Librarians play a central role in advancing colleges' and universities' strategic priorities through constant collaboration. Embedding oneself at as many venues as possible will ensure that library staff, collections, and services are more fully integrated into all aspects of campus life. Participation by librarians helps the campus move forward…

This article reports on a library renovation at California State Polytechnic University at Pomona which incurs complaints from professors and librarians about a shift from print to online materials. The $60-million project at Cal Poly is providing a difficult lesson in the challenges of library renovation, and in the changing role of one of the…

A quantitative study of a university chat reference service (online synchronous) addresses the following research questions: (1) What types of questions are being asked? (2) Who is asking the questions of the service? and (3) Did the customers get correct answers to their questions? All the transcripts (351) from January through August 2002 were…

This paper discusses a formal study conducted in 2001 at Brigham Young University to determine the value of the library to the university community. Methods used to collect data for the study included an e-mail survey, usage statistics, naturalistic observations, and interviews. Two years after the study, the authors wondered if the conclusions of…

OpenURL resolver is the next big thing for libraries. An OpenURL resolver is simply a piece of software that sucks in attached data and serves up a Web page that tells one where he or she can get the book or article represented by it. In this article, the author describes how he designed an OpenURL resolver for his library, the Lewis & Clark…

The number of electronic resources has climbed up steadily in recent times. Some of these e-resources are reference sources, mostly in Science, Technology and Medicine (STM), which publishers convert to electronic for obvious reasons. The library budgets for materials usually have two main lines, budget for one time purchase (monographs) and…

While it is certain that there is a technology presence on all campuses, further investigation suggests that faculty use of teaching with technology is far from a universal phenomenon. Anecdotal reports from staff tell of low turnouts among faculty who claim that they have no time to invest in learning the necessary skills despite expensive…

Researchers from Southern Illinois University Carbondale (SIUC) surveyed faculty members from 10 academic research libraries to learn about scholarly publishing activities, attitudes, and policies. Areas of special interest included the effect of publishers' intellectual property policies and institutional promotion and tenure processes on library…

This document is a statement of guidelines for the collection of reference materials at the Ethel K. Smith Library in Wingate University (North Carolina). The library's mission statement is given at the outset. Then parameters are established for the reference collection's scope and size, including subject-area and media priorities. The statement…

As the entity traditionally responsible for serving the information needs of the university, research libraries have little choice but to change dramatically in the next 25 years. This SPEC Survey on library reorganization seeks to understand how librarians have sought to meet this challenge through the redesigning of their organization.…

In the field of total quality management (TQM), the term "customer" has been redefined to include all stakeholders, people who have an interest in the organization and its activities, from traditional customers to employees and society as a whole. The stakeholders of an academic library include: students, academic staff, university and…

To reaffirm its accreditation with the Accrediting Association for Bible Colleges, Philadelphia College of Bible (Pennsylvania) studied programs and recommended improvements throughout the college. This study evaluates the operations of the library committee to determine if it functions according to its job description in the college's management…

The State of Mississippi authorized the construction of additions to three of the state's academic libraries. At the University of Southern Mississippi, planning for an addition raised the question of assignable study space. Lockable individual study rooms (carrels) and group study rooms were planned, and questions of how to assign them and rules…

The purpose of this study was to determine the extent to which environmental factors pertinent to bibliographic instruction are represented in the library literature and to determine any changes in the female to male ratio of authors that may have occurred over time. In 1990 the Bibliographic Instruction Section (BIS) of the Association of College…

In the face of decreasing enrollment and increasing information technology, future expansion of off-campus education programs is possible. A survey of 106 members of the North Central Association (NCA) of Colleges and Schools examined the library services considered essential to quality distance education and questioned the issue of accreditation…