This study examined whether three renovated academic library spaces encouraged group work as intended. Hourly observations and a questionnaire documented group work use, space preferences, and suggested improvements. Compared to the three renovated spaces, significantly more group work occurred in an unrenovated space that was more open, spacious,…

Through various efforts, the staff and faculty of San José State University's Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library (King Library) are working towards creating more equitable and inclusive collections. Examining the library's collecting practices and collections by and about African Americans, this article presents the ongoing work of a working…

This article discusses the formation and development of the Library Advisory Group at the University of Essex, exploring the benefits of this as a vehicle for service enhancement and culture change within the library and the wider institution. It begins with a literature review discussing the use of participatory research, collaborative design and…

Data from assessment of library building use can aid in making important decisions, such as where a renovation would be most impactful, in addition to the actual impact of those types of renovations. This article examines space usage data collected at Valdosta State University's Odum Library from 2017 to 2021. Renovations in two key areas occurred…

Librarians provide instruction for students across disciplines, each with their own teaching and learning practices. An exploration of signature pedagogies will help librarians develop a deeper understanding of student learning. This article identifies reflective pedagogy as a teaching strategy librarians can use to expand upon this learning by…

The concept of "student engagement" is widely discussed in academic libraries, but has not been thoroughly examined from a conceptual and theoretical perspective by scholars in the Library and Information Science (LIS) field. This paper presents the findings of a qualitative research project on student engagement in academic libraries.…

Purpose: This paper aims to explore whether academic librarians at the Universities of Technology (UoTs) in South Africa have the pedagogy and digital skills to implement a digital pedagogy approach for online teaching. Design/methodology/approach: A mixed-method approach in the form of a sequential explanatory design was selected to explore the…

Librarians play a pivotal role in bridging gaps and fostering learning across diverse global networks of campuses and learners. At Northeastern University's library, the Global Campus and Online Learning Unit (Online Learning, for short) supports the 16 (and growing) global campuses. The Online Learning unit has crafted an intermediary liaison…

In November 2019, the Leonard Lief Library implemented Ivy.ai, a proprietary chatbot on its website. This implementation was the first academic library installation of a vendor-supplied chatbot to be discussed in the professional literature. This chatbot functioned as a new tool that assisted users seeking information from the library website.…

This paper sets out to identify the ways in which academic libraries can further interdisciplinary scholarship on campus. The medical humanities is presented as an example to interrogate the current practices in academic libraries and to inform future efforts in support of interdisciplinarity. Text mining was employed to illuminate trends in this…

This case study examines the COUNTER 5 metrics pertaining to database usage reports, aiming to gain insights into how the metrics function within a vendor platform. By simulating a search process in two major databases, the authors were able to contextualize the numbers in their institution's COUNTER 5 Database Master Reports. The study finds that…

The library website is a tool shared by all library users. It is imperative to keep this tool accessible, but accessibility guidelines are not consistently applied to all library-owned pages. As institutions that receive federal funding, libraries have a responsibility to provide accessible websites. This study examines the library websites of the…

This essay uses the reprocessing of the "Luis Alberto Sánchez papers," the collection of a prominent Peruvian politician and author housed at Penn State University, to argue that ethical and reparative processing needs should be prioritized within an archives' overall extensible processing program. The author explores the tension between…

Technical standards are important documents that academic libraries collect to support education and research, particularly for engineering and technology programs. However, standards documents present many unique discovery and access challenges that are confusing and cumbersome for users. To help alleviate these issues, Elsevier started indexing…

There are few references that critically evaluate the different ways of searching the literature on scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL), or how these are related to researchers' goals. We use an academic literacies perspective as a lens with which to explore the different ways that literature searches may be undertaken. While searching the…