As the need for digital content increases almost daily, preserving this content for university libraries, especially in the least developed and developing nations, becomes a challenge, resulting in the loss of this data. Even though most of these libraries are automated and adopt one digital preservation strategy or the other, library users need…

The aim of this study was to examine the impact of academic digital archives on scholarship and university status. Digital archives have played roles in strengthening scholarly research and developing innovative fields of study. This is especially prevalent in the rise of digital humanities and making work available through digital libraries and…

This paper describes an investigation into whether institutional repositories at member libraries of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) provide publicly available metadata documentation via the repositories' websites. The study compares the results of a September 2017 survey with findings from a review of ARL institutional repository…

Encounters with primary sources--historical or contemporary artifacts that bear direct witness to a specific period or event--are central to the pedagogy of many disciplines, especially in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. Their use in undergraduate instruction aligns with universities' commitments to experiential and inquiry-based…

In "Open and Equitable Scholarly Communications," ACRL calls for more diverse and inclusive collection development (CD) by academic libraries and archives. Meanwhile, higher education is increasingly committing to community-engaged scholarship. This study investigated the extent to which academic libraries and archives are collecting,…

This study documents the experience of, and identifies professional barriers for, academic librarians and archivists with invisible illnesses and/or disabilities. Results from a survey of MLIS-holding individuals in academic positions indicate that invisible illness or disability often impacts the ability to succeed at work, but many are reluctant…

Zines have begun to gain a place in higher education as pedagogical tools studied or made by students, and many academic libraries maintain zine collections. The library literature reveals little about how nonlibrarian faculty use zines in their classrooms. This paper describes the results of a survey of faculty from a range of academic…

Special collections libraries collect and preserve materials of intellectual and cultural heritage, providing access to unique research resources. As their holdings continue to expand, special collections in research libraries confront increased space pressures. Off-site storage facilities, used frequently by research libraries for general…

It has become widely recognised across the academic and research libraries sector that special collections and archives play a key role in differentiating each institution from its peers. In recognition of this, Research Libraries UK (RLUK) established the workstrand "Unique and Distinctive Collections" (UDC) in support of its strategic…

The digital world has unhooked information from authority and created a post-truth ethos, yet it also allows for access to the building blocks of deliberative democratic discussions: sources, evidence, and databases. This article describes an approach to teaching the American history survey utilizing primary source databases as the students' main…

Although recent archival scholarship promotes the use of primary sources for developing students' analytical research skills, few studies focus on standards or protocols for teaching or assessing archival instruction. Librarians have designed and tested standards and learning assessment strategies for library instruction, and archivists would do…

Researchers increasingly engage with the digital archives built by libraries, archives, and museums, but many institutions still seek to learn more about researchers' needs and practices with these digital collections. This paper presents a user assessment study for "Emblematica Online," a research digital library that provides digitized…

Research across disciplines in recent years has demonstrated a number of gains involved in community engagement and service-learning pedagogies. More recently, these pedagogies are being filtered into digital contexts as instructors begin to realize the opportunities made available by online writing venues. This presentation describes a specific…

How have college and university-based archives and special collections fared over the past few years in the midst of an historically grim economic downturn? The authors conducted in-depth interviews with directors of 13 archival repositories at state universities and private colleges in the Appalachian region of Virginia, West Virginia, North…

A survey of college and university archivists revealed that their roles and responsibilities are broad and diverse. Archival responsibilities have expanded across the board. For the purposes of this study, survey respondents were divided into two groups: archivists with and archivists without library responsibilities. Archivists with library…