An increasingly complex and demanding research landscape has seen university libraries rapidly evolve their services. While research data management, bibliometrics, and research impact services have predominantly featured in the literature to date, the full scope of support libraries are currently providing to their institutions is unknown. This…

Introduction: Uncertainty is understood as an important component of the information seeking process, but it has not been explored as a component of reference and information service. Method: Interpretative phenomenological analysis was used to examine the practitioner perspective of reference and information service for eight academic research…

This article considers the role of teaching and learning departments within academic libraries and how they may differ from reference and instruction departments. The author used website analysis to profile and compare the two types of departments across multiple institutions. Initial findings indicate that the two have several roles in common,…

Augmented reality (AR) has been used and documented for a variety of commercial and educational purposes, and the proliferation of mobile devices has increased the average person's access to AR systems and tools. However, little research has been done in the area of using AR to supplement traditional library services, specifically for patrons aged…

Distance librarians often do not have the opportunity to engage face-to-face with users of library services. Without this personal interaction, it can be difficult to evaluate the effectiveness of library services in meeting the needs of the distance learners. Distance librarians may not realize it, but most have a wealth of information at their…

Reference transactions in academic libraries have been on the decline since mid-1990. The Academic Library Survey from the National Center for Education Statistics shows an average drop of 25% in reference use from 1996-2004 with higher numbers at some institutions such as the University of Maryland which plummeted 47% (Martell, 2008). The…

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…

Systematic reviews, and other forms of knowledge synthesis, are an increasingly popular research methodology being used in the sciences, humanities, and social sciences. Librarians are being called upon to support this work through consultation, instruction, and/or performing the systematic search on behalf of the research team. Professional…

When looking for ways to improve library services, we considered what data sources were readily available to us and how we could harvest and use this data. We investigated three years of chat reference statistics at Central Michigan University, a large research institution, to gain a better understanding of our patrons' chat behavior. We then…

Reference librarians are constantly balancing their reference duties against other duties, for example, collection development and departmental liaison. The author works as a reference librarian at Texas A&M University-Commerce Libraries in Commerce, Texas. The university has approximately 11,000 students, a large number of whom are…

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…

Regular evaluation of archival reference services is essential to ensure that users have appropriate access to the information they need. Archives New Zealand has been measuring customer satisfaction for many years using self-completion questionnaires but recently trialed two new methods of evaluation, using external research companies. One…

This paper examines the evolution and findings of an on-going longitudinal study that is assessing the satisfaction of distance education students with library reference services through the use of a transaction-level survey. The survey's purpose is two-fold: first, it is used to garner valuable input from these students; and second, it also…

The contributions in this volume represent a decade of OCLC's user behavior research findings that articulate the need for the design of future library services to be all about the user. Highlights include: (1) People associate the library with books and do not consider the library in relation to online resources or reference services; (2) People…

Research support services at The University of Queensland Library (UQ Library) have evolved in response to the global and national drivers, which have impacted on broader University strategy. UQ Library's success in responding to these drivers has involved leveraging the information within, and capacity of, the institutional repository, the core…