Bibliometric analysis to identify core reference sources of virtual reference transactions

As the use of electronic reference sources becomes commonplace, virtual reference services are expanding in scope, modes, and popularity. Simultaneously, reference practices are evolving as well. One concept that may be challenged by these trends is the notion of the core reference collection. What are the sources that form this core collection, and what are its characteristics? Are similar sources used to answer users' questions in virtual and traditional reference? How do core collections of public and academic libraries differ? An analysis of 1851 e-mail and chat reference transactions from public and academic libraries reveals that the notion of a core reference collection persists in the world of virtual reference services. In both types of libraries, responses to patrons showed a skewed bibliographic distribution; librarians used a small group of sources to answer most of the questions. Almost all sources used were electronic. Academic libraries tended to make greater use of fee-based sources, but public libraries more often used sources freely-available on the Web.     

英国两党政府公共图书馆政策比较

公共图书馆和政府政策密切相关。英国工党政府执政期间,成立行业机构,制定法规文件,开展多项活动,切实履行了管理公共图书馆的法定职责。保守党联合政府上台之后,不仅各地闭馆风潮愈演愈烈,而且联合政府还主动撤销行业机构。对比两者政策可以发现,他们对于图书馆的社会价值有着类似的认识。出现政策的变化,不仅是政党理念的不同,更是经济危机的影响。公共图书馆要得到发展,必须得到政府的支持,也需要充实的法律法规体系的保障。     

Floating collection in an academic library: An audacious experiment that succeeded

Can a floating collection thrive in a large multicampus academic research library? Floating collections have been successful in public libraries for some time, but it is uncommon for academic libraries and unheard of for a large academic library system. This article will discuss the investigation into the feasibility of a floating collection at Penn State University Libraries, its implementation, and continuation for a period covering 2009 through 2015. Attaining the floating collection, limited to monographs in the general stacks of campus libraries, proved to be easier to implement than imagined and resulted in unintended benefits as well as some surprises.     

Customer Experience in Public Libraries

ABSTRACT

Public libraries today are gingerly stepping into the emerging philosophy among successful businesses around the world: customer experience. Libraries are hiring staff with “customer experience” in their title, others are curious and want to learn more. Most of the resources currently available to libraries hoping to get started take a corporate approach particularly as it impacts financial success. The bottom line is that all of us are in the customer experience business, whether we know it or not. It goes to the heart of everything we do – how staff interact with the public and each other, the value libraries provide to a community, even the cleanliness of the restrooms. Additionally, many of those companies that library users experience in their daily lives – health care, insurance, retail – have already jumped on the customer experience bandwagon, overall raising the public’s expectation of what they should experience in libraries. How and where to start? How does a library build a road map to develop a customer experience philosophy and culture, which staff will embrace and support? When building a new library how do you design that building using a customer experience lens? Columbus Metropolitan Library has spent the last 5 years mapping out a customer experience practice, which includes staff training, journey mapping, customer insights, customer engagement training, and library design.     

A Core Collection of Trade Journals for Manufacturing

Trade journals are an important source of current information in academic libraries which support a business curriculum as well as for commercial, industrial and large public libraries. In recent years, studies establishing core lists of business periodicals have included trade journals, but have not dealt primarily with them. This study identifies trade journals for manufacturing industries, an economic activity defined and classified using SIC codes in the Standard Industrial Classification Manual. For this study, industries whose value of shipment was ten billion dollars or more annually were selected. Next, directories such as Business Publication Rates and Data which describe a journal's focus and coverage were consulted. From this large pool, the trade journal which most closely matched the industry defined by the SIC code was selected, provided it was indexed. If two or more trade journals were considered appropriate for the same industry, the one with the highest circulation was used. A core collection of trade journals was established which, when combined with a careful assessment of the needs of users, should be of value to those charged with collection development.     

Providing Reference Services for Young Adults

Summary

With more resource-based learning, libraries have become central in adolescent academic lives. School and public librarians play unique and overlapping roles in providing students with informational needs. School librarians, as educators, work with classroom teachers to design meaningful lessons that draw upon available resources. However, school librarians cannot work independently of public librarians, especially reference specialists. While school libraries focus on tools that support the curriculum, public libraries offer references for broad public use. Ideally, public and school libraries coalesce for collection development and service coordination. This article discusses issues and opportunities for school-public library partnerships and coalitions to benefit teens.     

Converting the Future of Public Academic Law Libraries

This article focuses on the current predicament in which American public academic law libraries find themselves given the budgetary and space constraints that have been passed down to them over time. By examining the current standards and future possibilities that govern these particular libraries, this article seeks to assist acquisitions librarians within these libraries with a way to examine, maintain, and purchase a collection that will take their library forward, prove their value and worth, and stay within their constantly dwindling budgets while remaining true to the library's core mission and obligation of providing services and support to the law school's faculty and student body.     

