This briefing paper captures the key findings and recommendations of a study commissioned by the Joint Information Systems Committee on aspects of the strategic commitment of institutions to repository sustainability. This project, labelled EMBRACE (EMBedding Repositories And Consortial Enhancement), is aimed at enhancing the functionality,…

In this article, the author discusses using Second Life (SL) in school librarianship. SL is a multi-user virtual environment in which persons create avatars to allow them to move and interact with other avatars. They can build and manipulate objects. To move, they can walk, run, fly, or teleport. There are many areas within SL to allow people to…

This article features new library designs that offer flexible, people-centric, tech-driven environments that reflect the increasingly synergetic nature of today's campuses. Among these new library designs is the University of Calgary's Taylor Family Digital Library, a 265,000-square-foot building scheduled to open in fall 2010 and touted as the…

In April 2007, the University of Washington Libraries debuted WorldCat Local (WCL), a localized version of the WorldCat database that interoperates with a library's integrated library system and fulfillment services to provide a single-search interface for a library's physical and electronic content. This brief will describe how WCL incorporates a…

The Information Services Division (ISD) of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) positioned itself to successfully implement an electronic resources management system. This article highlights the ISD's unique ability to "team" across the organization to realize a common goal, develop leadership qualities in support of…

Open access has long emphasized access to scholarly materials. However, open access can also mean access to the means of producing visible and recognized journals. This issue is particularly important in developing and emergent countries. The SciELO (Scientific Electronic Library On-line) project, first started in Brazil and, shortly afterward, in…

At the 2008 ALA Annual Conference, a wonderful Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) preconference was presented entitled "Library Instruction 2.0: Building Your Online Instruction Toolkit". The presentation was enlightening and provided numerous and valuable recommendations for Web 2.0 sites that can facilitate and enliven library…

Many published studies examine the effectiveness of Google Scholar (Scholar) as an index for scholarly articles. This paper analyzes the value of Scholar in finding and labeling online full text of articles using titles from the citations of engineering faculty publications. For the fields of engineering and the engineering colleges in the study,…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper to describe the research work on the long-term preservation of Chinese digital information funded by National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) since 2001. Design/methodology/approach: The paper provides an overview, in text and figures, of ways in which e-documents originating in China, in now obsolete…

As a direct consequence of the digital revolution, academic libraries today face competition as information providers. Using Richard N. Foster's technology S curves as the analytical model, this article shows that academic libraries are in the midst of discontinuous change by questioning a number of assumptions that support the current practice of…

People are now beginning to appreciate that acquisitions in the digital world is different. In addition to business acumen and accounting knowledge, a digital-age acquisitions librarian needs to understand scholarly communication and the emerging business models of digital publishing. In this article, the author discusses the challenges and the…

Rapid technological advances in communication technologies and computational power are altering the nature of knowledge, skills, talents and the know-how of individuals. A CD-ROM dictionary is an interesting and effective teaching tool, which captures pre-service teachers' interest and does much more than just translates especially with the…

This article describes the Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD) process and its application in the field of educational data mining (EDM) in the context of a digital library service called the Instructional Architect (IA.usu.edu). In particular, the study reported in this article investigated a certain type of data mining problem, clustering,…

This research examined teachers' online behaviors while using a digital library service--the Instructional Architect (IA)--through three consecutive studies. In the first two studies, a statistical model called latent class analysis (LCA) was applied to cluster different groups of IA teachers according to their diverse online behaviors. The third…

Medical and health sciences libraries have incorporated the elements of evidence-based practice (EBP) into their reference services, instruction, and online resource development for years. While EBP focuses on the use of medical and health sciences literature in the clinical environment (i.e., making decisions about how to treat a particular…