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…

Research data services are increasingly offered by academic libraries. As a result, librarians may need to upskill to provide data services and build capacity. This study measures the current level of data services skills of academic librarians and explores preferred methods of continuing education. An online survey was circulated asking…

Purpose: Public libraries play a pivotal role in supporting education and literacy. They provide numerous services, activities, collections and resources for education and leisure. Bibliotheca Alexandrina (BA) is an international renowned public library that provides numerous services for different users worldwide. E-learning is an emergent and…

This article explores two considerations in the push toward joint "LAM" (Library, Archive, and Museum) programs of education and research: the organizational proximity of departments and schools of library and information studies (LIS) and museum studies (MS); and the degree to which individual scholars of LIS and MS share publishing…

This project sought to study how much academic librarians who work with open educational resources (OERs) know about accessibility, as well as how they incorporate accessibility into the products of their work. A survey was sent out through email list services in spring 2020, and any librarian worldwide who works with OERs was invited to…

The digital humanities (DH) remain a growing area of interest among researchers and a locus of new positions within libraries, especially academic libraries, as well as archives, museums, and cultural heritage organizations. In response to this demand, many programs that train information professionals have developed specific curricula around DH.…

Public libraries have long been considered important spaces of adult education and learning. However, major social changes over the past few decades, and the impact these have had on libraries' work, have received little attention. Our three-year cross-national study of libraries in Canada and Britain explored how librarians navigate the discourse…

It has become widely recognised across the academic and research libraries sector that special collections and archives play a key role in differentiating each institution from its peers. In recognition of this, Research Libraries UK (RLUK) established the workstrand "Unique and Distinctive Collections" (UDC) in support of its strategic…

Games and other forms of play are used in today's libraries to attract underserved patrons, to introduce patrons to other library resources and services, and to facilitate engagement between library patrons. While many perceive gaming as a new library service, gaming services have been part of librarianship since the nineteenth century through…

This report sheds light on the expertise required to support a robust and sustainable digital scholarship (DS) program. It focuses first on defining and describing the key domain knowledge, skills, competencies, and mindsets at some of the world's most prominent digital scholarship programs. It then identifies the main strategies used to build…

Journal clubs are meetings where participants engage in discussion or appraisal of professional literature and research. This study investigates the perceived value of librarians' participation in journal clubs. Using a hermeneutic dialectic process, we built a construction of the value of journal club participation based on interviews with…

Understanding how social influences can foster avid book reader identification is a key research goal that warrants further investigation beyond a limited early-years lens. The author's 2015 International Study of Avid Book Readers (ISABR) explored, as one of its key research questions, the influence positive social agents can have on avid book…

The purpose of this research was to discover the conceptions of information literacy (IL) prevalent across multiple stakeholder groups in an international middle school community. The research involved students, parents, teachers, librarians, IT personnel, administrators and leadership in recorded focus group discussions. Using a phenomenographic…

Innovative behavior can be described as a process in which new ideas are generated, created, developed, applied, promoted, realized, and modified by employees to benefit role performance. Various reasons, such as rapid technological and social changes in society, underline the necessity for innovative behavior of employees and certainly of…

Introduction: This study aims to gain a greater understanding of the development of open access practices amongst library and information science authors, since their role is integral to the success of the broader open access movement. Method: Data were collected from scholarly articles about open access by library and information science authors…