientific path of disciplinary growth; objectivity and neutrality became ideals of library education. A different conception of social science provides the basis for recent challenges to the library and information science profession's traditional perception of…

Prior to 1997, the University of Oxford in Great Britain had approximately one hundred autonomous libraries with little coordination of services, collection development, or management among them. In that year a new director was hired with the mandate to integrate many of these libraries into one centralized system. Over the past seven years…