Five years ago the Association of College and Research Libraries published "The Value of Academic Libraries" report, spurring academic libraries to action concerning assessment. Communicating library value is especially important when reaching distance learning populations outside the walls of the library. By employing marketing and…

Academic libraries have reported long-term declines in circulation, reference transactions, reserves, and in-house library materials usage. Increasingly, libraries are perceived as being less critical to the academic enterprise. Are these trends irreversible? Perhaps public libraries and some innovative academic libraries can provide us with some…

What began with a few libraries' early application of ethnographic methods to learn more about user behaviors and needs has grown to become a significant body of work done across many institutions using a broad range of methods. User-centered investigations are increasingly influential in discussions about the shape and future of the research…

The moving image plays a significant role in teaching and learning; faculty in a variety of disciplines consider it a crucial component of their coursework. Yet little has been written about how faculty identify, obtain, and use these resources and what role the library plays. This study, which engaged teaching faculty in a dialogue with library…

University and college libraries often seek ways to demonstrate their impact for the academic community. This article reports the results from a two-year study that analyzed library use as demonstrated through checkouts and off-campus access to full-text resources against grade point averages (GPAs) of undergraduates and graduates at a large…

In the last two decades, fundamental changes in information distribution, in the general economy, and in the behaviors of faculty, students, and library staff have problematized the question of an academic library's value and how it can be measured. This article reviews those changes and, drawing on research linked to the Collegiate Learning…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to describe the findings from the qualitative strand of the National e-Book Observatory (2007-2009) project, relating to the promotion of e-textbooks in UK universities by the library, academics and publishers. A complementary paper on the ways in which students and academics locate e-books provided by their…

Activities and services that improve student engagement and retention in the higher education sector are important not only to individual students' success but also to university planning and funding. This paper reports on a study carried out to explore whether use of the library by new university students is associated with continued enrolment.…

Students at U.S. colleges and universities are concerned about the high cost of textbooks. Expansion of library course reserves has been suggested as one solution to this problem. The authors surveyed libraries at public universities to explore the status and management of physical course reserves and the role they play vis-a-vis textbook…

Discussion of the role of academic libraries focuses on a study that proposed and tested a model to explore the use of academic libraries. Investigated service quality factors, resources, and user characteristics, and concludes that use is influenced most by a user's perceived familiarity with the library and its resources. (Author/LRW)

This paper discusses a formal study conducted in 2001 at Brigham Young University to determine the value of the library to the university community. Methods used to collect data for the study included an e-mail survey, usage statistics, naturalistic observations, and interviews. Two years after the study, the authors wondered if the conclusions of…

Examines how history graduate students seek information and how they use the university library in their information-seeking process, based on interviews at UCLA. Explores the use of new technologies and the reliance that history graduate students place on reference librarians and librarians in special collections. (Author/LRW)

Student requests for online searching often show that faculty members have suggested inappropriate searches. A survey of faculty that examined their use of online searching in research and their communications to students about this research method is described, and ways in which librarians might improve the situation are suggested. The…

Explores the differences between the level of adoption of information resources by selected faculty and their responses to these technologies, the impact of library technology on the way they use the library for research and teaching, and their interpretation of the role the library plays in this period of transition and change. Contains 41…

The results of three surveys conducted in 1983--one of Texas Tech University students, one of the library staff, and one of faculty members--indicated that all three populations surveyed agreed that the library should provide bibliographic instruction for students. Preliminary profiles of user needs were developed on the basis of responses to the…