This qualitative case study provides fresh understandings about first year undergraduate international students' library and information use at an Australian university, and their associated information literacy learning needs. The findings provide evidence to inform the development of library spaces and information literacy responses that enhance…

Information transparency is the result of informational globalization and the avalanche of information and communication technologies: thus, these processes are natural for the whole modern society. Statistics show that during the past several years the transparency situation not just in education but in the entire society has expanded…

Academic libraries seek to play a central role in supporting the research enterprise on their campuses. Postdoctoral scholars ("postdocs") make substantial contributions to academic research and are an important group toward which services can be marketed. They are also difficult to find on many campuses, with some studies referring to…

As virtual worlds continue to proliferate globally, libraries are faced with the question of whether to provide information services to virtual patrons. This study, utilizing a mixed-method approach of interviews, focus groups, and surveys, represents one of the largest studies of virtual libraries attempted to date. Taking a holistic perspective,…

The contributions in this volume represent a decade of OCLC's user behavior research findings that articulate the need for the design of future library services to be all about the user. Highlights include: (1) People associate the library with books and do not consider the library in relation to online resources or reference services; (2) People…

This follow-up study examines whether or not findings of single institution studies are applicable to other institutions by performing an institution-to-institution comparison of the results obtained from an information-seeking behavior survey sent to education faculty at twenty research institutions. The results from this study corroborated what…

Personalization of information retrieval tailors search towards individual users to meet their particular information needs by taking into account information about users and their contexts, often through implicit sources of evidence such as user behaviors and contextual factors. The current study looks particularly at users' dwelling behavior,…

Teaching itself, though noble, is a challenging profession. Such a profession calls upon not only the intellectual capacities of the teacher, but the physical and emotional as well. In short, it is a unique profession. Teaching differently-abled students (special education), is even more challenging. By virtue of their teaching a special group of…

A number of academic, public, regional, and state libraries use WorldCat Local (WCL) as a resource location tool that enables users to search, find, and gain access to a range of print and electronic resources. This article describes a study undertaken to assess a Research I university's implementation of WCL. The study sought to understand the…

This article presents KnowledgePuzzle, a browsing tool for knowledge construction from the web. It aims to adapt the structure of web content to the learner's information needs regardless of how the web content is originally delivered. Learners are provided with a meta-cognitive space (e.g., a concept mapping tool) that enables them to plan…

This study was carried out to investigate whether the levels of university students' problematic internet use and of perceived communication skills differ with respect to their basic internet use purposes. The participants were 411 university students [215 of whom were females (52.30%) and 196 of whom were males (47.70%)]. In the study, the…

The circulation records from 1997/98 to 2007/08 for UCLA and from 2000/01 to 2007/08 for Pasadena City College (PCC) were analyzed to examine patterns in the use of print materials during a period of increasingly available online digital information resources. The analysis included examinations of longitudinal circulation patterns broken down by…

This study examined the effectiveness of a professional development (PD) experience on preschool teachers' instructional strategy development. Focusing on supporting young children's peer social competence as a common interest, preschool teachers were guided to design the specific contents of the PD workshops and were offered an on-site…

Purpose: This study is an attempt to develop an automatic identification method for Arabic web queries and divide them into several query types using data mining. In addition, it seeks to evaluate the impact of the academic environment on using the internet. Design/methodology/approach: The web log files were collected from one of the higher…

Although information has become increasingly prevalent in young people's lives, minimal research has addressed children's attitudes to the word itself. This paper scrutinizes questionnaire-based data to explore how 45 eight- to ten-year-old Canadians understood the term. "Information" was often considered to be material that met a need,…