In fall 2003, Mt. Holyoke, an elite, largely undergraduate liberal arts college with a student population of roughly 2000, unveiled its take on the information commons. Located in an area known as Miles-Smith 4, the commons functions as a conduit between the main library and Dwight Hall, which houses the library offices, state-of-the-art media…

Librarians are in the business of serving the public. Perhaps the public happens to be those who live in a particular city or county, or study at a college or university, or work at a certain organization. No matter where librarians work, they have clientele whose needs for information and entertainment need to be met. Some would think that…

The Carolina Consortium came into being for one purpose: to conclude deals that would allow the sharing of both the costs and the content of a large number of academic journals from three major publishers--Wiley, Springer, and Blackwell. In just a few months--and without any central authority, funding, or administrative overhead--librarians from…

With the dramatic growth of the Internet in the 1990s, the Canadian government developed a well-regarded strategy for addressing the emerging issues posed by the "information highway." The strategy featured legal reforms to address privacy and e-commerce, administrative reforms for the government online initiative, and connectivity…

Presents the results of a qualitative study that focuses on search patterns of college students and community users interacting with a digital image collection. The study finds a distinct difference between the two groups of users and examines the role of mental models in information seeking behavior in digital libraries.

This brief article reports on the 12th national Association of College and Research Libraries' (ACRL) conference held April 7-10, 2004 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. William Mitchell, head of the media arts and sciences program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an architecture professor provided the conference attendees with the opening…

At the centre of the PRIME Faraday Partnership's Technology Watch service is a growing series of technology and market reviews for managers and engineers in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) producing "smart" products. Its aim is to help them maintain their awareness of new technologies and markets and thereby seize opportunities to…

Scholarship conducted in an increasingly online environment requires the services of a trusted third party in order to ensure that scholarly communication remains reliably accessible and applicable over the longer term. The library, by virtue of its most fundamental values and attributes, is probably better suited at this time than other…

According to the National Association of the Deaf, there are approximately 28 million deaf and hearing-impaired people in the U.S.--roughly 10 percent of the total population. This hearing-impaired population may be even more isolated than the visually impaired community. Although technology is making it easier for libraries to provide effective…

We are building conventional library space without making the paradigm shift our digital environment requires. The chief obstacles to change lie in our conception of readers as information consumers, in our allegiance to library operations as the drivers of library design, and in the choice made between foundational and non-foundational views of…

Florida's Ask a Librarian service (http://www.askalibrarian.org) brings virtual reference to users at their moment of need via the Internet. Ask a Librarian is a growing service with 76 participating libraries including public, school, four-year, and community college libraries. The following article describes how Ask a Librarian was developed…

Chris Dodge, a renowned alternative pressologist and the librarian at "Utne" magazine, has been known to say, "Every library should be a special library." In order to meet this challenge, the librarians at Barnard College decided to start a collection of underground publications known as zines. In this article, the author describes how librarians…

With the expansion in quantity of full-text content material made available through online database subscriptions, aggregator services, and over the Internet, the need for print materials seems to have diminished over recent years. Growing, too, are the numbers of students taking advantage of distance learning opportunities, scattered miles and…

The purpose of traditional copyright law was to encourage the creation of works based on and to ensure reasonable access to original thought. Despite this harmonious intent, an intrinsic tension exists between libraries and copyright holders, as the former promotes "free" access to information that ultimately reduces the income of the…

Personal Digital Assistant serials are not just a subset of electronic serials from an acquisitions/collection development point of view because of their total dependence on patron-owned technology. Even if viewed as a "free" resource there are issues of expense and effort involved in gathering, classifying, and providing access and awareness of…