As the amount of online information continues to grow along with the changing landscape in higher education, academic libraries are facing changes where academic library leaders are navigating new challenges. Academic libraries provide different services depending on the institution. Institutions with fewer than 10,000 students were the target…

Today's library is still at the heart of all university activities, helping students and faculty become better learners, teachers, and researchers. In recent years there has emerged the formalizing of one or more of these activities into an Academic Commons. These centers of information have been labeled variously but they all share a commonality:…

For-profit schools constitute the fastest-growing sector of higher education institutions in the United States. Yet accompanying the phenomenal growth of these proprietary colleges and universities has been considerable controversy over the role that the profit motive should play in higher education. The literature of higher education contains…

Twenty scholarly papers and fifteen abstracts comprise the content of the sixteenth annual Brick and Click Libraries Conference, held annually at Northwest Missouri State University in Maryville, Missouri. The proceedings, authored by academic librarians and presented at the symposium, portray the contemporary and future face of librarianship. The…

This paper provides a means of quickly ascertaining the relative health of smaller academic libraries by presenting a top ten list of vitality indicators. The list is based on an observational convenience sampling of thirty smaller academic libraries across the United States. The indicators making the list were those which appeared most often in…

An examination of the Systems and Procedures Exchange Center's (SPEC) file of 72 annual reports from Association of Research Libraries (ARL) member institutions found that administrators were using annual reports for several purposes: as communication links with library users, the university administration, and the general university community,…

Describes a program developed at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) libraries that moved librarians from the centralized main library to college departments that are not served by branch libraries. Topics include remote access capabilities; librarians' roles, including reference librarian, instructor, Web master,…

This Systems and Procedures Exchange Center (SPEC) kit, an update of a 1975 kit, considers trends in the development and use of goals and objectives statements in Association of Research Libraries (ARL) member institutions, as illustrated in documents received in response to an August 1979 SPEC survey. The kit comprises: documents on developing…

Describes four library retreats held by the Bowling Green State University library staff from 1995 to 1998. The retreats reflect changes in library work and management theory that have occurred. The importance of technology to library work is recognized, but there is also a growing realization of the importance of developing a flexible staff…

The role of the university librarian in dealing with other members of the institution, including teachers, students, and administrators, is discussed from the perspective of a librarian in Bombay, India. Specific suggestions for improving relations are reviewed. (LBH)

At a two-day symposium held in DeKalb, Illinois, university administrators and library directors debated key issues of the library's role in higher education: invisible ownership of books, dual governance, on-campus competition for information delivery, collective bargaining and unions, government support, trends in higher education,…

This collection of statements of goals and objectives from member libraries of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) contains: (1) sections from management review and analysis program reports from the University of Washington Libraries and the University of Rochester Library; (2) a detailed organization description from the Columbia…

A survey of academic libraries which were members of the Association of Research Libraries in 1983-84 studies the organizational patterns that exist for collection development. Findings reveal that, although a variety of patterns exist, the one outstanding development has been the upgrading of the unit responsible for collection development.…

This document consists of seven issues of the ARL (Association of Research Libraries) Newsletter, covering February 2002 through December 2002. Most issues include some or all of the following sections: "Current Issues"; "Leadership and Management"; "New Measures Initiative"; "Statistics and Measurement";…

Offers a perspective on changes that have occurred in academic reference librarianship since 1980. Topics include librarians' responsibilities; the changing uses of reference services by students and faculty; technological advancements; the organization of libraries, including management styles and theories; roles of libraries and librarians; and…