For nearly a decade now, librarians have discussed and deliberated ways, for the sake of convenience, to integrate internet-like searching into their own catalogs to mimic what academic library patrons have been using outside the library. Discovery tools and web-scale discovery services (WSDS) attempt to provide users with a similar one-stop shop…

Reference librarians are constantly balancing their reference duties against other duties, for example, collection development and departmental liaison. The author works as a reference librarian at Texas A&M University-Commerce Libraries in Commerce, Texas. The university has approximately 11,000 students, a large number of whom are…

It is no secret that library budgets are in a downward spiral like the rest of the economy. The recent annual budget survey by the "Library Journal" indicates that per capita funding for libraries will decline 1.6%, and total library budgets will be reduced by 2.6% in FY 2010. Librarians are all too familiar with this bad news, and some of them…

In 2009, the author spearheaded the Thunder Bay Public Library's (TBPL) service audit on kiosks. A task force comprising staff from the children's, reference, and adult services departments was formed to work on the audit. Task force members worked together and studied how patrons and staff use kiosks, conducted a literature review, surveyed other…

Since the early 1990s, the Lloyd Sealy Library, where all four of this article's librarian-authors work in various capacities, has been providing the students and faculty of John Jay College of Criminal Justice with extensive electronic access to books and journals. In early 2009, the librarians at Lloyd Sealy decided to test a recent electronic…

During spring quarter 2008, the Western Washington University (WWU) Libraries established an interactive bloglike environment called "14 Days to Have Your Say" with the intention of gathering new ideas and feedback about the libraries from the university community. The environment was developed as a fairly simple Drupal site. The project…

Charles E. Bracker was a professor of botany and plant pathology at Purdue University from 1964 to 1999. His late wife, Anri, was an orchid enthusiast who began collecting and housing orchids in the 1980s. In 2009, Bracker's 30,000 digital orchid photographs were donated to Ball State University Libraries, where both of this article's authors…

A mission-critical system is one that is so intertwined with the operation of an organization that the organization can scarcely function without it. Just as in corporations, mission-critical library systems offer the capability to unlock talent and time. They are essential to the transformation of higher education and the learning environment. A…

In 2009 the University of Washington (UW) Libraries special collections received funding for the digital preservation of its audio indigenous language holdings. The university libraries, where the authors work in various capacities, had begun digitizing image and text collections in 1997. Because of this, at the onset of the project, workflows (a…

What is the economic situation in libraries these days? What are academic and research libraries doing with regard to making the resources in their collections more discoverable? Are they involved in institutional repository (IR) projects? And how do IRs and the availability of open access journals affect library purchasing decisions? Those were…

As e-resource systems and web coordinator for Southern Oregon University, the author is deeply involved with the university library's website. In the latest revision of this website, the author knew she needed to jazz it up a little. With screen real estate on the main page at a premium, the author hoped to use a tabbed box and an accordion-style…

In fall 2008, a collaborative partnership was formed between the libraries of two Indiana universities--Marian College's (now Marian University) Mother Theresa Hackelmeier Memorial Library, and the University Library at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). The authors discuss the digital nature of this collaboration, which…

In September 2007, Yale University Library (YUL) and Microsoft agreed to partner in a large-scale project to digitize 100,000 books from the YUL collections--an ambitious effort that would substantially increase the library's digitized holdings, particularly in the area of its own text collections. YUL has been digitizing materials from its…

At the Hewlett-Packard (HP) Labs Research Library, the metadata of HP Labs technical reports (research papers, reports, and articles) is managed through their customized library catalog system. RSS is used to make newly published technical reports from the ILS available externally as RSS feeds on the HP Labs Technical Reports Web site and…

In this column on digital repository management, the author defines three areas within the sphere of digital repositories that need work. The first two pertain to information architecture, while the last one pertains to taking action. The author's first "wish" is for top-notch library Web sites that act as a gateway to any sphere of knowledge. He…