Even as librarians have spent the past twenty years documenting the rich world of scholarly communication beyond the catalog, repositories and catalogs too often remain completely siloed from each other. Current practices and tools to unite the two focus entirely on matching names, an imprecise method requiring substantial time spent on review.…

Shared print programs are helping their member libraries right-size their collections. As they do, there are concerns about the adverse impact of bibliographic inaccuracies. This paper studies bibliographic record inaccuracies and the resulting frequency of mismatches between an item owned and the record representing ownership. Through analysis of…

Although scholarship has addressed issues around serving international students in U.S. and Canadian libraries, reports on how Chinese graduate students use information in Chinese universities, especially for a particular discipline, are rare. In this study, the author interviewed 15 graduate students and researchers in a top-ranked chemistry…

The study assessed users' information needs and satisfaction in selected seminary libraries in Oyo State, Nigeria. This paper employed the descriptive survey research design, whereby the expost-facto was employed with a sample size of three hundred (300) participants, selected from six seminaries located in Ibadan, Oyo and Ogbomoso, all in Oyo…

Database cancellation is one of the most difficult tasks performed by a librarian. This may seem counter-intuitive but, psychologically, it is certainly true. When a librarian or a team of librarians has invested a great deal of time doing research, talking to potential users, and conducting trials before deciding to subscribe to a database, they…

During the last two decades many Hungarian libraries have developed considerably, beyond what was considered possible prior to 1989 and the beginning of events signaling the end of Communism in the country. Some of the modernization of library services has been realized through participation in cooperative agreements. Many smaller and larger…

Today's scholars face an outstanding array of choices when choosing search tools: Google Scholar, discipline-specific abstracts and index databases, library discovery tools, and more recently, Microsoft's re-launch of their academic search tool, now dubbed Microsoft Academic Search. What are these tools' strengths for the emerging needs of…

The silo is a well-worn metaphor in information systems used to illustrate separateness, isolation, and lack of connectivity. Through the many iterations of system development, libraries, archives, and museums (LAMs) have sought to avoid silos and find the sweet spot between interface design and metadata interoperability. This effort is being…

Reference services in public libraries are changing dramatically. The Internet, online databases, and shrinking budgets are all making it necessary for non-traditional reference staff to become familiar with online reference tools. Recognizing the need for cross-training, Chesapeake Public Library (CPL) developed a program called the Database…

Libraries continue to shift budgets toward obtaining more electronic resources. Electronic resources can develop problems at any time when a library offers access. Staff collaboration is vital in ensuring availability to those resources. Partnering with areas in the library that work most closely with patrons can help share the load of the…

Western Illinois University Libraries has cut online serials subscriptions in the past 2 years. The librarians were guided by the statistics for downloads provided by the publishers of the journals. However, questions were raised by both professors and librarians regarding the exact meaning of the statistics. This caused the electronic resources…

The purpose of this paper is to report the results of a quantitative analysis exploring the interaction and relationship between the online database and electronic journal collections at the J. N. Desmarais Library of Laurentian University. A very strong relationship exists between the number of searches and the size of the online database…

This study investigates librarians' satisfaction with general interdisciplinary databases for undergraduate research and explores possibilities for improving these databases. Results from a national survey suggest that librarians at a variety of institutions are relatively satisfied overall with the content and usability of general,…

Libraries are not so unlike market giants Netflix, Amazon, and Pandora. Despite their significantly different business models and missions, they share an interest in facilitating the search for information, including what to read, view, and listen to next. Librarians, too, want their patrons to be able to use their tools to make connections among…

The introduction of Google Scholar in November 2004 was accompanied by fanfare, skepticism, and numerous questions about the scope and coverage of this database. Nearly one year after its inception, many of these questions remain unanswered. This study compares the contents of 47 different databases with that of Google Scholar. Included in this…