Research consultations are a standard service in academic libraries and consume significant library resources. There is a lack of scholarship evaluating the impact of this service on faculty. This paper describes the impact of librarian consultations on faculty and their role in the research process. Data was collected from a survey of sixty-seven…

This article describes a wayfinding study conducted in an urban, academic library to better understand the experiences of multilingual student populations. The study, which incorporated traditional user experience methods and video ethnography, exposed communication obstacles and spatial challenges encountered by students of English for speakers…

Master of Library and Information Studies (MLIS) students represent a population for whom literature searching is a core practice and a learning outcome for an entry-level course on information searching. How LIS students learn to find information, though, is not completely clear. Many studies have explored undergraduate searching behavior, but…

Google Scholar is a free service that provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly works and to connect patrons with the resources libraries provide. The researchers in this study analyzed Google Scholar usage data from 2006 for three library tools at San Francisco State University: SFX link resolver, Web Access Management proxy server,…

Society's view of the library has changed with each passing generation. What was once a quiet building full of books intended for the studious researcher is now becoming a place that combines print and technology, to encourage both the interactive and visual learners. Today's kids have access to both hardbound books as well as online resources,…

The year 2011 was the PALNI (Private Academic Library Network of Indiana) consortium's "rookie season" for the implementation of Primo, the 2010 Discovery Layer 500 race winner. In this article, the authors report on their transition to the cloud within Ex Libris Ltd.'s Primo TotalCare environment: their preparation, the steps involved…

As individuals become more and more comfortable mediating all kinds of situations online and through various technologies, their virtual selves increasingly overlap their "real" lives. Posting a "happy birthday!" message on Facebook is as automatic as dropping a card in the mail. E-mailing relevant links to co-workers happens as naturally as…

Discusses results from recent relevance research with implications for information professionals. The studies show that beyond the usual concern with high relevance and non-relevance judgments, partially relevant judgments by users are important. Calls for the adoption of a more complex view of human relevance judgments in the education and…

Investigates relationships among: techniques used by search analysts during interviews with users before engaging in online retrieval of bibliographic citations ("open" and "closed" questions, pauses of different lengths); amount of new information gained by user as result of search; and user's satisfaction with quality of…

This exploratory investigation of the process of defining the information needs of computer users and the impact of that process on information retrieval focuses on communication problems. Six sites were visited that used computers to process data or to provide information, including the California Department of Transportation, the California…

A series of five runs comprised of 20 searches each were carried out in a three-year span of the INSPEC data base. The same queries were processed manually in the corresponding volumes of Science Abstracts, and comparison of the output of each search method exposed reasons for the failures. Emphasis is laid on the fact that a query comprises other…

Project Intrex is a program of information transfer experiments directed toward new services and facilities for people who seek information in large libraries. The Project Intrex program includes: (1) the assembly and organization of an information store of sufficient size; (2) the development of the essential facilities for storing, retrieving,…

A comparison of costs for computer-based searching of Psychological Abstracts and Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC) systems by the New York State Library at Albany was produced by combining data available from search request forms and from bills from the contract subscription service, the State University of New…

Question analysis and search strategy development were broken down into nine steps for answering reference questions. These steps were examined for possible mechanization of the answering process. Such automation was not proved feasible. (LS)

This report examines the problems in the flow of scientific and technological information in the Ceramic Industry. The research methodology used involved a panel of experts which defined the functions performed by ceramists and their corresponding information needs, listed sources of information available to ceramists, and defined problems and…