This research investigated the importance of user-library trust in ensuring vital freedom of inquiry in academic libraries, exploring its strength through comparison with attitudes towards the National Identity Card Scheme (NICS) within the various libraries of a large UK university. An online survey of students and interviews with librarians…

This article focuses on a course-embedded guided inquiry project initiated by a senior librarian and an education professor to promote an understanding of how the brain functions and to experiment with brain-targeted teaching techniques. Information literacy instruction (ILI) takes place in the electronic classroom in the Educational Resources…

This article explains how the document management team (circulation and interlibrary loan) at the University of Maryland University College implemented Microsoft's SharePoint product to create a central hub for online collaboration, communication, and storage. Enhancing the team's efficiency, organization, and cooperation was the primary goal.…

In 2007, Hamilton College, Colgate University, and St. Lawrence University received a grant from the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education (NITLE) Instructional Innovation Fund to take stock of the ways in which multimodal assignments were being used on campuses and to look in particular at the ways in which such assignments…

Since the early 1990s, the Lloyd Sealy Library, where all four of this article's librarian-authors work in various capacities, has been providing the students and faculty of John Jay College of Criminal Justice with extensive electronic access to books and journals. In early 2009, the librarians at Lloyd Sealy decided to test a recent electronic…

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…

This paper provides a means of quickly ascertaining the relative health of smaller academic libraries by presenting a top ten list of vitality indicators. The list is based on an observational convenience sampling of thirty smaller academic libraries across the United States. The indicators making the list were those which appeared most often in…

This study analyzed reference lists in a large number of master's and doctoral theses in a university library of psychology and education sciences. It compared citation counts to other indicators of the use of periodicals. The usefulness and limitations of these statistics are discussed in relation to decision-making in subscriptions' management.…

In today's world of instant everything, everyone has been exposed to some form of Web 2.0 technology, and higher education is not exempt from its long reach. Libraries of all types are incorporating Web 2.0 features to attract users as well as to showcase library services. The Online Public Access Catalog (OPAC) has become more user-friendly with…

Automated storage/retrieval systems (ASRSs) are playing an integral part in today's library operations and collections management. Eastern Michigan University installed an ASRS as part of the new Halle Library, which opened in May 1998, to provide "storage" for up to 800,000 items. Over the past 10 years our policies and procedures have…

Shared vision is a component of leadership that fosters innovation through buy-in at all levels of the organization. At times, people see a need for innovation but do not have the power to make changes on their own. Many librarians in academic institutions that were early adopters of distance learning envisioned a need for new services that were…

How does one learn a second language? By drilling on conjugations? By practicing dialog? For decades, though the recommended method kept changing, linguists tended to argue that there was only one best way to learn French or Spanish or Hindi. But no more. Now, linguists agree that there's more than one way to learn a new language effectively and…

Although research concerning the information-seeking behavior of academic library users is abundant, few studies have focused specifically on PhD students. This oversight has had an impact on librarians' ability to effectively market services such as information literacy instruction and research assistance to doctoral students. In order to…

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…

This column presents an interview with Nick Baker, Reference and Web Services librarian at Williams College. Baker has produced several films for and about the library profession. In 2007, he won an InfoTubey Award for Outstanding Library YouTube Productions for his work. In this interview, Baker shares his ideas and experiences about this…