According to the author, we are all creators and consumers of media. Technology has made it easy to copy, paste, and transfer anything educators might want to use in their classrooms. As educators, school librarians have an obligation to honor the law and be the role models that learners and other staff members need them to be. So many times the…

This paper reports the findings of a survey administered to a large academic university student population, assessing students' self-reported motivations, difficulties, and methods used in finding and using financial information. Results discussed include information types and sources students consult for financial information. The survey also…

Every senior at Haverford College writes a thesis or its equivalent, conducting independent research with guidance from faculty and librarians. Students critically engage in investigative work in archives, field studies, and labs. In this article, librarians explore the way anthropology and history thesis writers do research to define paths toward…

While many studies have been conducted under the auspices of calculating academic library value, there are no large-scale studies into the perceptions that college or university provosts have of library value, nor are there studies into how provosts prefer library value data to be communicated. This study addresses that gap through a national…

The nature of the information seeking behaviour of the teachers engaged in General Degree Colleges and Teachers' Training Colleges affiliated to West Bengal State University, India, is critically analysed in the present study. The descriptive analysis is based on well structured, close-ended questionnaires which were distributed among 450…

This study uses three cohorts of first-time, full-time undergraduate students (N = 8,652) at a large, metropolitan, public research university to examine the impact of student use of three library resources (workstations, study rooms, and research clinics) on academic performance. To deal with self-selection bias and estimate this impact more…

Over the past decade and a half, free access to computers and the Internet in U.S. public libraries evolved from a rare commodity into a core service. Now, people from all walks of life rely on this service every day to look for jobs, find health care, and read the latest news. As the nation struggled through a historic recession, nearly one-third…

Intended to introduce librarians to social science concepts relevant to the future of librarianship, this essay explores Birdsall's thesis that librarians belong to a special class of professions that share knowledge with their clients, and that the problems of these professions are political as well as social and economic. (EM)

The linkage of information structure with methods of library instruction should be of primary concern in discussing the retrieval of information by students. Librarians can help students to locate information, document concepts, and assess sources. (Author/LS)

Discusses how school librarians can use self-interest to increase their influence with the principal. Topics include demonstrating how the library can help; providing pertinent information; increasing interaction with the principal; accuracy and speed of providing information; helpful Web sites; and organizing and presenting the information. (LRW)

Investigates how intranets are being used based on a survey of corporations and international organizations. Discusses good management practices for the development of intranets which stimulate knowledge sharing and the role they could play in facilitating knowledge management initiatives, and considers the role of libraries and information…

Through a nationally-administered questionnaire and a literature review, this report explores developments in the psychology of self-planned learning. The introduction presents a review of the current literature, hypotheses concerning the motivation and methods of adult learning, and assumptions made for this survey. The questionnaire was…

Prompted by an awareness of the general public's lack of access to scientific literature in the medical field, this paper documents the practical and ethical desirability of eliminating obstacles to those seeking health information. Discussions based on a survey of the literature focus on (1) the concepts and definitions of information, knowledge,…

Libraries must be aware of the needs of the users in their funding organization, and yet, there is growing concern among library funding organizations that libraries are not fully coping with the information explosion. In fact, libraries, by not adopting new techniques to become more productive, are actually helping to cause the problems of the…

In order to utilize cable, libraries will be dealing with an entirely new clientele. The present knowledge libraries have about their users is not sufficient to extrapolate to the new clientele, so needs must be identified. (Other conference materials are LI 503071-503074 and 503076 through 503084.) (Author/SJ)