The New Media Consortium's "Horizon Report" for higher education cites games and gamification with a time-to-adoption of two to three years. The use of digital games is almost ubiquitous in social media and is swiftly gaining popularity in other industries as well. Many in higher education have embraced gamification due to its…

Millions of books from public libraries and private collections have been scanned by various organizations in the last decade. The motivation is to preserve the written human heritage in electronic format for durable storage and efficient access. The information buried in these large book collections has always been of major interest for scholars…

The Saskatchewan Music Collection (SMC) is a local music collection held at the University of Saskatchewan. This case study examines a project to digitize and present this unique special collection in the online environment. The project aims to facilitate access to the collection, preserve the collection and promote scholarship and interest in the…

The e-book is raising fundamental questions around the dynamics and habits of reading; the role of books in the academic library; and the role of librarians in addressing new realities of reading and learning. Print and digital texts foster different styles of reading and different ways of thinking and doing research. This paper examines…

What do school librarians fear most? Hands down, their biggest fear is a formal challenge to a resource in the school library. There are no accurate statistics about the number of challenges to school library resources. The staff of ALA's Office for Intellectual Freedom estimates that only about 20 percent are reported to ALA annually. For the…

Academic libraries continue to face funding pressures compounded by the need to provide students with access to electronic resources, both in journal and book formats. With space constraints and the need to repurpose library space to other uses, libraries must carefully examine the move to e-only formats for books to determine if the format makes…

The Quality Matters™ (QM) Program is utilized by over 700 colleges and universities to ensure that online course design meets standards imperative to student success in a Web-based classroom. Although a faculty-driven peer-review process, QM provides assessment from a student perspective, thereby identifying opportunities for improvement that may…

New York City was home to 1,575 district and 183 charter schools in Fiscal Year 2014 (FY2014). Seven percent of all public school students in New York City attended charter schools that year. Researchers systematically reviewed funding and spending documents involving the city's district-run and independent charter schools for FY2014. Research…

Recent years have seen a growing emphasis on modern special collections (in themselves no new phenomenon), with a dichotomy between guidance for detailed cataloguing in "Descriptive Cataloging of Rare Materials (Books)" (DCRM(B), 2007) and the value of clearing cataloguing backlogs expeditiously. This article describes the De la Mare…

This article describes the results of a survey that gathered data on perceptions and use of e-books from undergraduate students, graduate students, faculty, and staff. The investigators analyzed the results based on user affiliate status and subject discipline and compared the results with the findings of a similar, smaller-scale study conducted…

Animated maps of the library stacks were integrated into the catalog interface at Pratt Institute and into the EBSCO Discovery Service interface at Illinois State University. The mapping feature was developed for optimal automation of the update process to enable a range of library personnel to update maps and call-number ranges. The development…

Open Educational Resources (OERs) are online classroom content that can be reused, modified, and shared freely. The University of Maryland University College (UMUC) undertook a project to redesign its undergraduate curriculum using OERs in place of traditional textbooks. UMUC librarians have played a critical role in this project, helping to find…

The rise of game development and game studies on university campuses prompts academic libraries to consider how to support teaching and research in this area. This article examines current issues and challenges in the development of game collections at academic libraries. The gaming ecosystem has become more complex and libraries may need to move…

This article examines the management of microdata collections in a university context. It is a cross-country analysis: Collection management at data services in Canada and South Africa are considered. The case studies are of two university sub-contexts: One collection is located in a library; the other at a Faculty-based Data Service. Stages in…

To address challenges that learners, course creators, librarians and academics involved with OER and MOOCs are facing when looking for scholarly materials, Athabasca University Library has initiated the development of "the Open Library at AU." This open library is a full library website that provides easy access to open and free…