When a university acquires the library of a national institute and the institute's active and worldwide membership expects continued and uninterrupted access to services from the collection, shockwaves can reverberate throughout the university's main library and among its staff. This was especially true for the Reference Department of the…

People look at one billion dollars in one of two ways: if it is the result of the long, hard effort of years of fundraising, they rejoice; if it signifies an astronomical budget deficit, they cringe. How, then, should people respond as a community to reaching the $1 billion mark ($1,242,436,438, to be exact) in this year's spending for public…

Academic library faculty require a supportive atmosphere in order to successfully engage in research and publication. At Oregon State University, the Library Faculty Association (LFA) provides venues for peer criticism of manuscripts and presentations and for the discussion of professional issues. A survey of LFA members on their level of…

The misconceptions that students bring with them, or that arise during instruction, are a critical barrier to learning. Implicit-confidence tests, a simple modification of the multiple-choice test, can be used as a strategy for recognizing student misconceptions. An important issue, however, is whether such tests are gender-neutral. We analyzed…

A brief picture of the academic library of the future is presented and anxiety is expressed over the impact of technology-enhanced and online education, which has become a critical part of educational enterprise, on these libraries. The growing need for expanding the people's role as educators and scholarly publishers into agents of literacy and…

In 2005, the University of Texas (UT) at Austin made some surprising national headlines when it removed the book collection from its undergraduate library. Behind the sensational headlines, the move was in fact more "life-as-usual" than "radical change." In today's academic libraries, technology is constantly redefining library…

"ARL Statistics 2005-06" is the latest in a series of annual publications that describe collections, staffing, expenditures, and service activities for the 123 members of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL). Of these, 113 are university libraries and 10 are public, governmental, and nonprofit research libraries. Data reported by libraries…

In accordance with the recent philosophy of quality in higher education embraced by European institutions, a checklist for the qualitative evaluation of service charters in academic libraries is proposed. The checklist is based on the existing literature on the topic, not only the large number of research papers on quality issues in general, but…

The Lloyd Sealy Library of John Jay College of Criminal Justice started as a small collection of books in the corner of the New York City Police Academy. A little over four decades later, it now contains one of the best collections of criminal justice materials in the world. Despite fiscal setbacks and tough times for the University and the…

This article analyzes a textbook collection project that spanned three semesters at the University of Minnesota. The project consisted of collecting extra copies from professors in several departments and placing the items on reserves for short term circulation; there was a small amount of money dedicated to the project. An analysis of circulation…

Learning management systems (LMS), such as Blackboard, make it possible to include information literacy in courses online. This survey assessed librarians' use of learning management systems. Results indicate that utilizing the LMS to enhance information literacy remains underdeveloped. The author recommends suggestions for campus-wide…

The study describes the methodology of a comparative citation analysis, discusses the results of its application to the analysis of published works and student theses at a single research university and evaluates the findings as a background for the management of a university library collection.

Promoting services is a conundrum for any organization. This is especially true for an academic library promoting distance library services. Systems thinking, process mapping, team learning, and diffusion of information practices offer ways of thinking about promoting services that help those involved find novel ways to approach promoting distance…

This paper outlines the principles and theory of performance support (in general) and of electronic performance support (in particular). It explains why the design and creation of electronic performance support systems are so important as a mechanism for providing scaffolding environments for use in improving the learning experience for new (and…

Twenty-three scholarly papers and twelve abstracts comprise the content of the eleventh annual Brick and Click Libraries Symposium, held at Northwest Missouri State University in Maryville, Missouri. The peer-reviewed proceedings, authored by academic librarians and presented at the symposium, portray the contemporary and future face of…