This article presents a qualitative evaluation methodology of academic departments for library organizational learning and library enhancement planning. This evaluation used campus units' academic program review reports as a data source and employed collaborative content analysis by library liaisons to extract departmental strengths, weaknesses,…

Birmingham City University's Library and Learning Resources' strategic aim is to improve student satisfaction. A key element is the achievement of the Customer Excellence Standard. An important component of the standard is the mapping of services to improve quality. Library and Learning Resources has developed a methodology to map these…

Purposeful assessment of space for the understanding and improvement of the academic library is a relatively new area of inquiry. This essay offers a framework to consider different factors affecting such an assessment and insights for undertaking a meaningful inquiry about the relationship of space to an academic library's evolving purpose as…

During spring quarter 2008, the Western Washington University (WWU) Libraries established an interactive bloglike environment called "14 Days to Have Your Say" with the intention of gathering new ideas and feedback about the libraries from the university community. The environment was developed as a fairly simple Drupal site. The project…

When Bruce Miller took up the position of head librarian at the University of California, Merced in 2001, the plan for the new library was to use the University of California (UC) system's rich base of support as a launching pad for something great and extraordinary: a model academic research library for the twenty-first century. This article…

Beyond collecting traditional circulation statistics, tracking in-house use of library materials is a significant measure of how patrons use our resources. In our pilot project, Lending Services staff members conducted nightly pick-ups of library materials left on tables, in carrels, in study rooms, as well as books cast aside in the stacks areas…

The process of identifying items in a library's collection by assigning to each a unique machine readable code has been generally referred to as barcoding. Barcoding is often one of the first critical projects a library will embark upon in the process of automation. This Systems and Procedures Exchange Center (SPEC) kit addresses many of the major…

This report of a project conducted to improve the sharing of library resources in the post-secondary sector in British Columbia focuses on the operations of the Interlibrary Loan Network, which went into operation September 1, 1977. This network was designed to provide access to the library collections at the University of British Columbia, Simon…

Data were gathered on the costs charged by various service centers which contract Ohio College Library Center (OCLC) services to individual libraries, and charges were compared at the levels of 3,000, 10,000, and 20,000 FTUs per year. (An FTU is the first time a library uses a cataloging record to catalog a title in its collection.) It was…

To gather information about the nature of photocopy services in academic libraries and issues relating to their management, a survey was mailed to each of the 117 members of the Association for Research Libraries (ARL). The survey focused on two components of photocopy services: the self-service copiers placed at strategic locations within the…

The 1986 annual report of the Council on Library Resources (CLR) reviews activity over the previous 10 years and provides a full record for the 12 months ending June 30, 1986, focusing on the program components of research, collaborative ventures to support operations and expand service capabilities, and the profession of librarianship.…

The 1985 annual report of the Council on Library Resources (CLR) describes an underlying uniformity of purpose in the activities of each of the three components of the program: research, exploration and installation of improved operating capabilities, and librarianship itself. The intent in each program is to reshape academic and research…

This paper looks at the literature on library bibliographic instruction and reviews the state of the art of such instruction in college and university settings. It is divided into four sections which include: (1) abstracts of 14 representative articles on library instruction published within the last 5 years; (2) a summary of major trends,…

This article describes a case study that best illustrates the value of student workers in university libraries, focusing particularly on how this kind of creative endeavor benefits everyone involved--the library, the students, the faculty, and at the end of the project: the university community. (Contains 1 table.)

A survey of the ten university libraries considered to be most comparable to George Mason University (GMU) in interlibrary loan (ILL) activity was undertaken for comparison purposes. To develop a series of recommendations for GMU with respect to ILL, the following areas were considered and are addressed in this report: (1) Divisional…