Research has been conducted within academia about faculty members and students who have experienced mental illness from a variety of theoretical perspectives, including disability studies. While this research acknowledges that the stigma surrounding mental illness keeps people from sharing their experiences, there has not been research that…

In small branch libraries, patrons seeking assistance from library staff outside of the dedicated single-service desk often results in large staffing inefficiencies. This paper presents a case study in which the authors applied behavioral psychology models to a branch library's space arrangement to identify possible factors influencing patron…

The provision of service to students with Special Educational Needs (SEN) at university libraries in the UK differs based on the types of positions that are being used to staff these programs. This study finds that although nondedicated staff tended to provide services that required fewer specialized skills, they seemed to place a higher priority…

With new program additions and changes to existing graduate programs, librarians at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas were interested in investigating if students taking online courses were successful in accessing the library services and instruction. A survey was created that included all types of graduate students (fully online to fully…

The study aims at identifying the concept of digital library, it also tries to shed the light on the most significant intellectual issues by presenting its definition, development, functions (selection and acquisition of information resources from the web, sources indexing, communication and management of intellectual property rights, production…

Introduction: Open access to digital research output is increasing, but academic library policies can place restrictions on public access to libraries. This paper reports on a preliminary study to investigate the correlation between academic library access policies and institutional positions of openness to knowledge. Method: This primarily…

At a time when government funding cuts mean that public libraries face an uncertain future and need to make sure they stay relevant to young users and their families, this paper explores what counts as literacy for young children in a public library in a town in the East Midlands, UK. It is based on a study which adopted an ethnographic approach,…

Library publishers have an important role in building an equitable and open scholarly publishing ecosystem. As library publishers' services mature, it is critical to understand how noncommercial journals operate and organize their daily activities to ensure the journals' success, longevity, and sustainability. To inform these efforts, the authors…

This paper discusses perceptions regarding the roles of PhD- and MLS (or MLIS)-holding librarians within academic libraries in the United States gathered via a survey conducted in 2019. Based on a review of previous literature and the results of the survey--which present mixed opinions about PhD holders as librarians--the authors provide…

Data visualization literacy is "the ability and skill to read and interpret visually represented data in and to extract information from data visualizations" and is an emerging literacy type. Even though support exists for data literacy and data visualization use within the academic professions, limited research assessing data…

Emergent issues relating to equity and inclusion have highlighted the systematic and structural inequities experienced by society, which can deeply affect our student populations. While certain events have shone a light on the overt disparities between social, ethnic, and racial groups, they have also offered academic librarians an opportunity to…

This paper compares website usability--specifically library users' understanding of library terms--for fifty-one original research studies between 2012-2021, with the findings of John Kupersmith's 2011 white paper "Library Terms That Users Understand." Studies reported approximately twice as many terms that users didn't understand than…

Open educational resource (OER) initiatives have opened new avenues for educational opportunities, yet OER adoption levels globally remain low. Two significant obstacles to more widespread adoption of OER are the challenge of internet connectivity that nearly half the world's population still faces, and the lack of locally-relevant (e.g. in terms…

This two-part dissertation centers on a re-examination of the role of book indexes in information retrieval research on full-text digital book collections in digital libraries. Early research focused on information retrieval and book indexes (in addition to other parts of books) in the 2000s when the Google Books corpus was first released to the…

Association of College and Research Libraries' (ACRL's) "2016 Top Trends in Academic Libraries" noted a "shift to the incorporation and integration of more continuous, ongoing, flexible, and sustainable review of collections," and "an increasing need" to align collection development with "institutional research…