As participants in the Association of College and Research Libraries' (ACRL) Distance and Online Learning Section (DOLS) Mentoring Program, two librarians collaborated to deploy a pilot library video tutorial program at the mentee librarian's small liberal arts college in the Southeastern United States. Drawing on the mentoring librarian's…

This research seeks to find the new trends in virtual reference and online learning by looking at the impact of COVID-19 on academic libraries, and by identifying gaps in professional development for academic librarians, particularly in reference and instruction. Responses from the surveyed academic librarians indicate that many services…

As the cost of textbooks rises and discoverability of resources improves, students are turning more and more to interlibrary loan to meet their textbook needs. This article describes how systems can be utilized to streamline processes and allow for the canceling of textbook requests consistently and appropriately by taking full advantage of the…

Measuring research impact has become a nearly ubiquitous facet of scholarly communication. At the University of Minnesota Medical School, new administrative directives have directly tied impact metrics to faculty assessment, promotion, and tenure. In this paper, I describe a platform for the analysis and visualization of research impact that was…

This article describes information literacy struggles of ESL college students within the context of four information literacy components: Identify, Locate, Evaluate, Use. Experiences from an online freshman composition course are used to illustrate these struggles, along with techniques academic librarians use to help ESL students from a distance.

The article reports the results of a survey conducted among the Polish and Lithuanian academics concerning their information needs and expectations regarding academic library websites. The survey was realized using the technique of Computer-Assisted Web Interviewing (CAWI) on a group of scholars representing sciences and humanities or social…

Smartphone users expect the presentation of Web sites on their mobile browsers to look and feel like native applications. With the pressure on library Web developers to produce app-like mobile sites, there is often a rush to get a site up without considering the importance of reusing or even restructuring the data driving the Web sites. An…

Usability testing has become a routine way for many libraries to ensure that their Web presence is user-friendly and accessible. At the same time, popular subject guide creation systems, such as LibGuides, decentralize Web content creation and put authorship into the hands of librarians who may not be trained in user-centered design principles. At…

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…

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…

"Sense of place" no longer applies only to the physical library. All students are distance learners to one extent or another, and all distance services must be considered as a single virtual learning commons. Librarians at Bucks County (PA) Community College implement and integrate current teaching, learning, virtual reference, and mobile access…

Today's academic libraries must demonstrate their value to cost-conscious university administrators. Budget trade-off decisions that involve the library can be difficult for any university administrator to make, and such decisions are complicated by the recent appearance of massive global digital libraries that seem poised to replace the…

One of the toughest challenges in an academic library systems office is how to manage and present the extensive selection of electronic resources from a variety of vendors. At York College of Pennsylvania, the authors participated in an admissions-driven web revision cycle and used a campus-provided CMS for 8 years. During this time, they tried…

As a concept, the next-generation catalog (NGC) is not new to librarians, who have been wishing for better OPAC interfaces for their integrated library systems (ILSs). The NGC has been the focus of discussion for more than 5 years now, from the 2006 report of the implementation of Endeca at North Carolina State University, to Marshall Breeding's…

The Internet and the World Wide Web have influenced the new approaches taken in teaching and learning at institutions of higher learning. The nature of the courses offered, the geographical spread of the teaching sites as well as the diverse and distributed student population are the catalysts for the changes. These non-traditional, or distant…