Keeping abreast of professional literature and the latest trends is critical for academic librarians to be successful, but in a time of information glut, are librarians achieving this? Over seven hundred academic librarians responded to this survey and inform us about their use of both traditional methods and new technologies to stay current.

Library literature publishes hundreds of articles on information literacy, many emphasizing the importance of collaboration and faculty outreach. A systematic search of fifty-four non-library journals that publish pedagogical articles reveals that some librarians are reaching out to faculty in disciplinary publications. However, this method of…

The academic library in the 21st Century must find innovative ways to remain central to the mission of the institution that it represents, and the people that it serves. Some of those ways involve what traditionally has been the province of student services. After hours events with music and art, poetry slams, and electronic gaming are a few of…

In the digital age, libraries are increasingly being augmented or even replaced by information technology (IT), which is often accompanied by implicit assumptions of objectivity and neutrality, yet the field of science and technology studies (STS) has a long history of studying what values are embedded in IT and how they are embedded. This article…

Citing her own difficulties in gaining access to digital repositories that would have made her research on "New Women" much less time-consuming, the author argues here that the digital divide between the ivory-tower haves and have-nots will be a defining one for the current generation of scholars. The inequity in ease of access, she asserts,…

Although salary compression has previously been identified in such professional schools as engineering, business, and computer science, there is now evidence of salary compression among Association of Research Libraries members. Using salary data from the "ARL Annual Salary Survey", this study analyzes average annual salaries from 1994-1995…

One lousy starred review. That was all, initially, that Susan Patron had to show for the 10 years she spent writing "The Higher Power of Lucky," her funny, tender story of a little girl struggling to gain control over her life. One star, from "Kirkus Reviews," for the heart and soul Patron poured into her second novel. Positive notices had…

Although science has provided empirical evidence for centuries, it's only as recently as the 1940s that a scientific method called randomized controlled trials (RCT) emerged as a technique to test the efficacy of drugs and medical procedures. Since RCT is unique in that it can claim causality, it's considered the "gold standard" of research…

Corporate librarians hold the key to determining new ways to work within their environments. They must drive the process to change the view of the company library as a liability--as overhead, as a cost center, as part of the problem--to the library as a solution center, a necessary investment. For the sixth consecutive year, corporate libraries…

Thomas Benton (a pseudonym of an associate professor of English at a Midwestern liberal-arts college) describes most college libraries of today as being clean and well-lighted, with metal shelving, veneered tabletops, and banks of computers. He fears that in 20 years, college students will regard books as a "quaint technology"--the way they now…

This document is a statement of guidelines for the collection of reference materials at the Ethel K. Smith Library in Wingate University (North Carolina). The library's mission statement is given at the outset. Then parameters are established for the reference collection's scope and size, including subject-area and media priorities. The statement…

As the entity traditionally responsible for serving the information needs of the university, research libraries have little choice but to change dramatically in the next 25 years. This SPEC Survey on library reorganization seeks to understand how librarians have sought to meet this challenge through the redesigning of their organization.…

Public library and institutional library statistics are presented in this document. The first section, which focuses on public library statistics, provides an analysis of fiscal year 1995 data on income, expenditures, and resources. Following this analysis are five tables of statistics on operating income, expenditures, library collection and…

This annual publication describes the collections, staffing, expenditures, and interlibrary loan activity of 108 university and 11 nonuniversity library members of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) during the 1993-94 fiscal year. Sections I, II, III, and IV contain: a 27-item selected bibliography; summary data tables on collections,…

The six papers in this collection, which were presented at the 1991 Library Association of the City University of New York (CUNY) Institute, focus on the theme of library collection development: (1) "Evolving Knowledge Resource Access Systems: Keynote Address" (Peter R. Young, Executive Director of the U.S. National Commission on Libraries and…