Libraries make heavy investments in electronic resources, with many of these resources reflecting title changes, bundled subsets, or content changes of formerly print material. These changes can distance the electronic format from its print origins, creating discovery and access issues. A task force was formed to explore the enhancement of catalog…

Librarians have long struggled to find user-friendly mediums to provide meaningful information to patrons using bibliographies, pathfinders, and subject guides with varying degrees of success. Content management systems, such as Springshare's LibGuides, have recently been developed to facilitate the creation of online subject guides. Special…

This paper examines aspects of journal articles published from 1967 to 2008, located in eight databases, and authored or co-authored by academics serving for at least two years in Australian LIS programs from 1959 to 2008. These aspects are: inclusion of publications in databases, publications in journals, authorship characteristics of…

Reference management (RM) software is widely used by researchers in the health and natural sciences. Librarians are often called upon to provide support for these products. The present study compares four prominent RMs: CiteULike, RefWorks, Mendeley, and Zotero, in terms of features offered and the accuracy of the bibliographies that they…

In spite of its popularity, keyword search mode has not been standardized. Though information professionals are quick to adapt to various presentations of keyword search mode, novice end-users may find keyword search confusing. This article compares keyword search mode in some major reference databases and calls for standardization. (Contains 3…

Western Illinois University Libraries has cut online serials subscriptions in the past 2 years. The librarians were guided by the statistics for downloads provided by the publishers of the journals. However, questions were raised by both professors and librarians regarding the exact meaning of the statistics. This caused the electronic resources…

Impact factors for journals listed under the subject categories "ecology" and "environmental sciences" in the Journal Citation Reports database were calculated using citation data from the Scopus database. The journals were then ranked by their Scopus impact factor and compared to the ranked lists of the same journals derived from Journal…

This study investigates librarians' satisfaction with general interdisciplinary databases for undergraduate research and explores possibilities for improving these databases. Results from a national survey suggest that librarians at a variety of institutions are relatively satisfied overall with the content and usability of general,…

This report presents selected findings from the Public School Library Media Center Data File of the 2011-12 Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS). SASS is a nationally representative sample survey of public and private K-12 schools, principals, and teachers in the 50 states and the District of Columbia. School districts associated with public schools…

The advent of large-scale digital repositories, along with the need for sharing useful data world-wide, demands change to the current information structure. The merging of digital scientific data with scholarly literature has the potential to fulfill the Semantic Web design principles. This paper will identify factors leading to integration of…

Scholars in many academic areas, including librarians, devote a significant amount of thought to critical thinking. Surveying views of its use and possibility, the author considers some key librarians' thoughts on critical thinking. In conclusion, the inability to define critical thinking means that librarians need to emphasize control of…

Web site usage statistics are a widely used tool for Web site development, but libraries are still learning how to use them successfully. This case study summarizes how Morris Library at Southern Illinois University Carbondale implemented Google Analytics on its Web site and used the reports to inform a site redesign. As the main campus library at…

After seeing growing frustration among inexperienced undergraduate researchers searching a popular aggregated interdisciplinary database, the authors questioned whether the leading interdisciplinary databases are serving undergraduates' needs. As a preliminary exploration of this question, the authors queried vendors, analyzed their marketing…

A review of the help files in several major databases revealed that database vendors have begun including information on citing sources, which has the potential to be very useful to students. Surprisingly, 94% of the citation examples in the databases reviewed had errors. The average number of errors per example was 4.3. The citation help appears…

Presents online search statistics, and reviews databases in the social sciences using the files found in DIALOG. Discusses the value of familiarity with fee-based databases for librarians and social science researchers. Concludes that database information plays a relevant role in research and expands the library resources, especially those without…