On the Merit of Case Studies in Access Services

ABSTRACT

The creation of “Access Services” departments in academic libraries did not translate into the creation or offering of new services for patrons. Instead, it was typically just the combination of three already existing departments. Recent changes and trends in Access Services, including new NCIP and ISO standards, an increase in the use of electronic reserves, and the availability of items in various formats, now allow librarians to reconsider if this departmental arrangement is the best for today's library customers. This paper argues that the traditional configuration of Access Services needs to be dismantled if academic libraries are to provide excellent customer service to faculty and students.     

Let's Circulate: A Report on the 1st Annual New Jersey Access Services Meeting

In 2014, access services librarians and professional staff from various institutions all over New Jersey came together at The College of New Jersey, in Ewing Township, to discuss regional trends and issues in access services. Library staff at these institutions face many of the same issues from managing student assistants, to dealing with stacks management, and handling building security. The goal of the daylong meeting was to build bonds between access services staff at the different institutions, and to learn from one another's experiences during a series of roundtable discussions, and informal conversations over coffee and lunch. It was the first meeting of its kind in New Jersey and the organizers plan to make it an annual occurrence under the name Let's Circulate. This article is a summary of the first meeting.     

Comparison of three web-scale discovery services for health sciences research

Objective

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relative effectiveness of three web-scale discovery (WSD) tools in answering health sciences search queries.

Methods

Simple keyword searches, based on topics from six health sciences disciplines, were run at multiple real-world implementations of EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS), Ex Libris''s Primo, and ProQuest''s Summon. Each WSD tool was evaluated in its ability to retrieve relevant results and in its coverage of MEDLINE content.

Results

All WSD tools returned between 50%–60% relevant results. Primo returned a higher number of duplicate results than the other 2 WSD products. Summon results were more relevant when search terms were automatically mapped to controlled vocabulary. EDS indexed the largest number of MEDLINE citations, followed closely by Summon. Additionally, keyword searches in all 3 WSD tools retrieved relevant material that was not found with precision (Medical Subject Headings) searches in MEDLINE.

Conclusions

None of the 3 WSD products studied was overwhelmingly more effective in returning relevant results. While difficult to place the figure of 50%–60% relevance in context, it implies a strong likelihood that the average user would be able to find satisfactory sources on the first page of search results using a rudimentary keyword search. The discovery of additional relevant material beyond that retrieved from MEDLINE indicates WSD tools'' value as a supplement to traditional resources for health sciences researchers.     

Books Not Burgers: Six Highly Effective Ways to Motivate and Retain Library Student Employees

Although there is a healthy amount in the literature about the importance of motivating student library employees in an academic setting, very little of it discusses the practical aspects of how to motivate students. A supervisor must often use ideas from other disciplines, including the business world and academia. In this article, the author suggests six highly effective, yet cost-conscious methods that have been used successfully in an academic library setting to keep student employees motivated and to retain them year after year. These six methods are: (a) encouraging autonomy, (b) holding contests, (c) providing food, (d) being open to suggestions, (e) using employee strengths, and (f) celebrating seasonal or university-specific events.     

Sublimity and Solutions: Problematization in ICT for Development Perspectives

This essay situates ICT for Development (ICT4D) perspectives in relationship to the neo-liberal rationality characteristic of the WTO, World Bank, and G8 economic frameworks. Using James Carey's (2005) pragmatist perspective and recent work on problematization, the essay proceeds in three steps: 1) it situates the emergence, role, and organization of the UN ICT Task Force in amplifying ICT4D perspectives, 2) it discusses the importance of problematization in the articulation of communication to international development frameworks, and 3) it recommends supplementing studies of the digital sublime with a pragmatist perspective better able to illuminate the practices of transnational policy networks.     

