Eighteen scholarly papers and twelve abstracts comprise the content of the fourteenth annual Brick and Click Libraries Symposium, held annually at Northwest Missouri State University in Maryville, Missouri. The proceedings, authored by academic librarians and presented at the symposium, portray the contemporary and future face of librarianship.…

This document presents data that describe collections, expenditures, personnel, and services in 64 medical libraries at Association of Research Libraries (ARL) member institutions throughout North America. In 2007-2008, the reporting health sciences libraries held a median of 240,955 volumes, spent a total of $240,019,298, and employed 2,304…

What is the future direction of reference books? What types of policies are libraries implementing regarding the purchase of electronic reference books? Are libraries still buying hard copy reference items when an electronic equivalent is available? This paper discusses a national survey of libraries regarding the purchase and use of electronic…

This article offers 12 steps to jumpstart a new school librarian's career. Being the information specialist will be both challenging and rewarding as one undertakes a myriad of activities. These 12 steps will help a new school librarian's first year successful.

The central argument of the article is that while the building, the collection and the staff were inseparably linked, in a digital environment these facets of the library are diverging. This divergence clouds the process of envisioning a future for the library, but, if properly defined, it is a source of clarity, which sheds light on strategic…

When flood came to Cedar Rapids city, the Cedar Rapids Public Library (CRPL), IA, lost 160,000 items including large parts of its adult and youth collections, magazines, newspapers, reference materials, CDs, and DVDs. Most of its public access computers were destroyed as was its computer lab and microfilm equipment. The automatic circulation and…

In this article, the authors present the outcomes of a project they implemented to increase library use by their adolescent males, a population at their school that avoided the library like the plague. They conducted a survey to know what their male students wished they would find in their media center. Their students suggested manga as a genre,…

Education in a free society requires that students are provided with a provocative and thoughtful curriculum and learning materials that will prepare them to function as productive adult citizens in a diverse and changing world. Textbooks and curricular materials that engage the rising generation in the study of social ideas, problems, and issues…

The circulation records from 1997/98 to 2007/08 for UCLA and from 2000/01 to 2007/08 for Pasadena City College (PCC) were analyzed to examine patterns in the use of print materials during a period of increasingly available online digital information resources. The analysis included examinations of longitudinal circulation patterns broken down by…

First offered to public libraries in 2004, downloadable audiobooks have grown by leaps and bounds. According to the Audio Publishers Association, their sales today account for 21% of the spoken-word audio market. It hasn't been easy, however. WMA. DRM. MP3. AAC. File extensions small on letters but very big on consequences for librarians,…

Over 2000 participants made the daylong programming at the "Library Journal"/"School Library Journal" Virtual Ebook Summit, September 29, a robust conversation and not just within the summit interface but also in tweets with the #ebooksummit hashtag (and beyond) and in libraries across the country where participants logged in to take part. The…

This article addresses the need for quantitative investigation into students' use of information resources in historical research. It reports the results of a citation analysis of more than 3,000 citations from master's level history theses submitted between 1998 and 2008 at a mid-sized public university. The study's results support the hypotheses…

In response to a hypothesis that researchers who no longer use print journals may miss out on the serendipitous benefits of "poor indexing" provided by print tables of contents, librarians at the University of Florida surveyed their engineering faculty to determine faculty use of tables of contents in either print or online format. Results…

Collaboration empowers everyone in different ways: in the school setting it brings partnerships with colleagues and relevance to the cycle of ongoing instructional improvement; in a regional setting it provides an understanding of the various facets that make up an exemplary library media program along with the challenges of the classroom. The…

Academic libraries are turning to automated storage and retrieval systems (ASRS) as a long-term cost effective means of gaining additional space in their open stacks areas by removing lesser used books and other materials for storage and placement into ASRS bins. The new library building under construction at the University of Nevada-Reno will…