Dissertations and theses with interactive digital components seldom fit neatly into the institutional format requirements designed for traditional humanities texts. This creates challenges for students, administrators, and librarians who are charged with preparing these works for library deposit. While disciplinary acceptance of digital…

Considering the importance of subject retrieval for scientific visibility, and the need to guide authors in self-archiving their papers in institutional repositories of university libraries, this study observed the patterns and strategies used by authors while indexing for keyword assignment. The study examined four categories of analysis:…

Discovery of digital items by scholars and the public is highly dependent upon effective metadata to ensure inclusion and prioritization in search engines. Subject descriptions based on controlled vocabulary, such as Library of Congress subject headings (LCSH), are particularly useful to enhance discovery, but they may be expensive to provide. In…

Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) programs have been recognized as one of the most effective channels through which theses and dissertations can be made available to academic communities and beyond. ETD program management, however, needs to be aware of the Critical Success Factors (CSFs) throughout the process of design and development of…

One of the standard models for e-book licensing in academic libraries is the subscription package. This study is a one-year analysis of "disappeared" titles from ebrary's Academic Complete™ collection. During 2013, 3462 titles were deleted. Deleted titles were mainly recent publications (published within the last ten years), with a high…

Why has the rise of the Internet--which drastically reduces the cost of distributing information--coincided with drastic increases in the prices that academic libraries pay for access to scholarly journals? This study argues that libraries are trapped in a collective action dilemma as defined by economist Mancur Olson in "The Logic of…

Despite the prevalence of academic libraries adopting web-scale discovery tools, few studies have quantified their effect on the use of library collections. This study measures the impact that EBSCO Discovery Service has had on use of library resources through circulation statistics, use of electronic resources, and interlibrary loan requests.…

Patron-Driven Acquisitions (PDA) is a new model used for e-book acquisition by academic libraries. A key component of this model is to make records of ebooks available in a library catalog and let actual patron usage decide whether or not an item is purchased. However, there has been a lack of research examining the role of the library catalog as…

This study investigates the perceived impact of future e-book collections on student research and recreational reading habits at our institution through three questions: how students currently use library print collections, how students use e-books, and how these factors impact student perception of the effects of future library e-books on their…

This is a study of the treatment of library patron privacy in licenses for electronic journals in academic libraries. We begin by distinguishing four facets of privacy and intellectual freedom based on the LIS and philosophical literature. Next, we perform a content analysis of 42 license agreements for electronic journals, focusing on terms for…

This paper presents an analysis of how humanities scholars use digital collections in their research and the ways in which digital collections could be enhanced for scholarly use. The authors surveyed and interviewed humanities faculty from twelve research universities about their research practices with digital collections and present analysis of…

This paper analyzes changes to the definitions of "authorized users" contained in electronic resources licenses and embedded in access control technologies from the mid-1990s to the present. In analyzing changes to the license and technology-based definitions, it tracks shifts in major stakeholders' perceptions of authorized users and…

To examine the open access availability of Library and Information Science (LIS) research, a study was conducted using Google Scholar to search for articles from 20 top LIS journals. The study examined whether Google Scholar was able to find any links to full text, if open access versions of the articles were available and where these articles…