The development of patron-driven acquisition (PDA) as a viable collections practice is encouraging many academic libraries to be proactive about sharing significant collection development responsibilities with their patrons. The adoption of PDA represents a challenge to some long-held understandings about libraries and collections, however, and…

Liaison librarians and faculty in chemistry, English, and psychology departments at colleges and universities in the United States were surveyed. They answered questions about services provided by the liaison and satisfaction. Liaisons' satisfaction with their performance was associated with active liaison service, such as recent contact with the…

Partnerships and collaborations among libraries are proven to enhance collective resources. The collaboration of multi-type libraries offers a unique opportunity to explore the potential of different libraries working together to provide the best possible service to their community members. This article provides a detailed report of a multi-type…

Forty years ago, the author arrived in Boston with an associate's degree and two years' experience in the corporate world. The idea of working at a college appealed, so she boarded the B line trolley to Boston College. She arrived on campus, found the human resources office, took a typing test, interviewed with the director of freshman financial…

Emanating from the ground-breaking Library Impact Data Project, the aim of the Roving Librarian project first initiated in 2011 was to offer personalized help outside of the traditional library to library non-users in social or academic settings using Android and the iPad tablets. It was thought that the portability and flexibility of these…

Princess Bernice Pauahi Bishop directed the five trustees of her estate to erect a school for Hawaiian children (Bishop 1883). Her wish was to improve the capability and well being of her people through education, and to provide an environment where each would have an opportunity to practice and perpetuate Hawaiian values and traditions. In 2008…

In this article Ira Socol explores the pros and cons of Paul Tough's "How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character." As Tough told Valerie Strauss, "The book is about two things: first, an emerging body of research that shows the importance of so-called non-cognitive skills in children's…

This article describes the use of scenarios as a tool to assist a large distance learning library service in its strategic planning. Through a description of the scenario process from beginning to end, the authors detail the steps that the library director and the consultant took initially; their missteps; and the successful conclusion. This study…

Technology lending has proven to be one of the most popular services that the Ryerson University Library and Archives (RULA) has offered in the past few years. Given the number of commuting digital natives comprising our student body, the library wanted to know how these students were using our current laptop loan program and how this service…

Jill Powell, engineering librarian from Cornell University, visited the library at NASA Goddard in Greenbelt, Maryland in July 2013, interviewing library staff and selected NASA scientists. She studied the library's digital projects, publications, services, and operations. She also interviewed several NASA scientists on information-seeking…

Information anxiety is a serious issue that has the potential to hinder the success of a large percentage of the population in both education and professional settings. It has become more prevalent as societies begin to focus more on the value of technology, multitasking, and instant information access. The majority of the population has felt, to…

This bibliometric study used citation analysis to uncover citing characteristics in the burgeoning academic field of emergency management. Of the 281 degree programs listed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency nationwide, those at community colleges accounted for 17% of the total. Using the interdisciplinary database of Academic Search…

For nearly a decade now, librarians have discussed and deliberated ways, for the sake of convenience, to integrate internet-like searching into their own catalogs to mimic what academic library patrons have been using outside the library. Discovery tools and web-scale discovery services (WSDS) attempt to provide users with a similar one-stop shop…

Selecting appropriate performance improvement interventions is a critical component of a comprehensive model of performance improvement. Intervention selection is an interconnected process involving analysis of an organization's environment, definition of the performance problem, and identification of a performance gap and identification of causal…

In late December, a set of articles and essays in "The New York Times" focused on the public library as a place, and on the changing meaning of that place with the rise of electronic books and the demise of brick-and-mortar bookstores like Borders. As librarians "struggle with the task of redefining their roles and responsibilities in a digital…