The research guide is a common tool librarians use to communicate with and instruct their audiences. Despite their prevalence and value to users, research guides remain underused. There are many examples of efforts encouraging guide use, but few studies have measured the effectiveness of that promotion. Academic Outreach librarians at Virginia…

Google Scholar and academic library discovery systems are both popular resources among academic users for finding scholarly information. By conducting an online survey with 975 users from more than 20 public research universities across the United States, this study comparatively investigates how and why academic users use these two resources.…

Circulation data from the Virginia Tech Libraries were analyzed to determine the extent of continuity or change between the author's study of the use of subject collections in 1982 and the present. Book circulation has declined, largely due to much less use by undergraduates. The overall profile of subject use has changed in ways traceable to…

This article describes the development of the Virtual Library of Virginia (VIVA). The VIVA statistics-processing system remains a work in progress. Member libraries will benefit from the ability to obtain the actual data from the VIVA site, rather than just the summaries, so a project to make these data available is currently being planned. The…

This study determines the periods of peak demands on library services in the Radford University Library, establishes staffing profiles to meet these demands, and projects changes in staffing levels which may in the future modify the library's service capabilities. It is divided into three parts, the first of which applies a data analysis of…

Describes The Library of Virginia's Digital Library Project that has made many of its state library collections available via the Internet and World Wide Web. Highlights include digitization decisions; the HTML Web gateway; the online catalog; microfilm digitization; users and use statistics; and future projects. (LRW)

The directors of 40 academic libraries in Virginia were surveyed to obtain information on their practices relating to public access, services, and fees in their libraries. Complete or partial responses were received from 21 libraries in private institutions and 14 from state-supported institutions. These responses indicate that all of the…

One of the biggest problems in education is that of showing the necessity for the provision of library services and demonstrating the difference it makes in academic achievement. An even bigger difficulty, perhaps, has been the existence and application of instruments capable of giving statistical evidence. The problem of this study was to…

This study provides a clearer portrait of the extent to which practicing history and social studies teachers, who explicitly expressed an interest in the potential of technology and advocate the use of primary sources within their teaching, are using Internet technologies to prepare students to learn to think historically and in turn participate…