This paper examines the impact of process mapping on the management of change in an academic library in a UK higher education institution. Book ordering has been highlighted by a group of subject librarians as being time-consuming and inefficient, detracting from their ability to respond to new challenges and opportunities. An action research…

Organizations are being called upon to take responsibility for the ways their operations impact societies especially the marginalized sectors. Libraries are not exempt from such social responsibility. The paper proposes a theoretical framework for Library Social Responsibility. The paper briefly traces the history of library services for the poor.…

This article addresses the development of electronic reserves within academic libraries. Libraries have been offering electronic reserve services on separate platforms since the 1990s (Austin, 2013). However, since the integration of campus-wide content management systems (CMSs), the need for a library reserves platform that is independent from an…

Baker Library at Harvard Business School is increasingly asked by the school's faculty to create custom digital information products to enhance course assignments and to find novel ways of electronically disseminating faculty research. In order to prioritize these requests, as well as facilitate, manage, and track the resulting projects, the…

This article outlines some of the opportunities and challenges of changing what the library "brand" means to academic and professional services staff in the rapidly changing environment of UK higher education, taking the University of Leicester as a case study. It makes a practitioner contribution to the growing body of evidence of how…

Two academic libraries undergoing significant organizational changes were the location for a project that researched how staff members and subunits of the libraries made collective judgments, negotiated what is sometimes called the "landscape of practice"--the collective body of knowledge of their profession--and thus came to collective…

Many academic librarians in the state of New Jersey (NJ) have successfully integrated information literacy (IL) into the curriculum using the ACRL IL Competency Standards for Higher Education ("Standards"). These "Standards" formed the underpinnings of IL curriculum mapping and assessment plans, and have been adopted by…

For the past several years academic libraries have been adopting discovery systems to provide a search experience that reflects user expectations and improves access to electronic resources. University of Houston Libraries has kept pace with this evolving trend by pursuing various discovery options; these include an open-source tool, a federated…

School librarians, professional library literature, and scholarly library literature tout the benefits of schools staffed with certified school librarians. However, recent reductions in library funding and elimination of school library positions suggest stakeholders do not connect the school library program to positive student learning outcomes.…

The research reported here is focused on a specific type of change in an organization: an innovation. In an empirical analysis of research libraries, it was found that five factors had a significant impact on the innovation performance of the library. These factors relate to the strategy, organizational structure, and leadership of the research…

Interest in supporting undergraduate research programs continues to grow within academic librarianship. This article presents how undergraduate research program coordinators perceive and value library support of their programs. Undergraduate research coordinators from a variety of institutions were surveyed on which elements of libraries and…

Library 2.0 is a change in the way libraries interact with their users. Technological developments on the Web have had a major influence on these changes. The change also places new requirements on librarians' competencies and skills. This research investigates how librarians themselves see this change in terms of their work identity and working…

Tufts University Hirsh Health Sciences Library created a Facebook page and a corresponding managing committee in March 2010. Facebook Page Insights data collected from the library's Facebook page were statistically analyzed to investigate patterns of user engagement. The committee hoped to improve posting practices and increase user engagement…

Electronic communication technologies continue to change the landscape of reference services. For many users, virtual communication is the preferred means of conversing. Synchronous virtual reference, similar to other synchronous means of communication, is an important method for reaching students and for providing teaching and learning…

Education in Library and Information Science is a requirement to become a librarian. There are a lot of syllabi and subjects to concentrate on such as cataloguing and classification, information retrieval, knowledge management, and reference. The library as a centre of information has been developing year by year with various types of collections…