An increasing number of institutions are freeing up shelf space in their libraries and moving in student services as well as a coffee shop and other lures such as flexible seating arrangements. Librarians are taking down the silence signs in all but the quiet study room and urging members of the academic community to meet, talk, research and…

Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs, have recently emerged as a disruptive pedagogy gaining rapid momentum in higher education. In some states, proposed legislations would accredit MOOCs to provide college-credit courses in the name of cost saving, efficiency and access. While debates rage regarding the place of MOOCs in higher education, some…

Embedded librarianship is a relatively new term but is a fairly well-established stance in academic librarianship. While the terminology has certainly spawned new activities and vigorous new channels of communication, few are talking about the strategies for expanding and enhancing the position of the librarian and libraries organizationally once…

Libraries have been around for thousands of years. Many of them are considered great because of their magnificent architecture or because of the size of their collections. This paper offers ten case studies of libraries that have used technology to achieve greatness. Because almost any library can implement technology, a library does not have to…

Podcasting is a term derived by combining iPod with broadcasting. During 2006, when the idea of podcasting was still in its infancy, this author [an information systems librarian at the Universal College of Learning (UCOL) in New Zealand] began to consider how this new technology could be used by librarians to provide instructional sessions. She…

The idea of the information commons as a space for students to gather and work with technology is over a decade now. Carving out these areas has allowed many university libraries to remain relevant in the academic lives of students. Just as libraries have historically provided reading rooms for users to access and work with print collections, they…

In the humanities, scholars accord libraries high prestige and use them extensively. Despite the availability of electronic mail and digital libraries, humanists persist in more traditional forms of scholarly communication. Because it will be many years before print records can be given digital form, this population will likely continue library…

Serving as liaison librarians at the department level, the authors discuss strategies for integrating library and online resources with the curriculum. Examples of technology-based capabilities range from current awareness services, e-reserves, and journal finding applications to smart linking functions that can be built into library catalogs,…

Librarians have paid insufficient attention to the conflict on college and university campuses about the role of print and digital resources in the library of the future. Effective communication with all sectors of the academic community, especially those maintaining a strong loyalty to books, will be essential as hybrid print and digital…