It is important for students to be good readers. In order to encourage reading for the fun of it, the author developed a game plan for the library. In this article, the author discusses how to make the library the place to be. She suggests that librarians need to encourage students to read, read, read. They must make their libraries places of…

This article presents the results of the latest "SLJ" survey of school expenditures and collections for 2009-2010. The survey reveals that librarians have used a variety of coping techniques to weather this economic storm, whether it is servicing more than one school, using additional volunteers, taking on more tasks, or seeking outside funding.…

Distance educators have special library needs. This article discusses the results of a library needs assessment of distance instructors at the University of Wyoming. Access to resources, use of library instructional services, barriers to distance library use, and perceived gaps in service are all addressed. Follow-up actions, based on survey…

Embedded librarians are attempting assimilation into a new pedagogical collective outside the library, often with a mission to improve the quality of service to that collective. But like the Borg, embedded librarians may not be achieving the results they envision. This article documents the varied experiences of five reference librarians at Murray…

People keep writing articles about how valuable libraries are, even with ebooks and the Internet. What people are overlooking is that the reason libraries are having such fits dealing with a changing environment is not that libraries are unrecognized as fountains of value, it's that libraries are so valuable that they attract voracious new…

The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between school library use and academic achievement of Hispanic students. This study utilizes data from the base-year and the first follow-up of the Education Longitudinal Study: 2002/06. A series of hierarchical regression analysis is incorporated to examine the nature of associations among…

Learning is becoming more self-directed and informal with the support of emerging technologies. A variety of online resources have promoted informal learning by allowing people to learn on demand and just when needed. It is significant to understand self-directed informal learners' motivational aspects, their learning goals, obstacles, and…

Objectives: To compare the performance of a range of search facilities; and to illustrate the execution of a comprehensive literature search for qualitative evidence in social work. Context: Developments in literature search methods and comparisons of search facilities help facilitate access to the best available evidence for social workers.…

This comparison seeks to determine if the three documents addressing information literacy skills and competence developed by professional library associations for postsecondary education in four predominantly English-speaking countries--the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand--have similar or varying conceptions of…

Providing financial incentives to faculty who adopt free educational resources in place of traditional textbooks is becoming more common in U.S. higher education institutions. The University of Mississippi (UM) offered liberal arts instructors the opportunity to apply for internal funding to replace one traditional textbook in their classroom with…

A three-year, grant-funded program to create an online video clip library for personnel programs preparing teachers of students with visual impairments in the United States and Canada was launched in September 2014. The first author was the developer of the Library of Video Excerpts (L.O.V.E.) and collected over 300 video clips that were 8 to 10…

This conceptual paper will discuss how faculty from The School of Library and Information Science at The University of South Carolina partnered with their university's Center for Teaching Excellence. This partnership resulted in the facilitation of professional development workshops and online tools for peer educators to better serve distance…

The purpose of this study was to determine whether distance education technologies, institutional support services and/or faculty demographics have a relationship to the job satisfaction of faculty teaching in American Library Association (ALA) accredited master of library and information science programs (MLS) delivered through online distance…

Service-learning as a pedagogical approach has become a popular trend in undergraduate teaching. according to Robert Bringle and Julie Hatcher, service-learning is a "course-based, credit-bearing educational experience that allows students to (a) participate in an organized service activity that meets identified community needs and (b)…

Many students leave the biology classroom with misconceptions centered on cellular structure. This article presents an activity in which students utilize images from an online database called "The Cell: An Image Library" (http://www.cellimagelibrary. org/) to gain a greater understanding of the diversity of cellular structure and the…