The Road Oft Traveled: Collection Analysis and Development in a Modern Academic Law Library

While law students and faculty are content to research solely online, the librarians at Stetson University College of Law's Dolly & Homer Hand Law Library are actively involving every library department to analyze and develop both the print and digital collection. This case study will analyze the print to digital shift in academic law libraries and its effect on collection development. It will then describe the process of collection management at the Hand Law Library and how the entire library team is used to determine what is required of the collection to best serve our students, faculty, and the public.     

Building the College Library Collection to Support Curriculum Growth

Because the mission of smaller academic libraries serving fewer than 10,000 full-time enrolled students is mainly to serve the curriculum-based needs of students and faculty, collection management in these libraries needs to be directly related to changes in the curriculum of the parent institution. A look into applicable collection management literature, combined with one library's experience, offers insights about effective curriculum-based collection building in a smaller academic library setting. To achieve efficiency, collection managers must maintain up-to-date knowledge of changing instructional and research needs at their institutions, the needs new programs have for library materials, appropriate collection assessment tools, and the tasks involved in a focused expansion project. By optimizing consultations with faculty and evaluation procedures scaled to its needs, the library at North Georgia College & State University, a modestly sized academic institution, established a model for becoming an active participant in new course and program planning during the application stage, ensuring appropriate library support for new courses and programs of study.     

Providing health information to the general public: a survey of current practices in academic health sciences libraries

A questionnaire was mailed to 148 publicly and privately supported academic health sciences libraries affiliated with Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC-accredited medical schools in the United States and Canada to determine level of access and services provided to the general public. For purposes of this study, "general public" was defined as nonaffiliated students or health care professionals, attorneys and other nonhealth-related professionals, patients from affiliated or other hospitals or clinics, and general consumers. One hundred five (71%) libraries responded. Results showed 98% of publicly supported libraries and 88% of privately supported libraries provided access to some or all of the general public. Publicly supported libraries saw greater numbers of public patrons, often provided more services, and were more likely to circulate materials from their collections than were privately supported libraries. A significant number of academic health sciences libraries housed a collection of consumer-oriented materials and many provided some level of document delivery service, usually for a fee. Most allowed the public to use some or all library computers. Results of this study indicated that academic health sciences libraries played a significant role in serving the information-seeking public and suggested a need to develop written policies or guidelines covering the services that will be provided to minimize the impact of this service on primary clientele.     

开放获取的发展态势及大学图书馆的作用

分析指出当今开放获取已获得广泛的民意支持,大学、科研机构等学术和管理部门纷纷出台开放获取政策,甚至将其作为国家发展战略;开放获取出版规模也迅速壮大,网络环境下传统商业学术出版面临挑战;开放获取顺应学术交流体系变革的需求,是不可逆转的发展方向。认为学术交流体系的巨变将会给大学图书馆带来革命性影响,大学图书馆应顺应历史潮流,将开放获取提升为事关未来发展的关键议题,在未来开拓全新的服务领域,深度参与校园学术活动,实现图书馆的战略性转变。     

Surviving to Thriving: Advancing the Institutional Mission

ABSTRACT

Academic research libraries can employ several approaches to advance the institutional mission. First, libraries can shift from goals focused on collections and traditional library services and instead align with their campus academic plan and an emphasis on supporting the institution's strategic initiatives. A second approach is for libraries to modify their organizational structures from being function-based on the tasks that traditional libraries performed (e.g., public services, technical services, collection development) and move instead toward organizational units that directly support their university's missions (e.g., undergraduate education; graduate and professional education; research, scholarship, and creative activity; and public engagement). The key is to have library staff engaged in work that contributes to vital institutional outcomes such as student success and faculty research productivity. Academic research libraries should also continue to work towards an assessment program that demonstrates the value of the academic research library in providing quality services that advance the institutional mission.     

英国高校图书馆学科服务现状调查和分析

[目的/意义] 调查和分析英国高校图书馆学科服务的内容、组织结构、教学和培训的主要方式、技术手段和反馈模式,发掘其对国内学科服务的参考价值。[方法/过程] 利用Qualtrics网上调查平台,对英国高校图书馆的学科服务内容、组织架构、教学和培训的方式、新技术和反馈手段等进行调查,收到来自英国50所高校图书馆的58份有效问卷,并利用Qualtrics和SPSS对数据进行分析。[结果/结论] 英国高校图书馆的学科服务内容由传统的馆藏资源建设、学科联系、信息素养培训逐渐外延,面向用户提供多项科研支持服务。功能性组织架构成为英国高校图书学科服务的主流结构,但基于学科的服务模式依然占有一席之地,部分图书馆采用二元结构,兼顾功能角色和学科角色。通识教学和嵌入式教学相结合已成为英国高校图书馆教学和培训的主流方式,新技术在英国高校图书馆教学和培训中应用广泛,教学和培训的反馈方式多样化。     

