After providing access to over 100 video interviews conducted by a professor with notable entertainers and personalities from film through an institutional repository, an experiment was conducted to discover whether a larger audience could be gained by adding a subset of 32 of these videos to YouTube. The results, over 400,000 views, indicate that…

The growth in number and kind of online reference services has resulted in both new users consulting library research services as well as new patterns of service use. Staffing in-person and virtual reference services desks adequately requires a systematic analysis of patterns of use across service points in order to successfully meet fluctuating…

Academic libraries are flocking to online social networking sites in an effort to meet users where they are. Pinterest is the latest of these rapidly growing online social networking tools. The author of this article reports results from a survey on academic libraries' presence on Pinterest. The survey found most academic library pinboards are in…

This paper will look at the services presently offered to distance students by libraries within the categories of professional staff, access to resources, reference assistance, and library user instruction. It will then offer the argument that these services could be improved by developing embedded librarians within online academic courses as a…

This collection of 15 essays, reports, and notes written by staff members of the Royal Institute of Technology Library (RITL) addresses various aspects of modern librarianship, and outlines some of the RITL contributions to the field. Designed to present a composite picture of the various activities of RITL since about mid-1973, these essays…

This article outlines a pilot project to offer a personalized online library service to Open University MBA alumni. A review of the literature and results of a desktop analysis of other UK Higher Education alumni library services are included. Content procurement and systems issues are considered along with the underlying organizational, resource…

A survey of 34 of the largest public library systems, each serving at least 500,000 people, showed: (1) minority offer online database services; (2) cost is major prohibiting factor; (3) New York Times Information Bank is most popular database; (4) fee structures vary; and (5) business organizations are most frequent users. (JD)

The national bibliographic services currently provided by the Library of Congress (LC) include the Machine-Readable Cataloging (MARC) service, LC's Automated Process Information File System, and the Library of Congress Subject Headings. Cooperative projects involving LC include COMARC (Cooperative MARC), a national bibliographic data base for…

To investigate the experience of American and Canadian university libraries with remote access catalogs, self-administered questionnaires were sent to the 137 directors of all Association of Research Libraries (ARL) libraries and all libraries of Canadian degree-granting institutions. The study was designed to: (1) survey Canadian and U.S.…

Four public libraries participated in a two-year investigation of the provision of on line reference services in a public library setting. To evaluate the utility and cost of the service, data were collected about search statistics, usage patterns, costs, and impact on the library. This volume of the report contains the evaluation methodology,…

College and university librarians were surveyed in May 1984 to assess their experiences and opinions with respect to online searching in the humanities. A questionnaire was mailed to 1,160 4-year college and university libraries in the American Library Directory (1983) that listed an online services coordinator, an enrollment of 1,000 or more, or…

As players in the delivery of services and online information, libraries are in the best position to use staff expertise and the technology they have developed to foster community awareness of social, professional and commercial interactions on the internet. Historically, libraries have been progressive institutions, undertaking constant…

This paper describes the experimental implementation of BIROS (Bibliographical Information Retrieval Online Service) in the Lancashire Public Library. The project is designed to provide information on the potential use of an online service for the general public, with particular regard to professional and technical users; the implications for…

Eight public libraries participated in a two-year experiment to investigate the potential of the public library as a "linking agent" between the public and the many machine-readable data bases currently accessible using on line computer terminals. The investigation covered users of the service, impact on the library, conditions for…

Explores issues surrounding efforts to introduce online catalogs to users and presents relevant research results from Northwestern University's "Educating the Online Catalog User" project. Highlights include attitudes and preconceptions about online catalogs and instruction, research on online catalog use, suggestions for online catalog teaching,…