This journey-mapping pilot study was designed to determine whether journey mapping is an effective method to enhance the student experience of using the library by assessing our services from their point of view. Journey mapping plots a process or service to produce a visual representation of a library transaction--from the point at which the…

With the diversification of information and the rapid development of information technology, and the arrival of the era of big data, information literacy has become one of the basic qualities that everyone must possess (Galvin and Jeanne 2006). This paper presents information literacy and review writing, data access autonomy and academic exchange…

For the past several years academic libraries have been adopting discovery systems to provide a search experience that reflects user expectations and improves access to electronic resources. University of Houston Libraries has kept pace with this evolving trend by pursuing various discovery options; these include an open-source tool, a federated…

This study assesses and compares the quality of sources found by undergraduate students when doing research using both Google and a library (federated) search tool. Thirty undergraduates were asked to find four sources (one book, two articles, and one additional source of their choosing) related to a selected research topic. Students used both…

This paper aims to present an alternative and simple method to improve the filtering of search results so as to increase the efficiency of literature searches, particularly for individual researchers who have limited logistical resources. The method proposed here is scope restriction using an impact-based filter, made possible by the emergence of…

The aim of this study is to investigate if providing mathematics education pre-service teachers with animated library tutorials on library and database searches changes their searching practices. This study involved the completion of a survey by 138 students and seven individual interviews before and after library search demonstration videos were…

The University of Michigan Library wanted to learn more about the kinds of searches its users were conducting through the "one search" search box on the Library Web site. Library staff conducted two investigations. A preliminary investigation in 2011 involved the manual review of the 100 most frequently occurring queries conducted…

As knowledge brokers, librarians are living in interesting times for themselves and libraries. It causes them to wonder sometimes if the traditional tools like the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) system can cope with the onslaught of information. The categories provided do not always seem adequate for the knowledge-discovery habits of…

Web design is a necessarily iterative process. During the process, it can be difficult to balance the interests and focus of the library site experts and their novice users. It can also be easy to lose focus on the main goals of site use and become wrapped up in the process of design or coding or in the internal politics of site design. Just as…

This article examines how finding aids are structured and delivered, considering alternative approaches. It suggests that single-level displays, those that present a single component of a multilevel description to users at a time, have the potential to transform the delivery and display of collection information while improving the user…

Google Scholar is a free service that provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly works and to connect patrons with the resources libraries provide. The researchers in this study analyzed Google Scholar usage data from 2006 for three library tools at San Francisco State University: SFX link resolver, Web Access Management proxy server,…

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…

The year 2011 was the PALNI (Private Academic Library Network of Indiana) consortium's "rookie season" for the implementation of Primo, the 2010 Discovery Layer 500 race winner. In this article, the authors report on their transition to the cloud within Ex Libris Ltd.'s Primo TotalCare environment: their preparation, the steps involved…

EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS) has been heavily used by UMUC students since its implementation in fall 2011, but experience has shown that it is not always the most appropriate source for satisfying students' information needs and that they often need assistance in understanding how the tool works and how to use it effectively. UMUC librarians have…

Content-enriched metadata in bibliographic records is considered helpful to library users in identifying and selecting library materials for their needs. The paper presents a study, using circulation data from a medium-sized academic library, of the effect of content-enriched records on library materials usage. The study also examines OPAC search…