A national research study was undertaken to identify and clarify issues related to the employment in academic settings of African librarians who have relocated to the United States. It examined, by means of a survey, employment issues concerned with education, credentialing, language skills and cultural bias from the perspective of those…

With the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University, the author has begun to build an open-access digital repository for poetry chapbooks. The repository is essentially a chapbook exchange: a place for poets to share their current works. Users are invited to share their chapbooks via upload and as such gain access to the chapbook repository.…

Some job descriptions of academic librarians, tenure track or otherwise, will emphasize publication, while in others, it is essentially an irrelevant factor. Some librarians have a combination of education and experience, however, that permits them to undertake research and writing in scholarly fields other than librarianship. In some ways,…

The open access (OA) movement is working to transform scholarly communication around the world, but this philosophy can also apply to metadata and cataloging records. While some notable, large academic libraries, such as Harvard University, the University of Michigan, and the University of Cambridge, released their cataloging records under OA…

The first section of this article reviews the literature on the changing face of reference, beginning with a discussion of the national decline in reference transactions, its causes, and the likelihood that online reference services might one day halt or reverse the decline. It then analyzes definitions of the term "reference," pointing…

The use of distance learning technology has allowed Northern Kentucky University's W. Frank Steely Library to remove traditional boundaries between both distance and on-campus students. An emerging model that applies these distance learning methodologies to all students has proven effective for enhancing reference and instructional services. This…

With the migration from Docutek to Ares Course Reserves management system, the University of Denver's Penrose Course Reserves department reached out to faculty at the university through a mixed methods survey to determine their level of satisfaction. The Ares system, reserve-related improvements, and communication results are discussed. (Contains…

A survey of college and university archivists revealed that their roles and responsibilities are broad and diverse. Archival responsibilities have expanded across the board. For the purposes of this study, survey respondents were divided into two groups: archivists with and archivists without library responsibilities. Archivists with library…

In the past 15 years a number of school shootings have captured international attention and sparked heated debates. In the aftermath of such tragedies, those directly affected and people from all walks of life expressed their condolences in a variety of ways. Following the tragic events of April 16, 2007, Virginia Tech received tens of thousands…

The paper analyzes problems of theorizing and evaluating a short series of "Library Academy" events within a Carnegie Corporation-funded project to improve library service to researchers in six South African universities. (Contains 1 table.)

In the last decade Australian academic libraries have increasingly aligned their research support services with assessment criteria used in the national research evaluation exercise (Excellence for Research in Australia). The same period has seen growing interest in research impact outside of traditional measures, such as bibliometrics. Social…

Since the earliest days of the profession, academic librarians have attempted to reconcile their status within the academy. This project takes a new approach to this effort by using Lee Bolman and Terrence Deal's "Four Frames" model to analyze the issues. To more closely examine the dynamics, tensions, and implications associated with…

Introduction: By applying the visitor and resident framework on e-book usage, the article explores whether the concepts of a resident and a visitor can help to explain e-book use, and can help to gain a better insight into users' motivations for e-book use. Method: A questionnaire and semi-structured interviews were conducted with users of the…

The goal of this report is to provide an empirically-based assessment, based on WorldCat bibliographic and holdings data, of the size, scope, and salient features of these collections, with special attention to identifying and characterizing segments consisting of relatively scarce and relatively widely-held materials. The analysis also employs a…

To determine how academic library leaders make decisions about their organization's future and how they effect changes, the author interviewed 44 university librarians and deans from institutions belonging to the Association of American Universities (AAU). The author analyzed the interviews using content analysis to identify the most frequent…