In 2000, Eastern Washington University became part of the Cascade Consortium and participated in consortial borrowing through the Cascade Union Catalog. In 2003, the Orbis and Cascade consortia merged into the Orbis Cascade Alliance, which manages the Summit Union Catalog. Since 2000, Cascade or Summit consortial borrowing has increased while…

Open source software has become a catchword in libraryland. Yet many remain unclear about open source's benefits--or even what it is. So what is open source software (OSS)? It's software that is free in every sense of the word: free to download, free to use, and free to view or modify. Most OSS is distributed on the Web and one doesn't need to…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to identify the features that international student users prefer for next generation OPACs. Design/methodology/approach: A total of 16 international students of the University of Sheffield were interviewed in July 2008 to explore their preferences among potential features in next generation OPACs. A…

Retention of students is a critical area of much needed attention on nearly every college campus. It is important to students who want to succeed in college and beyond, to institutions that desire high efficiency and prestige, and increasingly to state and federal leaders. Retention of students in college affects a broad range of stakeholders,…

Content-enriched metadata in bibliographic records is considered helpful to library users in identifying and selecting library materials for their needs. The paper presents a study, using circulation data from a medium-sized academic library, of the effect of content-enriched records on library materials usage. The study also examines OPAC search…

The CollegeKeys Compact[TM] is a national call to action to school districts, colleges and universities, state education agencies, and nonprofit organizations to identify, share and expand programs and practices that address the needs and challenges of low-income students and help them get ready for, get into and get through college. The College…

Student engagement and retention is a concern of many university professors. To engage sophomore-level students in a Sociology of Aging class, I challenged them to design the course in a way that would make the outcome personally meaningful to them. The class was asked to identify specific learning objectives related to the university's course…

In 2009, the author spearheaded the Thunder Bay Public Library's (TBPL) service audit on kiosks. A task force comprising staff from the children's, reference, and adult services departments was formed to work on the audit. Task force members worked together and studied how patrons and staff use kiosks, conducted a literature review, surveyed other…

This article explores ontological principles and their potential applications in the formal description of archival photographs. Current archival descriptive practices are reviewed and the larger question is addressed: do archivists who are engaged in describing photographs need a more formalized system of representation, or do existing encoding…

What does it mean to be a college graduate? One knows about the time and ever-increasing amount of money that a diploma demands. But when it comes down to what matters--the skills and knowledge acquired--what does a college degree mean? That is the question the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) answers in this book. Inside one will…

The article presents a usage-based analysis of color attribution, i.e. the construal of the relation between color property and an entity to which it is attributed in painting descriptions. The study is based on the corpus of 100 catalog entries written for American art museums. It focuses on the two most frequent morpho-syntactic patterns in the…

It's well known that technology is changing at an increasingly rapid pace and that many public libraries throughout the United States are attempting to adopt new technologies to better reach their patrons. In trade journals, blogs, and at library conferences, professionals in the field have continually discussed the best methods for using web…

Purpose: The purpose of the paper is to examine the various features and components of web-based online public access catalogues (OPACs) of IIT libraries in India with the help of a specially designed evaluation checklist. Design/methodology/approach: The various features of the web-based OPACs in six IIT libraries (IIT Delhi, IIT Bombay, IIT…

This article examines the evolution of a national register of the archives of science and technology in Australia and the related development of an archival informatics focused initially on people and their relationships to archival materials. The register was created in 1985 as an in-house tool for the Australian Science Archives Project of 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…