Currently, one of the hottest topics in library marketing is branding. Over the years, businesses have utilized this technique to achieve commercial success. Is it possible for libraries to utilize this same strategy to promote their resources and services? One of the key components of a good branding campaign is passion, dedication, and a quality…

This article reports on the results of a survey of instructional practices in a variety of archival and manuscript repositories. The results of the survey suggest that archives professionals devote a significant amount of time and energy to instructing users of primary sources. However, a relatively small number of respondents conduct formal…

Purpose: This paper seeks to describe a personal recommendation service (PRS) involving an innovative hybrid recommendation method suitable for deployment in a large-scale multimedia user environment. Design/methodology/approach: The proposed hybrid method partitions content and user into segments and executes association rule mining,…

This paper heeds the advice of EPAT's editor, who said he "will be happy to publish further works on Heidegger and responses to these articles" after introducing four articles on Heidegger (and one of his students) and education in the August, 2005, issue. It discusses the papers in order of appearance critically, for none of them shows…

This paper provides a theoretical critique of the deficiencies of full-text searching in academic library databases. Because full-text searching relies on matching words in a search query with words in online resources, it is an inefficient method of finding information in a database. This matching fails to retrieve synonyms, and it also retrieves…

No one likes being two steps behind, and the fastest way to fall off the pace is by not keeping up with major titles and hot authors. Fortunately, there are numerous resources, both prepublication and postpublication, that can help. It is best when readers' advisory (RA) librarians know what is coming out months ahead of time--in order to think…

Over the past decade or so, gardens have been blossoming in schools all across the United States. These gardens are as varied as their schools and are as unique as each child who tends to them. Some are bountiful vegetable gardens, and others are arid natural habitat gardens. Some are acres of land with entire classes devoted to their teachings…

In the context of the changes in the information environment, the LIS department of the TEI of Athens developed a curriculum intending to incorporate the changes taking place in the information field's knowledge base, based on a literature review, the comparison of similar curricula in LIS schools worldwide and the demands of the students and the…

This article discusses the electronic thesis and dissertation project at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Be'er Sheva, Israel. It describes the status of the ETD movement in Israel as part of the worldwide spread of ETDs as reported in the literature. It also examines openness to ETDs by faculty and by publisher discipline. (Contains 6…

In this article, American author, children's librarian, and storyteller Laura Amy Schlitz is profiled. Schlitz is the winner of this year's Newbery Medal for her tall tale about the Mongols called "Gulnara the Tartar Warrior." Like her award-winning book, "Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!" (Candlewick, 2007), the tale takes place in the Middle Ages.…

Citing literature that supports the benefits of flexible scheduling on student achievement, the author exhorts readers to campaign for flexible scheduling in their library media centers. She suggests tips drawn from the work of Graziano (2002), McGregor (2006) and Stripling (1997) for making a smooth transition from fixed to flexible scheduling:…

Academic librarians are increasingly expected to advocate for scholarly communications reforms such as open access to scholarly publications, yet librarians do not always practice what they preach. Previous research examined librarian attitudes toward open access, whereas this article presents results of a study of open access publishing and…

This study focuses on a quantitative assessment of undergraduate student use of SFX citation linking software. The study seeks to reveal whether or not students are using SFX, and, if so, how they are using it. Study participants were Penn State Altoona students, all of whom had received basic library instruction. Their research sessions were…

This report summarizes the activities of the South Carolina State Library. Sections include: (1) the library governance and mission statement; (2) a brief library history; (3) details about the organization and operations of the library, including a list of the responsibilities and personnel assigned to each of six departments, as well as charts…

This survey is designed both to update data reported in the survey of library networks and cooperative organizations conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics in 1977-78 and to provide more specific data that will make possible more sophisticated analyses of the status of library networks and cooperative library organizations.…