Library staff developed a project to reclassify the Curriculum Materials Collection of a specialty library on the campus of a regional comprehensive university. Materials were reclassified from a custom classification system derived from those developed by Lois Belfield Watt in 1962 and Harlan Johnson in 1973, to the Dewey Decimal Classification.…

This research brief describes recent methodological initiatives with the Public Libraries Survey. It describes how starting with the 2022 data, Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) updated geographic identifiers to better align Census Bureau geography types with the library's legal service area, with the goal of enabling data users to…

Librarianship is constantly confronted with unexpected and quickly evolving sociotechnical challenges, yet the documents that define the core professional competencies for librarians are infrequently updated. Based upon survey responses collected from 383 working librarians located in the United States, we describe a set of gaps between current…

Academic libraries, apart from their main function, which is to provide information services to academic communities, may also perform a number of social roles in the broad meaning of the term. Accordingly, they now tend to serve as the third place offering inclusion and animation activities to academic as well as local communities (including…

Currently "Big Data" is an emerging field that presents several Information Technology challenges regarding the capture, storage search, structure, and visualization of this data. The real challenge for organizations is to find ways to extract value from it and provide better services to their clients. The data generated in academic and…

As art libraries face challenges from an evolving environment, repercussions from the COVID-19 pandemic, and static or diminishing resources, finding sustainable pathways forward becomes an increasing priority. An important option for art research collections in achieving long-term sustainability is collaboration. This report explores…

Background: The recruitment of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) has been an ongoing effort for specialized libraries and library programs, especially as they try to fill technical roles while combatting internalized biases and candidates' potential self-deselection by not applying or otherwise removing themselves from the recruitment…

Art research collections continue to be impacted by the lingering effects of economic uncertainty and the global COVID-19 pandemic, which resulted in reduced or stagnant budgets and staffing cuts. These impacts have coincided with a period of institutional reflection and examination of the fundamental role of cultural heritage institutions in…

Escape rooms are used in a myriad of ways by businesses, teachers, and public libraries. They can be a great way to encourage team building, learning, and simply having fun in a non-threatening environment. This case study presents an innovative approach to engaging students, faculty, and community by using and showcasing unique academic library…

Purpose: This essay focuses on the Chinese-Japanese Library of the Harvard-Yenching Institute and examines how the Library collected and transported Chinese rare books to the United States during the 1930 and 1940s. It considers Harvard's rationale for its collection of Chinese books and tensions between Chinese scholars and the Harvard-Yenching…

The purpose of this study is to contribute to the establishment of metrics that can be used by libraries to analyze, anticipate, and plan for resource allocation for specialized print-based collections within an academic library. In the context of transactions associated with the circulation of library materials, that is checkouts, renewals, and…

This issue of Research Library Issues looks at the critical role and participation of libraries and librarians in supporting the data science revolution. The articles contained in this issue are: (1) Data Literacy as a Pathway to Data Science at Georgia Tech (Catherine Murray-Rust, with Ameet Doshi, Jay Forrest, Ximin Mi, and Alison Valk); (2) New…

Evidence-based library and information practice (EBLIP) was adapted from evidence-based medicine (EBM). In doing so, problems of EBM might affect EBLIP. One issue already known in medicine which may eventually reach the field of library and information sciences (LIS) is the phenomenon of "evidence reversal". An evidence reversal (ER)…

Providing free access to relevant resources is crucial for prisoners' personal development, well-being and, ultimately, rehabilitation. By offering a variety of reading and learning materials, from easy to expert levels and in various languages, prison libraries provide lifelong learning opportunities, thereby improving inmates' chances of…

This paper surveys the (patchy and uneven) advances in LIS impact evaluation over the past ten years and notes the surge forward in public library impact evaluation, before looking more broadly at the international and educational impact evaluation scene and noting the advance of programme-theory driven approaches. The authors then identify…