The ways in which university quality assessments are developed reveal a great deal about value constructs surrounding higher education. Measures developed and consumed by external stakeholders, in particular, indicate which elements of academia are broadly perceived to be most reflective of quality. This paper examines the historical context of…

There has been longstanding debate about whether the level of complexity of questions received at reference desks and via online chat services requires a librarian's expertise. Continued decreases in the number and complexity of reference questions have all but ended the debate; many academic libraries no longer staff service points with…

Discusses subject searching problems in online library catalogs; explains advanced information retrieval (IR) techniques; and describes experiments conducted on a test collection database, CHESHIRE (California Hybrid Extended SMART for Hypertext and Information Retrieval Experimentation), which was created to evaluate IR techniques in online…