"Terra Cognita" surveys the current landscape of archival research and the experiences of emerging scholars seeking to navigate it. Drawing on data from the Council on Library and Information Resources' (CLIR's) Mellon Fellowships for Dissertation Research in Original Sources, the report takes an in-depth look at how the conditions and…

While trying to access microform content, patrons at the Christopher Center for Library and Information Resources at Valparaiso University were often hampered by unfamiliar equipment, temperamental software, and a puzzling file management system. In an effort to address these problems, the Access Services Department launched a pilot program for…

In the summer of 2004, Georgia Southern University began a library construction project that was to last 4 years. An important aspect was the installation of an Automated Retrieval System (ARC) to house a substantial portion of the library collections so that more space could be available for students, faculty, and the services to meet their…

We investigated whether American dissertations that were deposited in university libraries or disseminated on microfilm prior to 1978 were "published" for copyright purposes. This question has direct bearing on the copyright status of these works today. In the absence of a directly relevant legal decision to clarify the matter, the…

The preservation of paper-based artifacts is an essential issue for collection management in academic libraries. In recent years, the library science profession has often favored reformatting through microfilm or digitization, assuming too quickly that information matters, whereas an artifact's medium does not. However, much recent humanities…