Download rates of academic journals have joined citation counts as commonly used indicators of the value of journal subscriptions. While citations reflect worldwide influence, the value of a journal subscription to a single library is more reliably measured by the rate at which it is downloaded by local users. If reported download rates accurately…

Responsible Operations is intended to help chart library community engagement with data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence (AI) and was developed in partnership with an advisory group and a landscape group comprised of more than 70 librarians and professionals from universities, libraries, museums, archives, and other…

Journey mapping, a method of collecting data that illustrates individuals' paths toward a specific goal, was originally developed for use in retail/customer service environments. Much of the literature describes its application in examining customer behavior when navigating merchants' Websites, allowing researchers to examine the effectiveness,…

Aim/Purpose: This study examines differences in credit and noncredit users' learning and usage of the Plant Sciences E-Library (PASSEL, http://passel.unl.edu), a large international, open-source multidisciplinary learning object repository. Background: Advances in online education are helping educators to meet the needs of formal academic credit…

The Saskatchewan Music Collection (SMC) is a local music collection held at the University of Saskatchewan. This case study examines a project to digitize and present this unique special collection in the online environment. The project aims to facilitate access to the collection, preserve the collection and promote scholarship and interest in the…

Soon after the university movement started in the late 1800s, academic libraries became the dominant providers of the tools and services required to locate and access scholarly information. However, with the advent of alternate discovery services, such as Google Scholar, in conjunction with open access scholarly content, researchers now have the…

With both budget dollars and buying power shrinking for academic library collections, the selection of materials is a series of crucial choices. With increases in numbers of online programs, how can we determine if what we are buying is in fact what our users need? E-reserves are an increasingly popular way to provide digital copies of course…

The management and curation of digital geospatial data has become a central concern for many academic libraries. Geospatial data is a complex type of data critical to many different disciplines, and its use has become more expansive in the past decade. The University of Idaho Library maintains a geospatial data repository called the Interactive…

Increasingly libraries are expected to play a role in scientific data curation initiatives, i.e., "the management and preservation of digital data over the long-term." This case study offers a novel approach for identifying researchers who are receptive toward library involvement in data curation. The authors interviewed researchers at…

Any librarian who has managed electronic resources has experienced the--for want of words--"joy" of gathering and analyzing usage statistics. Such statistics are important for evaluating the effectiveness of resources and for making important budgeting decisions. Unfortunately, the data are usually tedious to collect, inconsistently organized, of…

E-books have been around for more than 10 years but are still a relatively new phenomenon to many librarians and publishers. With the introduction of e-book readers, the e-book has become mainstream, with recent triple-digit annual increases in sales. But what place do they have in the library? In this volume, Sue Polanka brings together a variety…

Discusses the ARL (Association of Research Libraries) E-Metrics project that is investigating problems related to collecting and using data for electronic materials and services. Describes a survey of libraries that focused on data collection activities and showed a lack of preparation as well as a lack of consistent statistics from database…