How Do I Get a Campus ID? The Other Role of the Academic Library in Student Retention and Success

Academic libraries have long gathered data at the reference desk to facilitate informed development of services and collections, and have long known that regardless of whether questions are related to doing research, the library is a safe place a student may go to find answers. This article highlights the role of the library and information commons service desks as valuable windows into the student experience. The authors suggest that librarians share with campus stakeholders information about students’ non-research-related questions to aid in the development of programs and services designed to help students adjust to campus life and, ultimately, succeed.     

The Impact of “Scholar's Workstations” in an Undergraduate Academic Library

Summary

The Eastern Connecticut State University library planned, with the new facility, a new configuration for user computers to be one-stop-shopping “Scholar's Workstations.” The impact on reference services was dramatic, resulting in modifications in staffing, policies/procedures, printing practices, user orientation and education, etc. Moreover, the reference librarians were troubled by their perceptions of how these workstations were utilized, challenging us to conduct a user survey to determine the validity of these perceptions. In this article, we will describe (1) how we conceived this new configuration and its impact, (2) modifications made, and (3) an analysis of the user survey.     

“Where Are the Bathrooms?”: Academic Library Restrooms and Student Needs

This article investigates bathrooms, paying specific attention to those in academic libraries. The authors describe how bathrooms have been considered in the library literature for the past century and challenges to changing the status quo. Finally, this work sets the stage for future inquiry. Research materials come from a range of sources: historical library literature, building codes, social science theory and research that address the issues around bathroom taboos, and checklists for assessing bathrooms. The authors propose librarians and library administrators reconsider all aspects of their own bathrooms: location, features, equity/inclusiveness, and maintenance in service to their patrons.     

Downloads or Outcomes?: Measuring and Communicating the Contributions of Library Resources to Faculty and Student Success

How can libraries proactively demonstrate, quantitatively and qualitatively, return on investment in an academic environment that is increasingly concerned with tangible results? As speaker for Mississippi State University Libraries' 9th MidSouth eResource Symposium, Dr. Rachel Fleming-May, Assistant Professor at the University of Tennessee's School of Information Sciences, articulated the need for libraries to communicate their true value and indispensability to campus communities, particularly through the measurement of electronic resource usage. The concept of “use,” however, is complex and must be fully understood for meaningful incorporation into assessment measures. A brief summary of this session, also authored by Amanda Price, appeared in the “E-Resource Roundup” column of the Journal of Electronic Resources Librarianship, Volume 23, Issue 1 (2011: March).     

Is Your Academic Library Pinning? Academic Libraries and Pinterest

Academic libraries are flocking to online social networking sites in an effort to meet users where they are. Pinterest is the latest of these rapidly growing online social networking tools. The author of this article reports results from a survey on academic libraries’ presence on Pinterest. The survey found most academic library pinboards are in their infancy. Findings suggest that before establishing a presence on Pinterest, libraries should focus on planning institutional profiles and boards. Example institutions are highlighted, and tips are offered for setting up profiles and pinning, based on information from the survey.     

One Academic Library—One Year of Web-scale Discovery

Tonia Graves, the electronic resources librarian at Old Dominion University, described her library's discovery environment using Marshall Breeding's 2010 article “The State of the Art in Library Discovery” as a framework for her discussion. She discussed the library website redesign, the creation of a mobile website, the audit and reconsideration of the role of the integrated library system (ILS), and the implementation of WorldCat Local. The objective of the presentation was to highlight the challenges of revamping the art of discovery in the library and the application of usage data to evaluate the success of the program.     

Card Sorting in an Online Environment: Key to Involving Online-Only Student Population in Usability Testing of an Academic Library Web Site?

ABSTRACT

Based on in-person, task-based usability testing and interviews, the authors' library Web site was recently overhauled in order to improve user experience. This led to the authors' interest in additional usability testing methods and test environments that would most closely fit their library's goals and situation. The appeal of card sorting methods became evident: learning more than users' points of confusion interacting with the site, but learning users' preferences for grouping pages or concepts and naming various library links. The appeal of the online venue for card sorting was first that testing could incorporate input from a larger base of users than in-person testing alone, and, additionally, that testing could include the university's online-only student population.     

Microaggressions in Academic Spaces: What About the Library?

