Two years after the onset of the COVID-19 health pandemic, electronic resources librarians are assessing how the work in their libraries has changed and determining if certain modifications made to services and workflow processes are, in fact, transformational. The authors detail how service changes and telework during the pandemic affected…

Effective for the 2012-2013 academic year, the Hilda C. Landers Library at St. Mary's College of Maryland (SMCM) eliminated daily overdue fines for undergraduates on books and some other materials. In 2019, nine years of comprehensive data on overdue returns (comprising three years before and three years after the change) was extracted from the…

At the University of Maryland Libraries, Angie Ohler, Director of Collection Services, discusses the history of the management of electronic resources for the past ten years at the Maryland Libraries, including the challenges of in an ever-changing environment and solutions she developed over time. The history she describes are lessons learned…

The ACRL "Framework for Information Literacy" revolutionized information literacy instruction. It asks librarians to instill in students the higher-level skills to navigate the information landscape. Literature establishes the value of shared faculty ownership of information literacy threshold concepts, but it also documents the…

This research study examined the relationship between years of traditional classroom teaching experience and teaching in school library instructional environments. Data for the study emerged from formal observations of MLS candidates' practicum teaching in school libraries. Participants in the study were examined based on the following levels of…

In Maryland, national standards in any discipline are reviewed and revised with student and educator needs in mind. The approval process for all standards includes stakeholder review and revision followed by a public comment period. Comments are then considered and used to inform further revisions. Finally, guidance, supporting documents,…

As young people increasingly need computer science (CS) and other related STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) skills, libraries have been identified as spaces in which this learning can occur. However, librarians often perceive they lack the skills or confidence required to lead this type of education. As a result, funding sources,…

ERM librarians discuss their approaches to electronic resources management for an academic library consortium, the University System of Maryland & Affiliated Institutions (USMAI). They focus on innovation and developing actionable strategies for procedures and policies.

Inspired by the 2017 Big Ten Academic Alliance Library Conference's collective collection theme, the authors undertook a study to better understand the consortium's resource-sharing needs for Spanish and Portuguese materials published in Latin America. The authors employed multiple technologies to expedite gathering, reconciling, and analyzing…

In 2016, the University of Maryland Global Campus Library began a redesign of its core information literacy tutorial in response to substantive curricular changes, the technological obsolescence of an older tutorial, and an improving understanding of student needs based on an analysis of reference questions received. This article describes the…

There is an established history of academic libraries collaborating with their institutions' athletics departments to provide learning and research support to student-athletes in order to achieve positive educational outcomes. It is rarer to find documented the effect that athletics has had on the professional life of an academic librarian. The…

Many librarians work in public libraries to make a difference for children, families, and communities and identify family and community engagement as a cornerstone of their responsibilities. For librarians to be successful they must be afforded strong foundations in family and community engagement that begin early in their preparation. Yet little…

March 2020 kicked off a period of unprecedented change and new experiences for all school librarians, but for one group of school librarians, the months to follow would be incredibly unique. In this article, three elementary school librarians share their experiences as brand-new school librarians, seeing everything with new eyes at the exact…

Immigrants are essential library constituents. This article presents the outcomes of a pilot, self-paced mini-course to introduce US immigrants to the library and information science (LIS) field. Data from student assessment and focus groups suggest that, with curricular and design improvements, the mini-course can help recruit skilled or degreed…

In many elementary schools across the nation the library looks like a revolving door of classes. Classroom teachers come and drop off their classes for a lesson at a set time during the week. The school librarian teaches a lesson in isolation while the classroom teacher has a planning period. There is little time for collaboration. There is even…