This review offers a critical analysis of the library and information science (LIS) literature on first-generation students (FGS) from the last 40 years. This literature demonstrates an interest in understanding the needs of FGS to serve them better, but it is often grounded in a deficit model of education that focuses on what first-generation…

Expanding on previous research, the authors applied quantitative and qualitative methods to investigate Web usability policies, standards, and guidelines (PSGs); resources; and usability testing, including mobile testing and usability laboratories, at the academic members of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL). Survey results indicated…

Makerspaces continue to grow in popularity in library ecosystems, yet no one has done a census on important data points, such as total active makerspaces, planned makerspaces, and types of makerspaces in public colleges and universities in the United States. The objective of this report is to gather baseline data on makerspaces, the majority of…

Graduate students across disciplines feel pressure to publish their scholarship, but they are often unsure how to go about it, partly due to a lack of explicit training in this area. This article discusses the collaborative development of a semester-long Publishing Academy, designed to promote knowledge of scholarly publishing and increase the…

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…

Academic and research libraries are undergoing a profound transformation, shaped by technological advancements, shifting societal dynamics, and evolving institutional priorities. This essay examines how these forces are driving libraries to evolve into specialized and distinct models, shaping their future and drawing parallels to the Cambrian…

This article considers the role of teaching and learning departments within academic libraries and how they may differ from reference and instruction departments. The author used website analysis to profile and compare the two types of departments across multiple institutions. Initial findings indicate that the two have several roles in common,…

Undergraduate research and other high-impact educational practices simulate real-world learning environments and present an opportunity for high-level information literacy teaching to be better incorporated into the curriculum. The purpose of this survey is to examine efforts of libraries currently offering IL instruction to undergraduate research…

Liaison (or subject specialist) librarians are routinely identified as essential to the sustained success of academic libraries. Yet despite the purported centrality of liaisons to the mission of their institutions, many libraries have struggled to define the role of the subject specialist. These attempts at definition have resulted in a…

The authors surveyed the websites of Canadian academic research libraries to better understand the current landscape of digital humanities and digital scholarship research guides and their content. While only a third of the surveyed library websites provided guides of this nature, an analysis of their content showed a variety of resources 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…

University rankings play an increasingly large role in shaping the goals of academic institutions and departments, while removing universities themselves from the evaluation process. This study compares the library-related results of two university ranking publications with scores on the LibQUAL+™ survey to identify if library service quality--as…

In Fall 2011, staff at the University of Minnesota Libraries-Twin Cities undertook a project to measure how often, and in what ways, students used the Libraries' services. Partnering with the University's Office of Institutional Research, the team investigated ways to match library service usage to individual accounts while retaining patron…

Assessment in United States higher education has become very important in recent years. Virtually all colleges and universities are now striving to prove through empirical evidence that they are committed to improving student learning. Created in late 2005, the US Department of Education's Commission on the Future of Higher Education was charged…

This article explores the closing of the Howard Ross Library of Management at McGill University, Montreal, Canada. We hypothesized that closing a branch library would result in a decline in the use of library services. We measured library service using circulation statistics, library instruction workshop statistics, and data from the online survey…