The Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) collects institution-level data from postsecondary institutions in the United States (50 states and the District of Columbia) and other U.S. jurisdictions. This "First Look" presents findings from the provisional data of the IPEDS spring 2016 data collection, which included four…

As more students, faculty, and staff from traditionally underrepresented groups enter universities and colleges, academic libraries must find ways to reach out to these groups in order to better meet their unique educational needs. In this article, librarians from two large public universities describe how they used data about their communities to…

This article builds on the 2007 College and Research Libraries article, "The Librarian, the Machine, or a Little of Both." Since that time, Oakland University Libraries implemented changes to its instruction program that reflect larger trends in teaching and assessment throughout the profession; following these revisions, librarians…

Recent changes in Canadian copyright law have prompted Canada's educational institutions to reexamine their need for a blanket copying license. Users' rights under the amended Copyright Act now include fair dealing for purposes of education, and the Supreme Court has established that copying short excerpts for classroom use can qualify as fair…

At the State University of New York at Oswego (SUNY Oswego), a faculty member and advisement coordinator, both of the biological sciences department, and the biological sciences librarian have worked together since 2013 to present a workshop called Writing for the Biological Sciences. Offered once per semester, the workshop is sponsored by the…

Gaps between users' and designers' mental models of digital libraries often result in adverse user experiences. This article details an exploratory user research study at a large, predominantly online university serving non-traditional distance education students with the goal of understanding these gaps. Using qualitative data, librarians created…

This paper identifies approaches, challenges, and best practices related to planning and designing today's academic library learning spaces. As part of the Project Information Literacy (PIL) Practitioner Series, qualitative data is presented from 49 interviews conducted with a sample of academic librarians, architects, and library consultants.…

This column focuses on the conceptual and practical aspects of teaching information literacy and opens with the question: What is a university library's relationship with peer tutoring services on campus? Peaceful coexistence, détente, or active collaboration? Armies of tutors employed through student services may routinely use a university…

This article makes the case for librarians to engage with second-year students as part of the burgeoning movement in higher education to provide dedicated programming and experiences for second-year students. Grounded in development theories and transition theory, the article describes the special needs characteristic of typical second-year…

This study aims at gaining a better understanding of the current state and needs of RDA training among cataloging and metadata practitioners. Using nationwide survey data focusing on the academic library sector, this study finds that while training activities since RDA's release in 2010 show a positive correlation with catalogers' levels of RDA…

The main purpose of this study is to examine the college students' perception of library services, and to what extent the quality of library services influences students' satisfaction. The findings depict the relationship between academic libraries and their users in today's digital world and identify critical factors that may sustain a viable…

This study analyzed citations in four journals, "Annals of the Association of American Geographers," "Cartography and Geographic Information Science," "International Journal of Geographical Information Science," and "Cartographic Journal," using Bradford's Law of Scattering to identify three influence zones…

How do you effectively train and assess student staff in a learning commons environment? How do you foster a student-led approach while maintaining accurate and high-level service? How do you create an environment where student staff are engaged and motivated to succeed? Peer-to-peer service models are fundamental to many learning commons…

The Imposter Phenomenon (IP) is an observed anxiety caused by an individual's feelings of fraudulence, fear of being exposed as a fraud, and inability to internalize personal achievement. This study measures the incidence of the IP among librarians at college and research institutions in the United States and Canada and seeks to identify factors…

This article describes the application of electronic resources management (ERM) to digital repository management at the Health Sciences and Human Services Library at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. The authors discuss electronic resources management techniques, through the application of "Techniques for Electronic Management,"…