At Winona State University's Krueger Library, where Kendall Larson is an associate professor and Allison Quam is an assistant professor, informational and directional signs are an essential part of the interior space. Yet the ubiquitous sign and media saturation has challenged them to design and maintain effective signage that is conspicuous and…

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…

An increasing number of library patrons are hard of hearing. The U.S. Bureau of Census projected that 35 million North Americans would suffer from hearing loss by the year 2005 based on the age-population projections. These individuals would have at one time been labeled as deaf due to the lack of assistive hearing technology such as hearing aids…

In this article, the author discusses the most important thing she thinks school libraries should work toward. It is important for a school librarian to know and understand the mission of the school. It is also important to formulate a mission for the school library program. School librarians must think about and reflect on their own beliefs. What…

The Orange County Library System (OCLS) began to offer basic technology classes in July 2000. The computers were funded through a grant awarded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Over time, the library staff noticed that the demand for the classes increased, so the offering of classes also increased. When the author arrived at OCLS, her…

The President of ALIA writes about expectations for the Public Libraries Summit, and provides an account of what took place on the day of the meeting, and what has taken place since. In funding terms, the most likely areas of productive engagement with the federal government are considered to be: children, early learning and a literate Australia;…

The purpose of this quantitative content analysis was to determine whether there was a relationship between the age, gender, or race of protagonists in contemporary American Library Association award-winning juvenile literature and the representation of resilience by those characters. Award-winning juvenile fiction and biography books were…

Activities and services that improve student engagement and retention in the higher education sector are important not only to individual students' success but also to university planning and funding. This paper reports on a study carried out to explore whether use of the library by new university students is associated with continued enrolment.…

Libraries today face an increasing challenge: to provide relevant information to diverse populations with differing needs while competing with Web search engines like Google. In 2009, a large group of libraries, including the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries, joined with Innovative Interfaces as development partners to design a new type of…

This article focuses on the model used at the University of Kansas Medical Center to reach graduate students in the School of Nursing. Like many students returning for graduate degrees, distance students are balancing the demands of professional positions, graduate studies, and family life. Topics addressed include: point-of-need assistance,…

As a strategy to promote the Arapahoe Community College Library's collections and services, the Library undertook to brand itself as a math resource center. In promoting one area of expertise, math was selected to help address the problem of a large portion of high school graduates' inability to work at college-level math. A "Math…

This article is the fourth in a series of articles published annually by "Computers in Libraries" surveying integrated library systems and services (ILSs). The purpose of the annual survey is to enable comparison of the ILSs that are available. ILS vendors are in constant pursuit of an ever-changing, consistently vague definition of what the…

ICT made real magic and drastic changes in all service sectors along with higher education and library practices and services. The academic environment is changing from formal education to distance and online learning mode because of ICT. Web technology and mobile technology has made great impact on education sector. The role of Open Access,…

Education in Library and Information Science is a requirement to become a librarian. There are a lot of syllabi and subjects to concentrate on such as cataloguing and classification, information retrieval, knowledge management, and reference. The library as a centre of information has been developing year by year with various types of collections…

Graduate students are a significant segment in online instruction programs, yet little is known about how well they learn the necessary library research skills in this increasingly popular mode of distance learning. This pre- and posttest study and citation analysis examined learning and confidence among students in graduate education programs,…