Escaping Lenin's library: Library and Information Science education in independent Ukraine

This article examines historical developments and current trends in Ukrainian library education. It gives a synthetic overview and comparison with US library education, based on a review of the Ukrainian literature, a survey of Library and Information Service (LIS) curricula and interviews with senior figures in Ukrainian LIS education. Ukraine became an independent state only in 1991 after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Previous to independence, Ukraine's LIS education was integrated within the Soviet system. After independence the system evolved slowly, but with the recent Orange Revolution, reform efforts have increased pace. Ukrainian LIS education remains more vocational than in the US, with a two-year non-degree certificate as the most common training, and a four-year bachelor's degree offered by elite institutions. One emerging trend in LIS education stresses the new opportunities for librarians and information professionals opened by Internet technologies. Another is part of a more general shift, inspired by a new Ukrainian higher education law, stressing the country's independent culture and formalizing standards for different degrees. LIS education has now reached a turning point, as reformers grapple with the limited resources, power of inertia, and remnants of Soviet culture in their efforts to meet current challenges and prepare a new generation of information professionals.     

Interactive Kiosk at the Texas Tech University Libraries

The academic library, given its often privileged position on campus, is the information source that can include directional as well as general campus facts among the myriad of print and e-resources for reference. Also, an academic library's audiences can be quite varied and include prospective students or parents seeking more general knowledge of the building and the campus. Many times this need for information drives patrons to the library service desks. Sometimes, especially during the high-demand seasons of new student orientation and beginning of the fall semesters, the desk is so busy that many patrons will leave because they don't have the time to wait. To address this immediate need for information, Texas Tech University Libraries developed an interactive kiosk to provide general information for frequently asked questions in a more efficient, creative, and interactive way. The kiosk provides a fun method of satisfying a patron's information needs without the requirement of a staff member or the need to wait in line for help. The kiosk is available as long as the Library is open and provides a variety of useful answers to general questions, as well as facts about the Library.     

BBC's Wednesday Magazine and Arts Television for Women

Wednesday Magazine (1958–1963) was an innovative BBC television afternoon arts and culture strand produced by the specialist BBC women's programme unit, which had been built up and nurtured by the first dedicated head of women's programmes Doreen Stephens, who was appointed in 1953. Stephens was responsible for the development of a diverse and extensive range of women's programming; highly ambitious in the offering that it presented to its female viewers. This article will examine the series Wednesday Magazine exploring the wealth of arts and culture items broadcast, whilst considering the programme's significance in critical histories of both women's programming and arts television. The article will also make an intervention into historical debates around what constituted women's television in Britain.     

Putting the “I” back in team

In the summer of 2013, staff in the Access Services unit of an academic library began a cross-training and collaboration project in an effort to provide continued library service to the campus community. The cross-training was established in an attempt to address a shortage of staff as a result of budget cuts. The cross-training resulted in the transitioning of the Access Services units and the creation of a collaborative team. The development of cross-training and its benefits are addressed in addition to lessons learned.     

Internal Party Bulletin or Paper of the Working Class Movement?

On 1 January 1930 the Communist Party of Great Britain's (CPGB) new daily newspaper, the Daily Worker, was published for the first time. It was heralded by the CPGB as a maturing of the British Communist movement, and an opportunity for the Party to spread its message to a much wider audience than previous weekly newspapers would allow. With leading Party members in control of the paper, the Daily Worker was very much a Party newspaper; however, the CPGB wanted it to be much more than an internal bulletin. This paper examines the attempts by the CPGB to create a newspaper that spoke both for and with the voice of the working-classes, whilst also spreading the Party's message. It will ultimately conclude that the CPGB's depiction of it as a paper ‘by the working-classes, for the working-classes’ reflected the Party's efforts at locating its own place within the working-class movement.     

From Vision to Action: One Campus's Experience with the UC CONSER Funnel

ABSTRACT

In 2006, the University of California launched a Cooperative Online Serials Program (CONSER) Funnel. It paved the way for serials catalogers across UC libraries to work with CONSER records in the OCLC WorldCat database. The first funnel dealing with bibliographic records in a decentralized approach in the Program for Cooperative Cataloging's history, it has had significant impact locally and nationally. The UC Davis Library was one of the early participants. Valerie Bross was instrumental in its establishment and implementation. This article presents the view from a participating library's standpoint and complements Valerie's article which was published here in 2010.     

