A key area of debate within the public and academic library sectors across the world is use of physical space. Changing ideas about what a library should be, coupled with the growth of digital collections, has raised fundamental questions about how library buildings are used and the role of space in library services. Alongside these drivers is the…

Tufts University Hirsh Health Sciences Library created a Facebook page and a corresponding managing committee in March 2010. Facebook Page Insights data collected from the library's Facebook page were statistically analyzed to investigate patterns of user engagement. The committee hoped to improve posting practices and increase user engagement…

In 2007, New York University's Bobst Library assembled a group of staff charged with suggesting improvements to circulation policy. As a result of these efforts many changes were implemented at the beginning of the 2007-2008 academic year, including extended loan periods and the elimination of routine daily overdue fines. The changes were…

The inclusion or not of chat services within Virtual Reference (VR) is an important topic for university libraries. Increasingly, email supported by a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) database is suggested in the scholarly literature as the preferred, cost-effective means for providing university VR services. This paper examines these issues and…

Automated storage/retrieval systems (ASRSs) are playing an integral part in today's library operations and collections management. Eastern Michigan University installed an ASRS as part of the new Halle Library, which opened in May 1998, to provide "storage" for up to 800,000 items. Over the past 10 years our policies and procedures have…

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…

Purpose: This paper seeks to provide an insight into the implementation of some of the innovative Web 2.0 applications at Jaypee University of Information Technology with the aim of exploring the expectations of the users and their awareness and usage of such applications. Design/methodology/approach: The study was undertaken at the Learning…

To evaluate the current state of resource sharing and cooperative collection development, this paper examines the relationship between less commonly taught language collections (LCTL) and ILL services. The study examined multiple years of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's resource-sharing data. This paper provides a historical…

"Research Library Issues" ("RLI") focuses on current and emerging topics that are strategically important to research libraries. The articles explore issues, share information, pose critical questions, and provide examples. This issue includes the following articles: (1) Special Issue on Diversity (Mark A. Puente); (2)…

Recent surveys indicate that many colleges and universities have reached a pivotal moment in assessing the function and future development of their institutional repositories. Other surveys convey that archivists are participating in the development and implementation of institutional repositories at a variety of levels and have contributed to the…

The author recently asked his colleagues, "How can libraries determine the value in collecting, managing, preserving, and/or cataloging e-resources?" hoping to challenge readers to come up with some thoughtful opinions and useful tips. Not surprisingly, he received a handful of substantially different but uniformly provocative and creative…

This article presents a case study of the intranet implementation and adoption process of a SharePoint intranet at a small academic library and investigates why the many Web 2.0 tools of the library intranet are currently underused. Staff interviews showed that common goals for an intranet, such as information dissemination, knowledge sharing,…

Libraries are widely known as institutions that access, organize, and preserve collections of information. Libraries are also dynamic administrative entities that generate and exchange internal business information. From small operations with limited staff and technology to large, multidepartmental institutions with full IT support, libraries…

The social work library at USC provides a case study of an academic library's transition to an information center service model. Analysis of the collection, user community, Web 2.0 applications, and Web usage data demonstrates how the changes facilitated library services and information literacy instruction. (Contains 6 tables and 3 figures.)

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…