When Leslie Polott arrived at the Hudson Library and Historical Society in 1996. She headed out into the community to find out what people wanted from their library. After rounds of surveys, focus groups, and town meetings, she knew: a library that was the center of their educational and cultural lives, that provided more opportunities for…

The most elemental identifier of a book is the international standard book number (ISBN). It allows publishers, booksellers, and libraries to label works in a consistent way and to distinguish not only among different titles but also among different versions of the same title, such as newer editions, various bindings, audio products, and…

While preparing to migrate from Innovative Interfaces' text-based serials module to its new Millennium Serials product, the author, a manager of technical services operations in a small academic library, found herself faced with a number of decisions regarding how to store holdings information. Holdings data is information about individual items…

As academic libraries move toward the electronic frontier for their serial subscriptions, there are several issues to be considered. This paper intends to outline the advantages and disadvantages with respect to electronic and paper serials, address selection criteria, and describe our practice in coping with these issues at the Leddy Library of…

Getting kids excited about the library isn't as difficult as media librarians think. All it takes is giving them some control. They'll be surprised at how quickly their attitudes change once they let them play a role in everything from programming and technology to book selection and design. It may take some getting used to, but listening to what…

This SPEC Kit and Flyer focus on the extent to which Association of Research Libraries (ARL) libraries engage in formal or organized customer service programs. Seventy-five out of the 121 member libraries responded to the customer service program survey (61%). The SPEC Flyer discusses results in terms of customer service program characteristics,…

A user evaluation of library services and facilities revealed a dichotomy of the user population into director and non-director subgroups. (Author/PF)

Many small and medium-sized companies see a library as a luxury they cannot afford. They may have room set aside with a small collection of books, periodicals or reports, yet the use of this often unsupervised storage system is minimal at best. These same companies, however, usually place great importance on maintenance of and access to…

Most countries have school legislation, and many have library legislation; however, in very few is school library legislation found. It is noteworthy that school libraries are the weakest in many library systems. There is a strong case to be made for a legal requirement that library services be established in all recognized schools and vocational…

This formal statement presents the principal objectives of the university, the goals of the library and nine specific objectives which define them, and more detailed descriptions of the policies which form a complex body of interrelated regulations designed to accomplish the library's critical objectives. (FM)

This collection of bibliographies funded by the state cooperative extension service lists books and articles on various aspects of rural librarianship. Topics include community development and community analysis, school-public library cooperation, administration of the small and medium-sized library, library networking and interlibrary…

An assessment of an increasingly tight national economy dictates a reevaluation of the costs and functions of the corporate special library if it is to survive recessionary pressures intact. Services which are crucial to daily business operation, not duplicated elsewhere, and of high visibility to upper management must become the prime focus of…

The Alberta Government Libraries' Council Job Specifications Committee presents an all-inclusive checklist of tasks which might be performed in a special library. Designed as a tool to aid in the development of job descriptions in a library setting, it is organized into three categories: library management, technical services, and public services.…

The author views the organization as a total operating system which mobilizes its resources for the sole reason of satisfying the wants of a market. The organization must consider the environmental forces of technology, and also social, economic, and competitive trends. (Author/JAB)