This study investigates how article downloads from ScienceDirect changed after Temple University Libraries downsized its all-inclusive Elsevier big deal bundle to a selective custom package. After the libraries lost current-year access to nearly half of Elsevier's active journals, the total downloads from Elsevier journals declined by 16.2 percent…

This paper explores possibilities for marrying data visualization to online archival finding aids, which have continually suffered from usability issues in their long history. This paper describes a project in which two different data visualization models were built to replace sections of an archival finding aid. Users were then shown the models,…

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…

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…

This paper examines the problems involved in subject retrieval from full-text databases of secondary materials in the humanities. Ten such databases were studied and their search functionality evaluated, focusing on factors such as Boolean operators, document surrogates, limiting by subject area, proximity operators, phrase searching, wildcards,…

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…