Libraries have limited budgets and Collection Development Librarians can be faced with difficult decisions in the spending of their allocated funds. This paper discusses how the Tasmanian Polytechnic Launceston Campus Library discovered a gap in their collection and addressed this situation without funding. The Library wished to purchase fiction…

Since 2008, Victoria University (VU) Library has employed 20 or more Student Assistants annually who work on a casual basis for up to 12 hours per week during terms/semesters to staff the Library in Study Hall mode (where there is self-service access to PCs and collections and limited staff assistance). This initiative appears to have been highly…

Academic libraries in Japan are well resourced by international standards, and support Japan's internationally recognized research capability well, but there are also ways in which they reflect Japan's strong bureaucratic culture. Recent changes to the status of national university libraries have seen a new interest in customer service, and…

Preservation and conservation of library materials is an important aspect of library and information management. Their importance and necessity are more paramount in countries where resources are limited and libraries need to balance them with the needs of an ever increasing number of students hoping to use them. This article reports on the…

This paper is a practical and personal perspective on the challenges faced by special collections in an increasingly digital environment, and the strategies employed to promote their unique resources to the academic and wider communities, including the value of promoting heritage through reconstructing collections and the place of expertise in the…

Everyone in the business of raising funds for graduate and professional schools knows that the effort has certain challenges. Deborah McCreery, of Widener University School of Law, identifies two main hurdles to alumni fundraising at Widener Law: (1) student loan debt; and (2) a perception problem. At Widener Law and other professional and…

Despite the stereotype of libraries as peaceful retreats, unacceptable behaviour is a reality that desk staff have to deal with. This paper outlines the results of two surveys conducted at Charles Darwin University Library to investigate the extent to which this is a problem in Australian academic libraries. The first survey went to CAUL (Council…

There is a general perception that as librarians, we know what constitutes and defines a rare book, that our heritage book collections are well-documented and their future survival is planned for and secure. This discussion paper asks whether our definitions of heritage material might be too narrow and whether they reflect the reality across all…

This paper reports on a questionnaire survey of 16 national libraries designed to clarify how national libraries attempt to justify their web archiving activities. Results indicate they envisage that a) the benefits brought about by their initiatives are greater than the overall costs, b) the costs imposed on libraries are greater than the costs…

This paper looks at the challenges that libraries in Africa face in responding to massification of higher education by discussing the University of Zambia library's response in library and information resources provision. As a result of massification of higher education, libraries have been forced not only to employ new and different strategies to…

The aim of this research was to investigate current issues faced by public library staff in rural South Australia and to examine some of the reasons why people choose to work in rural libraries. The study took a mixed methods approach, combining interviews and questionnaires to gain a fuller understanding of the issues and experiences of rural…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to assess costs in the National and University Library of Croatia for processing Croatian web resources and the maintenance and development of the service, and to analyse the present organisation and workflow of their processing, and to propose improvements. Design/methodology/approach: The assessment period…

The President of ALIA writes about expectations for the Public Libraries Summit, and provides an account of what took place on the day of the meeting, and what has taken place since. In funding terms, the most likely areas of productive engagement with the federal government are considered to be: children, early learning and a literate Australia;…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of The Bridging Worlds Conference which was held in October 2008 in Singapore. Design/methodology/approach: One of the main topics the National Library Board of Singapore, the organising party, wished to address was the roles cultural institutions, such as libraries, may play in…

The teaching of mathematical modeling to undergraduate students requires that students are given ample opportunity to develop their own models and experience first-hand the process of model building. Finding an appropriate context within which modeling can be undertaken is not a simple task as it needs to be readily understandable and seen as…