Academic libraries are well lauded for offering supportive spaces for students' self-directed study, and significant resources are dedicated to librarian instruction in the classroom. What many academic libraries lack, however, is a middle ground, a routine way for students to help one another using best practices in peer-to-peer learning theory.…

Nursing is a relatively new discipline in research with a small number of registered nurses holding a research higher degree (RHD). Entry into RHD study for nurses is often via a less direct route than the traditional bachelor's degree through honours to PhD pathway. The supervisor-candidate relationship is an important factor in RHD completions…

Robbins Carter's portrait of the librarian workforce is still true. According to the latest American Library Association (ALA) demographics, the profile of today's librarian is that of a white (87.1 percent) woman (80.7 percent) of middle age (57.1 percent, age 45 or older) (ALA, 2013). Despite these data, support for increased diversity is…

In 1993, based on the proficiencies for bibliographic instruction librarians (1986), Diana Shonrock and Craig Mulder investigated if and where librarians were acquiring these proficiencies. In 2007, ACRL approved a revised set of proficiencies: Proficiencies for Instruction Librarians and Coordinators. The authors recreated the 1993 study, using…

The Do It Yourself (DIY) section is an essential and well-used part of the public library's collection and must be kept up-to-date to remain valuable, since tools, materials, and building codes are always changing. Current economic decline has increased the topic's popularity as homeowners choose to remodel rather than buy, or attempt to make…

Purpose: The paper aims to provide an overview of the e-resources and services in Tsinghua University Library, Beijing, and describe five campus-wide user surveys. It states how these user surveys play an important role in service quality enhancement. Design/methodology/approach: Following a brief history of Tsinghua University Library, a summary…

This article outlines Public Library Association (PLA) 2010 annual conference to be held in Oregon Convention Center, Portland on March 23-27. The days quickly fill up with the picks of over 100 programs as well as valuable "talk tables" and special events. The well-organized schedule, divided into eight broad tracks (e.g., technology,…

With the recession, library budgets have been hit hard just as demand keeps climbing, a paradox that creates a resource gap for even the best-off libraries. Short term, the recession has library leaders scrambling to find ways to close the money gap and keep core services alive. Long term, it has them thinking about how to stabilize their…

With the ongoing shift to electronic formats for library resources, acquisitions librarians, like the rest of the profession, must adapt to the rapidly changing landscape of electronic resources by keeping up with trends and mastering new skills related to digital publishing, technology, and licensing. The author sought to know what roles…

Embedded librarianship has emerged as one approach to meeting the ever-evolving information needs of our clients. The University of Arizona Health Sciences Library has endeavored to become more proactive by embedding librarians within each of the four colleges it serves. Although the process of establishing visibility, recognition, and developing…

This paper looks at the library's ability to spread environmental conservation efforts throughout the community. The paper suggests various ways library staff can explore environmentally friendly procedures within the context of the media center as well as ways to promote community interest and support. It identifies areas for improvement, ideas…

This study aims to identify the career movement patterns of librarians, analyze factors influencing their career movements, and compare differences in such factors between librarians and chief librarians. Findings showed that the jobs with the highest retention rate were those in public libraries, that library automation system developers showed…

Expertise in searching and evaluating scientific literature is a requisite skill of trained scientists and science students, yet information literacy instruction varies greatly among institutions and programs. To ensure that science students acquire information literacy skills, robust methods of assessment are needed. Here, we describe a novel…

The purpose of this article is to investigate representations of diversity in books included in early childhood classroom libraries. The authors hope to contribute to ongoing, critical conversations in the field by providing preliminary baseline data that verify and underscore the need for increased critical attention toward the books selected for…

The present study examined undergraduate students' multiple source use in response to two different types of academic questions, one discrete and one open-ended. Participants (N = 240) responded to two questions using a library of eight digital sources, varying in source type (e.g., newspaper article) and reliability (e.g., authors' credentials).…