TRIAL BY FURY

The paper relates the author's experiences in editing and publishing a journal in microfiche, devoted to the future of bibliographic control and related issues. The use of a micro format was dictated by financial considemtions, but it offers additional advantages of speed and flexibility. The first year of publication has provided its editor, a librarian, with a revealing look at journal distribution from the publisher's point of view.     

Should next generation access networks fall within the scope of universal service? A European union perspective

In 2010 the European Commission (EC) undertook a review of its current Universal Service Obligation (USO) to discuss whether or not broadband should be included in it. In fact, convergence of telephony, internet and media, further market liberalization and rapid technological development in the broadband market challenge the traditional definition of USO and increasingly question its notion of a “basic set of communication services”, which does not include broadband. In this context, the paper looks at the origins, the theoretical arguments for, and the empirical basis of the USO in light of the ongoing debate in the EU, and links these arguments to technological developments and changing demand conditions in European broadband markets. The authors propose that the European Commission should include in its future USO regulation provisions for a wider set of services based on Next Generation Access (NGA) networks rooted in the EC's new regulatory approach. Even if these provisions have not been included in the new USO framework in November 2011 further discussions are needed to account for the new realities of broadband markets in the European Union.     

Google Scholar Usage: An Academic Library's Experience

Google Scholar is a free service that provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly works and to connect patrons with the resources libraries provide. The researchers in this study analyzed Google Scholar usage data from 2006 for three library tools at San Francisco State University: SFX link resolver, Web Access Management proxy server, and ILLiad interlibrary loan server. Overall, the data suggested that Google Scholar had become a very useful resource in the library and was a significant addition to the library's collection of research databases. SFX data revealed requests from Google Scholar grew ten-fold from 2006 to 2011, and that Google Scholar became the top-ranked SFX source for requests in 2011. Library patrons favored Google Scholar over San Francisco State University's federated search tool, MetaLib, and it has become an important source for interlibrary loan requests. Analysis of San Francisco State University usage data will assist other libraries in their decisions about the implementation of Google Scholar.     

HAROLD D. LASSWELL'S ANALYSIS OF HITLER'S SPEECHES

The War-Time Communications Project (WTCP), conducted during the Second World War, was a major event in the evolution of communication science. A prominent place in it was occupied by Professor Harold D. Lasswell's study on Hitler's speeches, in which the ‘speech model’ was examined in reference to its vocal components and non-verbal communication elements – in terms of ‘how spoken’, rather than of ‘what said’, with an emphasis on audience feedback. This approach formed part of Lasswell's innovative idea: quantification of the word domain. The study was of one of a series of content analysis research works undertaken at the Library of Congress at that time, part of an attempt at ‘keeping an eye’ on world peace. The present article, the first exposition of Lasswell's opus, highlights one of his central concepts – linguistic transformation.     

All-Women's Radio: WHER-AM in Memphis

In the 1950s, television knocked radio off its pedestal as the primary electronic entertainment in the home and forced the radio industry to find new ways to compete. In Memphis, Tennessee, WHER went on the air in 1955 as an early experiment in all-women's programming. Located at 1430 on the AM dial, WHER featured a female on-air staff, but it was owned by three businessmen: Sam Phillips of Sun Records, Roy Scott, and Kemmons Wilson, the founder of Holiday Inn. WHER called itself "a thousand beautiful watts." The Memphis Sunday Times heralded it as "the nation's first successful all- girl station."     

A view from within: the student in student worker

Clare Harris is a Master’s student in the Department of Library and Information Science at St. John’s University. This essay offers a first-person account of life as a student and a library employee. From her personal experience, Harris offers suggestions for how best to engage student workers in academic library settings.     

News Outsourcing: The Producers' Perspective

Canada was the first country challenged by the massive inflow of American popular culture. The Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission (CRBC), Canada's first national public broadcaster, was created to provide an alternative to U.S. network and Canadian commercial radio. After analyzing the CRBC's programs, this article concludes that even the public network imitated or incorporated much American programming, but recontextualized it to Canadian locations, both real and imaginative, and supplemented it with more nationally oriented serious and symbolic content as well. The case study fits within the framework of the international literature emphasizing the hybridity and resiliency of national cultural identities.