The problem undertaken in this study was the impact of the COVID-19 on academic-library directors at small, private, liberal-arts institutions in Wisconsin. The purpose of this study was to understand the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic closures on collection development and reference interviews. The participants were seven academic-library…

Student employees fulfill an essential role at all academic libraries, but budget and staffing cuts have made student work even more imperative at small, public institutions. This article examines a reference service redesign at Adams State University through the lens of the student circulation employees. Student employee feedback was directly…

Two research questions guided this study: (1) Is there a gap in customer service quality perception between librarians (service providers) and patrons (service beneficiaries)?; and (2) How do patrons perceive the relational service qualities of librarians who staff the reference desk? Quantitative results based on a Likert scale survey showed no…

Are services that were once intended to be exclusively available to the distance learning population now typically available for all users in a university community? This article seeks to investigate this question using two different methods. First, an unobtrusive study of 100 library Websites was conducted to determine whether these libraries…

Student workers are a well-established component of academic library operations. Recently, their traditional role has expanded to include responsibilities that were previously assigned to librarians, including in-person and virtual reference support. This trend has raised concerns about service quality and highlighted the importance of adequate…

Peer learning dynamics have proven powerful in collegiate contexts. These dynamics should be leveraged at the undergraduate level in academic libraries for reference provision and basic information literacy instruction. Drawing on the literature of peer learning, documented examples of peer reference and instruction in academic libraries, and…

This study conducted a systematic sample of every 70th reference transaction from over a three-year period and analyzed 1,852 reference transactions asked at an academic library system's fifteen face-to-face (f2f) service points as well as via telephone, e-mail, and chat. Findings indicate two-thirds of the total questions asked were…

This report presents tabulations for the 2012 Academic Libraries Survey (ALS) conducted by the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), within the Institute of Education Sciences. The 2012 ALS population included postsecondary institutions with all of the following: total library expenditures that exceed…

The growth in number and kind of online reference services has resulted in both new users consulting library research services as well as new patterns of service use. Staffing in-person and virtual reference services desks adequately requires a systematic analysis of patterns of use across service points in order to successfully meet fluctuating…

The purpose of this study was to measure the degree to which academic libraries or library staff members throughout the United States adhere to the Guidelines for Virtual Reference Services provided by the Reference & User Services Association (RUSA). The results of the study were analyzed to identify specific areas where improvement is needed…

This report presents tabulations for the 2010 Academic Libraries Survey (ALS) conducted by the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), within the Institute of Education Sciences. The 2010 ALS population included postsecondary institutions with all of the following: total library expenditures that exceed…

This paper will look at the services presently offered to distance students by libraries within the categories of professional staff, access to resources, reference assistance, and library user instruction. It will then offer the argument that these services could be improved by developing embedded librarians within online academic courses as a…

Each year the State Library sends annual report forms to California's public, academic, special, state agency, and county law libraries. Statistical data from those reports are tabulated in this publication, with directory listings published in the companion volume, "California Library Directory." For this fiscal year, 389 libraries of…

This report presents tabulations for the 2008 Academic Libraries Survey (ALS) conducted by the United States Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), within the Institute of Education Sciences. This First Look summarizes services, staff, collections, and expenditures of academic libraries in 2- and 4-year,…

This bibliographic essay discusses a variety of items from the literature on the evaluation of reference services and reference personnel. A model for the evaluation process is presented on which the literature review is based. (Contains 48 references.) (LRW)