Student workers are a well-established component of academic library operations. Recently, their traditional role has expanded to include responsibilities that were previously assigned to librarians, including in-person and virtual reference support. This trend has raised concerns about service quality and highlighted the importance of adequate…

There has been longstanding debate about whether the level of complexity of questions received at reference desks and via online chat services requires a librarian's expertise. Continued decreases in the number and complexity of reference questions have all but ended the debate; many academic libraries no longer staff service points with…

When looking for ways to improve library services, we considered what data sources were readily available to us and how we could harvest and use this data. We investigated three years of chat reference statistics at Central Michigan University, a large research institution, to gain a better understanding of our patrons' chat behavior. We then…

Web 2.0 tools offer academic libraries new avenues for delivering services and resources to students. In this research we report on a content analysis of 100 US community college libraries' Websites for the availability of Web 2.0 applications. We found Web 2.0 tools utilized by 97% of our sample population and many of these sites contained more…

The creation of an instant messaging (IM) service is described. The challenges encountered in developing, launching, and maintaining the project are examined and include technical support, archiving, balancing different formats, privacy, assessment, training, and the effectiveness of the IM channel. The process of choosing an aggregator and a…

With celebrities discussing Twitter on television talk shows, Facebook being used by people to share pictures of their grandchildren, and academic seminars being delivered in Second Life, it is hard to get through a day without being faced with some sort of social networking tool. Librarians often talk about the importance of outreach and of…

Facebook is a social network that connects people with other people. Librarians have created Facebook Groups to share ideas and to debate how to use this resource as a potential marketing and/or reference tool. Based on conversations among these librarians, it appears that student response to library outreach on this medium is lackluster at best,…

Knowing that some students appreciate their library's value and want to contribute to its new developments, the author sought to generate discussion about her library to know how her library patrons use the internet. At first, she created a blog, but after that attracted few responses, she built a wiki instead, to invite more student interaction.…

This paper describes chat widgets, chunks of code that can be embedded on a web site to appear as an instant messaging system, and how they can be used on a science library web site to better serve library users. Interviews were conducted concerning experiences at science and humanities libraries and more similarities than differences were…

As more users access library services remotely, it has become increasingly important for librarians to reach out to their user communities and promote the value of libraries. Convincing the faculty and students in the sciences of the value of libraries and librarians can be a particularly "hard sell" as more and more of their primary…

This library technology plan from Mission College in California establishes the goals, objectives, strategies, and implementation plans of the library in developing and maintaining its technical capabilities and electronic resources. The goals are organized into four categories: information resources, instructional resources, infrastructure, and…