The ways in which university quality assessments are developed reveal a great deal about value constructs surrounding higher education. Measures developed and consumed by external stakeholders, in particular, indicate which elements of academia are broadly perceived to be most reflective of quality. This paper examines the historical context of…

A limited number of interlocking institutions provide career opportunities within contemporary visual art, which affects both who is seen and written about. This paper compares the proportions of recent art exhibition reviews and catalogs to artists' race and gender, and how that is reflected in library collections. Overall, publications covered…

The purpose of this study is to learn more about virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) practices at the United States' top one hundred university libraries, as well as how they are engaging with the metaverse. We conducted qualitative and descriptive analysis on the websites of the top one hundred university libraries in the United…

Although their research agendas may vary widely, school library researchers from around the world share the common goal of conducting studies designed to advance the field of school librarianship. International school library scholars are united in their efforts to prove that quality school library programs can have a significant impact on student…

Mary Virginia Gaver conducted the first correlational research in the field of school libraries. Many in the field trace the beginning of the search for proof that effective school libraries impact student learning to her study published just over fifty years ago. While conducting her study she developed measures of the effectiveness of school…

A citation analysis of chemistry PhD dissertations at the University of Texas at Austin yielded data on how often graduate students cite books in their bibliographies, and on the characteristics of the books cited, in terms of age and local ownership. The analysis examined samples of dissertations selected from five discrete years--1988, 2006,…

Many librarians evaluate local Interlibrary Loan (ILL) statistics as part of collection development decisions concerning new subscriptions. In this study, the authors examine whether the number of ILL article requests received in one academic year can predict the use of those same journal titles once they are added as library resources. There is…

In 1986, Constance Mellon found that 75 to 85 percent of undergraduate students experienced library anxiety as well as shame about their anxiety. Fifteen years earlier, Helen Block Lewis began her groundbreaking research in shame theory. This paper explores the affective components of library anxiety using the pioneering research of Constance…

This study examines the role of online communities in connecting and supporting librarian researchers, through the analysis of member activities in the online community for academic librarians that attended the 2014 Institute for Research Design in Librarianship (IRDL). The 2014 IRDL cohort members participated in the online community via Twitter…

The research guide is a common tool librarians use to communicate with and instruct their audiences. Despite their prevalence and value to users, research guides remain underused. There are many examples of efforts encouraging guide use, but few studies have measured the effectiveness of that promotion. Academic Outreach librarians at Virginia…

Research in academic libraries has recently seen an increase in the use of ethnographic-based methods to collect data. Primarily used to learn about library users and their interaction with spaces and resources, the methods are proving particularly useful to academic libraries. The data ethnographic methods retrieve is rich, context specific, and…

Introduction: The article contributes to conceptual studies of information behaviour research by examining the conceptualisations of information seeking and related terms such as information search and browsing. Method: The study builds on Bates' integrated model of information seeking and searching, originally presented in 2002. The model was…

One of the most enduring and controversial metaphors to describe the academic library is this: "The academic library is the heart of the university." For 150 years, librarians have both embraced and rejected this metaphor in equal measure. For some, the metaphor is old, dusty, and ignorant of contemporary library practices; for others,…

A solid professional performance on the part of academic librarians at present calls for adequate knowledge about copyright law, not only for the development of their own tasks without infringing the law, but also to guide and provide pertinent advice for library users (faculty and students). This paper presents the results of an online survey of…

The 1961 Copyright Office study on renewals, authored by Barbara Ringer, has cast an outsized influence on discussions of the U.S. 1923-1963 public domain. As more concrete data emerge from initiatives such as the large-scale determination process in the Copyright Review Management System (CRMS) project, questions are raised about the reliability…