Today's student must be able to work in an online environment. This often presents unique challenges for elementary students as they develop and extend fundamental literacy skills to various media. Many text features such as titles, headings, authors, and copyrights are easily transferable from paper to an online format; however, orientation and…

Creating information literate students and future employees is an expected outcome of a tertiary education. This paper shares insights from a successful collaboration between an academic and three university librarians to create an online learning module designed to develop students' professional information literacy capability: identifying…

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…

Google is currently recognized as the world's most powerful search engine. Google is so powerful and intuitive that one does not need to possess many skills to use it. However, Google is more than just simple search. For those who have special search skills and know Google's superior search features, it becomes an extraordinary tool. To understand…

As knowledge brokers, librarians are living in interesting times for themselves and libraries. It causes them to wonder sometimes if the traditional tools like the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) system can cope with the onslaught of information. The categories provided do not always seem adequate for the knowledge-discovery habits of…

Web design is a necessarily iterative process. During the process, it can be difficult to balance the interests and focus of the library site experts and their novice users. It can also be easy to lose focus on the main goals of site use and become wrapped up in the process of design or coding or in the internal politics of site design. Just as…

Reference services in public libraries are changing dramatically. The Internet, online databases, and shrinking budgets are all making it necessary for non-traditional reference staff to become familiar with online reference tools. Recognizing the need for cross-training, Chesapeake Public Library (CPL) developed a program called the Database…

Europeana: Think Culture (http://www.europeana.eu) is a wonderful cultural repository. It includes more than 15 million items (images, text, audio, and video) from 1,500 European institutions. Europeana provides access to an abundance of cultural and heritage information and knowledge. Because Europeana has partnered with and brought together so…

The year 2011 was the PALNI (Private Academic Library Network of Indiana) consortium's "rookie season" for the implementation of Primo, the 2010 Discovery Layer 500 race winner. In this article, the authors report on their transition to the cloud within Ex Libris Ltd.'s Primo TotalCare environment: their preparation, the steps involved…

Library users' evolving information needs and their choice of search methods have changed reference work profoundly. Today's reference librarian must work in a whole new way--not only service-focused and businesslike, but even entrepreneurial. Murphy innovatively rethinks the philosophy behind current library reference services in this…

Quora (www.quora.com) is a contemporary, web-based take on reference. Users post questions within Quora and other users answer the questions. Users can vote for and against answers (or not vote at all). It is users asking questions of friends and strangers and then sorting through the results. If the model sounds familiar, it's because it is.…

This article presents a reading of the user interface in one public library system. Its aim is to find out the frames and competences required and used in the communication between the computer and the patron. The authors see the computer as a text that is to be read by the user who wants to search for information from the library. The transition…

EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS) has been heavily used by UMUC students since its implementation in fall 2011, but experience has shown that it is not always the most appropriate source for satisfying students' information needs and that they often need assistance in understanding how the tool works and how to use it effectively. UMUC librarians have…

This article describes the Project Lefty, a search system that, at a minimum, adds a layer on top of traditional federated search tools that will make the wait for results more worthwhile for researchers. At best, Project Lefty improves search queries and relevance rankings for web-scale discovery tools to make the results themselves more relevant…

This article describes the Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD) process and its application in the field of educational data mining (EDM) in the context of a digital library service called the Instructional Architect (IA.usu.edu). In particular, the study reported in this article investigated a certain type of data mining problem, clustering,…