Microaggressions are subtle aggressions, often unintentional, which are usually directed at certain groups of people, generally minorities. Due to their insidious frequency, they cause great discomfort. They can even cause permanent problems with adapting and integrating of various kinds. University libraries, as the social spaces that they are, accommodate a wide variety of people and can be places where microaggressions occur in different directions: librarians towards users, users towards librarians and among these groups. This study analyzes the incidence of various types of microaggressions in the academic library environment from the point of view of one group of users: academics and researchers. An online survey was completed by a large number of academics and researchers from a large geographic area. Data was obtained on both observed and felt or experienced microaggressions in the library, either towards themselves or other users, or towards the librarian. The results indicate that researchers are more aggressive than librarians, making the library space a safer place for diversity than the university. Nevertheless, for certain aspects the library shows some data that invites reflection and an opportunity to further reduce occurrences.     

Full-Text Database Dependency: An Emerging Trend Among Undergraduate Library Users?

The ever-growing number of full-text electronic databases and their increasing availability has helped to create greater expectations among the undergraduate students who use them in their research. A study was made of nearly three hundred students enrolled in composition classes to determine the indexes and databases most commonly used for assignments and whether having the full text of journal articles online played a role in shaping the nature of their research. The survey results confirmed the authors' belief from encounters at the reference desk that students are becoming dependent on the availability of full-text databases and are using them in some cases to the exclusion of all other information sources.     

Will Undergraduate Students Play Games to Learn How to Conduct Library Research?

This exploratory study examines whether undergraduate students will play games to learn how to conduct library research. Results indicate that students will play games that are an integral component of the course curriculum and enable them to accomplish overall course goals at the same time they learn about library research.     

Can Microsoft Academic help to assess the citation impact of academic books?

Despite recent evidence that Microsoft Academic is an extensive source of citation counts for journal articles, it is not known if the same is true for academic books. This paper fills this gap by comparing citations to 16,463 books from 2013 to 2016 in the Book Citation Index (BKCI) against automatically extracted citations from Microsoft Academic and Google Books in 17 fields. About 60% of the BKCI books had records in Microsoft Academic, varying by year and field. Citation counts from Microsoft Academic were 1.5 to 3.6 times higher than from BKCI in nine subject areas across all years for books indexed by both. Microsoft Academic found more citations than BKCI because it indexes more scholarly publications and combines citations to different editions and chapters. In contrast, BKCI only found more citations than Microsoft Academic for books in three fields from 2013-2014. Microsoft Academic also found more citations than Google Books in six fields for all years. Thus, Microsoft Academic may be a useful source for the impact assessment of books when comprehensive coverage is not essential.     

Pop-Up Library at the University of Birmingham: Extending the Reach of an Academic Library by Taking “The Library” to the Students

ABSTRACT

Aligning with student engagement and promotional strategies, a Pop-Up Library project was initiated at the University of Birmingham. This involved setting up temporary, staffed stalls in different locations across campus in order to informally communicate with students and effectively take “the Library” to them. This article discusses the planning and implementation of the Pop-Up Library, including the rationale for the initiative. Details are given of the stalls themselves, the wide range of staff involved, the many locations trialed, the promotional materials used, and the ways in which the venture was advertised and subsequently evaluated. Results of a questionnaire used on the stalls are presented. Conclusions are drawn as to the effectiveness of the Pop-Up Library as a communication tool, with particular emphasis on breaking down barriers between students and library staff, and proactively raising students' awareness of the many ways Library Services can enhance their learning.     

The Contemporary Academic Library Resource Sharing Mission: Fragmentation or Evolution?

Academic interlibrary loan practitioners are experiencing changes that can be characterized as either the fragmentation of the resource sharing mission or its evolution into a new form of service routinely making use of new and diverse sources of information outside the scope of past practices. Among these new sources are curated repositories of open access literature, institutional repositories, digital libraries containing scanned public domain literature, and social media article-sharing networking sites. The incorporation of these sources of information into regular workflows presents interlibrary loan practitioners with many challenges. This paper will discuss ways to address these developments.     

Do Library Fines Work?: Analysis of the Effectiveness of Fines on Patron's Return Behavior at Two Mid-sized Academic Libraries

Data on library fines imposed at Eastern Illinois University and the University of Hawaii at Manoa was extracted and compared to determine whether fines had an impact on the patron's return behavior. The results indicated that fines as well as patron group status (undergraduate, graduate, faculty) have an impact on the patron's return behavior.     

How Well Are We Preparing Them?: An Assessment of First-Year Library Student Assistants’ Information Literacy Skills

Most libraries have fully integrated cadres of student assistants into their daily operations, including helping at points of service. As libraries rely more and more on student assistants, we must maintain exceptional customer service to our users. This requires our student assistants to possess information literacy skills that exceed those of our users. This assessment investigates the information literacy skills of first-year library student assistants when compared to the general first-year student population, and it examines if first-year library student assistants’ information literacy skills increase more than those of their peers during their first semester at college.