A paradox exists in the building and managing of digital scholarship centers in academic libraries. While imagined as collaborative library spaces, such centers often remain "siloed" or isolated from the subject specialists who work with departments to build collections, assess critical needs, and collaborate with faculty and students.…

Student employees are often vital members of an academic library's workforce, though the extent to which they contribute to library geospatial services has not yet been explored in a systematic way. The present study was designed to address this gap through a survey of academic library professionals involved in employing students to provide…

During COVID-19, academic library employees pivoted to predominantly remote work. Associate deans, associate university librarians, and equivalent managers at the top 50 Association of Research Libraries (ARL) institutions were interviewed about benefits, challenges, pre-pandemic norms, necessary conditions, and the future of flexible work…

The role and functions of an academic library have evolved drastically as the result of a new social, economic, and technological reality. Libraries are responding to these developments by changing focus from collection and storage of information to becoming active partners in students' educational journey. The learning commons model of service is…

In many locales--in many states--early conceptions of the school librarian's job have not evolved over the years even as the duties have expanded exponentially. The fact that in some districts outdated evaluation tools, such as Georgia's 1990 system, are still used to rate 21st-century school librarians is an obvious sign of the misconceptions…

Licensure examination performance of graduates is one measure of the effectiveness of curricular programs. This study analyzed the five-year performance of 159 BLIS graduates in the Librarians' Licensure Examination in from 2011 to 2015. Findings reveal that the passing the graduates' passing rates were statistically consistent in the five-year…

Chicago Public Schools librarians have discovered that iPads engage students in developing their reading, writing, speaking, and listening skills while expressing their creativity. Their librarians embarked on a year-long experiment with the mobile devices that inspired them to completely reinvent the way they teach. This article presents tips…

In the library context, they depend on sophisticated business applications specifically designed to support their work. This infrastructure consists of such components as integrated library systems, their associated online catalogs or discovery services, and self-check equipment, as well as a Web site and the various online tools and services…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to compare the attitude of the managers of libraries located at Iran, Tehran and Shahid Beheshti Medical Sciences Universities' training hospitals, on the status of information technology (IT) in the mentioned libraries. Design/methodology/approach: This study employed a researcher-made questionnaire. The…

In 2012, more than a decade after the original Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education (hereafter the Standards) were institutionalized as the goal of academic library instruction, the Information Literacy Competency Standards Review Task Force convened by ACRL recommended…

The trajectory of U.S. higher education in the next 20 years is portrayed by some as an arc of potential disaster and by others as a slightly upwardly inclined plane that may have some dips along the way. Generally these scenarios focus on the teaching and learning program of higher education institutions and give very little attention to the…

This paper examines the extent to which public librarians are successfully prepared to engage the community in digital literacy and inclusion. A qualitative, multiple case study research design was chosen, using an analysis of policy documents and existing training programs offered by the libraries together with semi-structured interviews with…

Eighteen scholarly papers and twelve abstracts comprise the content of the fourteenth annual Brick and Click Libraries Symposium, held annually at Northwest Missouri State University in Maryville, Missouri. The proceedings, authored by academic librarians and presented at the symposium, portray the contemporary and future face of librarianship.…

A mission-critical system is one that is so intertwined with the operation of an organization that the organization can scarcely function without it. Just as in corporations, mission-critical library systems offer the capability to unlock talent and time. They are essential to the transformation of higher education and the learning environment. A…

This article describes a qualitative mixed-method study of students' perceptions of place and space in an academic library. The approach is informed by Scott Bennett's model of library design, which posits a shift from a "book-centered" to a technology supported "learning centered" paradigm of library space. Two surveys…