Even as librarians have spent the past twenty years documenting the rich world of scholarly communication beyond the catalog, repositories and catalogs too often remain completely siloed from each other. Current practices and tools to unite the two focus entirely on matching names, an imprecise method requiring substantial time spent on review.…

Higher education students have an increasing number of pre-existing health and wellness concerns when they arrive on campus. College-based health service leaders are tasked with addressing those concerns with a finite set of resources within the context of evolving healthcare and higher education industries. In order to develop a set of practices…

Although scholarship has addressed issues around serving international students in U.S. and Canadian libraries, reports on how Chinese graduate students use information in Chinese universities, especially for a particular discipline, are rare. In this study, the author interviewed 15 graduate students and researchers in a top-ranked chemistry…

The study assessed users' information needs and satisfaction in selected seminary libraries in Oyo State, Nigeria. This paper employed the descriptive survey research design, whereby the expost-facto was employed with a sample size of three hundred (300) participants, selected from six seminaries located in Ibadan, Oyo and Ogbomoso, all in Oyo…

Librarians have long struggled to find user-friendly mediums to provide meaningful information to patrons using bibliographies, pathfinders, and subject guides with varying degrees of success. Content management systems, such as Springshare's LibGuides, have recently been developed to facilitate the creation of online subject guides. Special…

In this study, three years of SFX usage logs at Texas A&M University were analyzed to determine how patrons use link resolver services. The study contrasts the actions taken by users when full text is and is not available and compares public versus staff usage. The results confirmed users' preference for full-text services but also provided…

This paper examines aspects of journal articles published from 1967 to 2008, located in eight databases, and authored or co-authored by academics serving for at least two years in Australian LIS programs from 1959 to 2008. These aspects are: inclusion of publications in databases, publications in journals, authorship characteristics of…

The silo is a well-worn metaphor in information systems used to illustrate separateness, isolation, and lack of connectivity. Through the many iterations of system development, libraries, archives, and museums (LAMs) have sought to avoid silos and find the sweet spot between interface design and metadata interoperability. This effort is being…

Like many libraries, Seton Hall University Libraries has suffered budget cuts that forced a reduction in serial subscriptions. As science librarian, I report on my efforts to streamline subscriptions and to address the question "Why are science journals so expensive?" Our science journals are significantly more expensive than journals in…

Western Illinois University Libraries has cut online serials subscriptions in the past 2 years. The librarians were guided by the statistics for downloads provided by the publishers of the journals. However, questions were raised by both professors and librarians regarding the exact meaning of the statistics. This caused the electronic resources…

The guided experimentation method requires that students learn how a database works by generating and testing hypotheses about it (i.e., become skilled at strategies of experimentation). These strategies are essential to learning by inquiry, which is linked to argumentation. We conducted a quasi-experimental field study to show that students who…

The purpose of this paper is to report the results of a quantitative analysis exploring the interaction and relationship between the online database and electronic journal collections at the J. N. Desmarais Library of Laurentian University. A very strong relationship exists between the number of searches and the size of the online database…

James Morrison's interview with Trevor Owens explores Zotero, a free, open-source bibliographic tool that works as a Firefox plug-in. Previous bibliographic software, such as EndNote or Refworks, worked either online or offline to collect references and citations. Zotero leverages the power of the browser to allow users to work either online or…

This study investigates librarians' satisfaction with general interdisciplinary databases for undergraduate research and explores possibilities for improving these databases. Results from a national survey suggest that librarians at a variety of institutions are relatively satisfied overall with the content and usability of general,…

Feminist pedagogy as a research construct can be classified into gender and liberatory subgroups. Gender models frequently focus on learning. Liberatory models underline the social structures and power relations which constitute systems of oppression. Humor in practice may be used as a social corrective, or it may be used to extend power distances…