Students in STEM and the health sciences have unique learning needs, including preparation for exams required for entering a STEM or health sciences profession. Students in these areas thus often seek, in addition to or instead of traditional course materials and library resources, digital study tools that utilize techniques such as spaced…

As academic libraries around the world face the dual challenges of rising demand but limits on funding, managers look for ways to improve library performance that do not add significantly to the budget. This paper presents a novel relationship between intrapreneurship and Enterprise 2.0 that suggests there are relatively cheap and easy ways to…

This article describes ways of measuring the monetary value of resource sharing across jurisdictional boundaries, using the same "buy once, use many times" logic that is the basic underpinning of libraries. (Contains 4 notes.)

This article provides a practitioner's guide to marketing user-initiated borrowing at the point of need. By reviewing interlibrary loan book requests and manually transferring them to an INN-Reach consortial system, Link+, the University of Nevada, Reno Libraries were able to successfully market the service, deliver materials faster, and save…

Using an electronic shelf-reading system a cost-benefit analysis was conducted of an inventory/shelf-reading project in a medium-sized academic library. Analyses include time spent, cataloging discrepancies, books found with active statuses, mis-shelving rate and distance, and subsequent use of found books. Correctly re-shelving "missing"…

The public computing center offers an economical and environmentally friendly model for providing additional public computer access when and where it is needed. Though not intended to be a replacement for a full-service branch, the public computing center does offer a budget-friendly option for quickly expanding high-demand services into the…

Nursing and library faculty face many information literacy challenges when graduate nursing programs migrate to online course delivery. The authors describe a collaborative model for providing cost-effective online library services to new graduate students in a three-university consortium. The embedded librarian service links a health sciences…

This paper reports on a questionnaire survey of 16 national libraries designed to clarify how national libraries attempt to justify their web archiving activities. Results indicate they envisage that a) the benefits brought about by their initiatives are greater than the overall costs, b) the costs imposed on libraries are greater than the costs…

Designed to assist with the management of e-resources, electronic resource management (ERM) systems are time- and fund-consuming to purchase and maintain. Questions of system compatibility, data population, and workflow design/redesign can be difficult to answer; sometimes those answers are not what we'd prefer to hear. The two primary functions…

As resources become more constrained in the library community, many organizations are finding that they need to have a better understanding of their costs. To this end, this article will present one approach to conducting a cost analysis (including questions to ask yourself, project team makeup, organizational support, and data organization). We…