Recent literary practices such as surface reading or the digital humanities have challenged the centrality of close reading in literary studies. Nonetheless, reading literature still involves sustained and productive attentiveness to texts. Fostering this skill, however, can seem increasingly difficult. From paper mills, to SparkNotes, to blogs…

Introduction: This paper presents the findings from a project that investigated the lived experiences of library and information professionals in relation to evidence-based practice within an Australian public library. Method: The project employed ethnography, which allows holistic description of people's experiences within a particular community…

Using feminist pedagogical practices that incorporate student knowledge production and digital scholarship methods, a team at the University of Washington Bothell founded the online, open-access Feminist Community Archive of Washington (FCA-WA). Faculty, students, and the library partner with local feminist and gender justice organizations to…

Respondents to "Library Journal's" ("LJ") annual book buying survey of public libraries nationwide reported that adult book budgets were down eight percent overall, the largest plunge recorded since the survey began in 1998. What's more, for the first time ever, cuts were reported for every region of the country and every size of population…

The study carried out at Makerere University and Uganda Martyrs University in 2010 aimed at providing strategies for enhanced distance learning library services in terms of convenience and adequacy. The study adopted a cross sectional descriptive survey design. The study revealed services provided in branch libraries in Ugandan universities were…

A hundred years after Marie Curie received her Nobel Prize in Chemistry, this arm of science is pointing the way to a more sustainable future. Growing movements like green chemistry, which strives to create alternative and new chemical reactions that produce no harmful waste products, and molecular engineering hold great potential for industry,…

Selecting the most appropriate content for a community is a challenge librarians have faced since the dawn of libraries. Formal patron-driven acquisition (PDA) models have been around for at least a decade. These models attempt to collect materials based on known patron demand. Some libraries simply use a suggestion form, while others use…

School librarians have always been teachers, even before the term "teacher-librarian" was coined. They teach every time they help students select books, locate and evaluate resources for research projects, or troubleshoot a computer problem. When they assist students, they explain and model the steps they are taking. Teaching for school librarians…

There is a "clash of civilizations" going on in the information field--a clash characterized by a brash upstart, Google, and its attendant creations, Google Scholar and Google Books, and the old guard represented by the library world. Librarians who deprecate Google Scholar or simply ignore the Google phenomenon do so at their own risk. Google…

Among specialized applications of the well-known SERVQUAL scale for measuring perceptions of service quality, the LibQUAL[superscript +[TM]] survey system has found widespread use in assessment of the quality of libraries. Three main dimensions of library quality have been identified: Information Control, Library as Place and Affect of Service.…

This paper investigates the accreditation possibilities and prospects for the library and information science education programmes located in the six member nations of the Gulf Cooperation Council. This paper has been based on the findings of a study focused on the evaluation practices of these programmes and the perceptions of the leading…

In January 2008, the Belk Library & Information Commons at Appalachian State University combined the Access Services staff members of the Circulation and Lower Level Service Desks with the Reference and Instruction team as part of a library-wide reorganization effort. The new team balanced what had been a staff-dominated Access Services team…

Last fall, Information Today, Inc.'s research division, Unisphere Research, conducted a survey of more than 1,200 public, academic, government, and special librarians with budget authority in North America. The study determined that after a couple of devastating years, most libraries are projecting budget stabilization in 2011. Naturally,…

The IFLA Trend Report identified five trends that will impact the information environment (IFLA, 2015), such as access to information with new technologies, online education for global learning, hyper-connected communities, and the global information environment. The faculty at San José State University (SJSU) School of Information (iSchool) is…

We compared students from schools with an enriched school library--that is, one with a larger and more up-to-date book collection--with students from schools with a typical school library. We tested effects of an enriched school library on reading motivation, reading frequency, and academic skills. Fourth- and fifth-grade students of 14 schools…