Even as librarians have spent the past twenty years documenting the rich world of scholarly communication beyond the catalog, repositories and catalogs too often remain completely siloed from each other. Current practices and tools to unite the two focus entirely on matching names, an imprecise method requiring substantial time spent on review.…

There are currently no databases dedicated to indexing the research literature for disability studies. To identify which databases have more robust indexing of the literature of this field, the author compiled a list of relevant journals and searched for them in databases either frequently recommended in libraries' disability studies research…

This bibliometric study looked at the information literacy (IL) literature published by Asian authors, focusing on publishing and citation trends, prolific authors, institutions, countries, collaboration patterns, the thematic evolution of keywords, and factor analysis of keywords, journals, and countries. From the Scopus database, the study's…

Open innovation makes an open, collaborative process of creating new or improved ideas, methods, or products, based on the exchange of information and knowledge between different agents. Several Web-based platforms have been developed to support this collaborative process. These platforms act as "innovation markets," virtual meeting…

This case study describes the development of CORA (Community of Online Research Assignments), an open educational resource (OER). CORA, available at www.projectcora.org, was developed through a Statewide California Electronic Library Consortium (SCELC) grant. The grant proposed to use a "recipe" metaphor to envision shared information…

Students today perform research in a disintermediated environment, which often allows them to struggle directly with the process of selecting research tools and choosing scholarly sources. The authors conducted a qualitative study with twenty students, using structured observations to ascertain the processes students use to select databases and…

An explosion in access to electronic databases and digital information is changing the way we view source citation. While the original purpose of referencing--showing the reader exactly where the author got his or her input--is clearly more important than ever, citation is increasingly taking on other roles, ones that have little to do with good…

Librarians regularly encounter students who struggle to understand and apply information literacy concepts. A qualitative survey administered to information literacy practitioners asked about troublesome content and analyzed results using the threshold concepts pedagogical framework first described by Jan Meyer and Ray Land. A threshold concept…

Digital media increase the visibility and presence of the past while also reshaping our sense of history. We have extraordinary access to digital versions of books, journals, film, television, music, art and popular culture from earlier eras. New theoretical formulations of database and archive provide ways to think creatively about these changes…

Though information literacy (IL) instruction is often assumed by faculty to be electronic, introductory, and teachable in a single visit, our collaboration on an inquiry-driven, research-intensive capstone course for English majors focused instead on bringing their information gathering and critical thinking skills up to a disciplinary level.…

This study evaluates the effectiveness of simple and expert searches in Google Scholar (GS), EconLit, GEOBASE, PAIS, POPLINE, PubMed, Social Sciences Citation Index, Social Sciences Full Text, and Sociological Abstracts. It assesses the recall and precision of 32 searches in the field of later-life migration: nine simple keyword searches and 23…

The introduction of Google Scholar in November 2004 was accompanied by fanfare, skepticism, and numerous questions about the scope and coverage of this database. Nearly one year after its inception, many of these questions remain unanswered. This study compares the contents of 47 different databases with that of Google Scholar. Included in this…

After seeing growing frustration among inexperienced undergraduate researchers searching a popular aggregated interdisciplinary database, the authors questioned whether the leading interdisciplinary databases are serving undergraduates' needs. As a preliminary exploration of this question, the authors queried vendors, analyzed their marketing…

Business faculty members teaching at undergraduate campuses of the Pennsylvania State University were surveyed in order to assess their satisfaction with free Web sources and with subscription databases for their professional research. Although satisfaction with the Web's ease of use was higher than that for databases, overall satisfaction for…

Examined the effect of an interdisciplinary Web-based citation database with full text, the ProQuest Research Library, on the Western State University library's acquisitions allocation plan. Used list price of full-text journals to calculate increases in acquisitions funding. A list of articles discussing formula allocation is appended.…