Flipped Interlibrary Loan (F.I.L.L.): Putting Interlibrary Loan in the Driver's Seat of Acquisitions

Interlibrary loan (ILL) is an important service point in the academic library, a channel through which patrons can ask for specific books and expect that those books will be made available to them. Examining the methods in which libraries handle those requests may reveal new workflows wherein ILL can influence the direction of the library's permanent acquisitions. ILL data is able to drive immediate purchases of user-requested titles but also more complex models of acquisition. By comparing circulation rates and expenditures against traditional book-approval plans, acquisitions departments may also measure the financial effectiveness of purchase-on-demand programs and use them to both supplement and supplant those approval plans. At the core of Lehigh University's efforts is an internal library philosophy called “Flipped Interlibrary Loan” (F.I.L.L.), by which ILL can and should inform permanent acquisitions for the library collection.     

PDA认识误区之解析与建议

对国内在认识与研究PDA时,在PDA与成本的关系、PDA名称翻译中强调"决策"是否合适、PDA实施是否公开化和是否适合任何类型的馆藏发展目标4个方面易产生的认识误区进行分析,并对拟引进PDA模式的国内高校图书馆提出5项建议,即外文图书采购可尝试PDA、采取隐性操作方式、慎重选择出版商、设定读者参与权限、加强结果评估,以促进PDA在我国图书馆的实施。     

Birds of a feather: partnerships towards community engagement in South African academic libraries

This paper adopted a qualitative research approach to assess the formation of partnerships towards community engagement (CE) in South African public university libraries. Online interviews with Library Heads and Community Participants as well as focus group discussions with Librarians were the two data collection methods used. Data were collected, analysed and interpreted thematically using ATLAS.ti. Findings revealed that in conducting CE, South African libraries foster several internal and external partnerships. These partnerships help the libraries to bridge the gap between the university libraries and the external communities as well as to strengthen bonds between the libraries and internal communities. Barries to partnerships include lack of commitment, non-sustainability of some partnerships, differences in organisational culture and internal processes, and poor or lack of communication. Strengths include sharing responsibility and resources, and an opportunity to create long-lasting bonds based on mutual benefits and trust. None of the academic libraries have an explicitly stated exclusion criteria for partners which may expose them to the danger of partnering with unscrupulous organisations and individuals. Therefore, it is recommended that, in forming partnerships, academic libraries should develop clear guidelines on the type of organisations and individuals to collaborate with to protect themselves from the possibility of partnering with unscrupulous organisations. Therefore, all academic library partnerships must be based on shared vision and values.     

Beyond Mark and Park: Classification Mapping as a Collection Development Tool for Psychiatry/Psychology

Developing specific collection development policies for psychiatry poses problems because of its interdisciplinarity with psychology and medicine. East Carolina University has separate academic and medical libraries that are responsible for supporting the curriculum and research needs of the students and faculty. In an era of dwindling budgets and growing programs, it is imperative that book selectors be aware of cross-discipline classification schemes that may lead to unnecessary duplication of materials. This article proposes an instrument that maps the National Library of Medicine classification to the Library of Congress classification for psychology/ psychiatry to be used as a guideline for supporting cooperative collection development.     

我国省级公共图书馆1979-2008年科研产出及科研能力分析

笔者通过统计CNKI"中国期刊全文数据库"和"中国引文数据库"的有关数据,对我国31个省级公共图书馆1979-2008年在学术刊物上发表论文的年代分布、论文合作情况分布、论文发表刊物分布、核心期刊分布、核心作者分布五个方面进行了分析,从而揭示了我国公共图书馆学术研究的现状.     

高校图书馆潜课程及可控因素初探

通过对"潜课程"界说的分析,进一步明确了高校"潜课程"的内涵,指出了高校图书馆"潜课程"在学校教育中的呈现方式和传递的知识内容,以及高校图书馆"潜课程"独特的作用特征,并据此从"潜课程"实施的过程控制和馆员、环境、馆藏、制度在实施过程中的特殊作用角度,论述了对高校图书馆"潜课程"可控因素的选择与实施.参考文献6.     

Boundary Spanners and Serials Deselection

Periodic serials deselection projects are an economic necessity, especially for academic libraries that serve predominantly undergraduate institutions. The dialogue between teaching faculty and librarians accompanying the serials deselection process may be an important learning experience for both, especially if thc library uses subject specialist librarians as "boundary-spanners," a concept explored in the essay. Nonetheless, even the most skillfully conducted cancellation program will reduce a library's ability to support scholarship and impair the working relationship bctween the library and its teaching faculty.