The Never-Ending Story: Structural Dilemmas and Changing Solutions in the Communication Field

This article examines the idiosyncratic development of Israel's communication field against the backdrop of the field's main structural dilemmas: (a) emphasis on research orientation versus on professional journalistic training and (b) firm boundaries for the field based on its mother disciplines (humanities or social sciences) versus open boundaries adopting different disciplines' research topics/methods that touch on communication phenomena. The article suggests a theoretical framework based on criteria anchored in the sociology of science and then applies these criteria to an analysis of the institutionalization and development of the Communication Institute at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem from its foundation in 1964 through the 1990s. The study is based on documents from the university archive and the Guttman Institute for Applied Social Research, curricula and catalogs of communication departments in Israel, and interviews with senior researchers in the field.     

UCF Library Express: Marketing a Faculty Delivery Service

As it becomes increasingly difficult to demonstrate the worth of the library to the academic community, gate counts and usage statistics are no longer enough. Showing the impact the library has on the community requires planning new services with outcome measurement from the start. This article outlines a marketing strategy for launching a faculty book delivery service at the University of Central Florida's John C. Hitt Library using Fisher and Pride's (2006) Blueprint for Your Library Marketing Plan. It includes a review of relevant literature on marketing delivery services, service and marketing goals and outcomes, target audiences, marketing messages, message delivery strategies, marketing budget, and management of staff responsibilities. This article is the second in a series of three articles that together make up an entire project planning and management document that is based on Rhea Rubin's (2006) Outcome Measurement model. The plan in its entirety provides an example of how to apply the Outcome Measurement model in an academic library setting.     

中国高校科技期刊百年史回顾与前瞻

对晚清以来(1889—2013年)125年间高等学校主办的科技期刊发展历史作系统研究。认为:上海圣约翰大学清光绪十五年(1889年)创刊的《约翰声》(The St.John’s University Echo)标志着中国高等学校文理综合性学报的诞生,比传统认识(1906年的《学桴》)前推了17年。目前,精品科技期刊战略和特色期刊战略将引领新的发展方向。     

Conversation as a model to build the relationship among libraries,digital humanities,and campus leadership

ABSTRACT

By committing to two conversation-based concepts, David Lankes's Mission for New Librarians and the “Scholarship as Conversation” Information Literacy Frame, Bethel University's Library has established a leadership role in advocating and implementing digital humanities at a midsized liberal arts institution. Aligning the services and strategy of the Bethel University Digital Library (BUDL), Bethel's institutional repository, with the lessons learned and relationships built through these conversations with administration, faculty, and staff has resulted in successful outcomes for the communication and implementation of innovative digital library and digital humanities initiatives.     

An Assessment of the Relationships between Resource Development Decisions,Library Collection Usage,and User Perceptions

Today's managers of library journal collection budgets experience pressures from shrinking resource allocations and rising costs. Consequently, they seek ways to assess the value of their collections in relation to user needs. This study at Montana State University seeks to understand what resources users (both faculty and graduate students) are citing in their research, the breadth of the information cited that is provided by the Library, how the Library's proactive and reactive efforts might influence user satisfaction with the information resources provided, and how user perceptions align and differ from information realities. It takes a unique approach by comparing LibQual+® survey results and faculty and graduate student citation behaviors.     

Too Many Students,Too Little Time: Creating and Implementing a Self-Paced,Interactive Computer Tutorial for the Libraries' Online Catalog

The goal of the project presented in this article was to create a tutorial for the University of Louisville's online catalog, Minerva, using an authoring software program. This article describes the thought process behind this decision, how the appropriate software was chosen, how the tutorial was designed and implemented, and how the project was evaluated. The tutorial is the first step in helping all students become information literate and works in coordination with the library session, which furthers the process by helping them learn how to evaluate and use the information they find.     

BiblioFemina: A panel discussion on women in publishing,bookselling, and libraries

A panel discussion was held at the University of Minnesota to explore how librarians, publishers, and booksellers advance access to women's literature. Using the Twin Cities area of Minnesota as a model, the program brought together five professionals representing university and public libraries and socially conscious publishing and bookselling. The group addressed issues associated with the production, selection, and access to women's literature. Three conditions came to light, revealing the complexities of each function, the impact of contemporary trends, and the necessity of cooperation among publishers, booksellers, and librarians.     

From competencies to threshold concepts through the information literate university. A faculty's perspective

This article explores the perceptions of social sciences professors in Spanish universities on a series of variables concerning the Information Literate University, and information literacy competencies and threshold concepts. The aim is to determine faculty's levels of agreement with such variables, how they cluster, and what the relationship between clusters consists in. Factor analysis and structural equation modeling methods are used. The accepted ILUCC-FP model structures the causal linkage between the constructs of IL Competencies, Information Literate University, and IL Concepts, and measures how they relate to the variables. The construct on faculty's attitudes toward the Information Literate University plays a key mediating role. This attitudinal, causal, bidirectional, flexible, and transferable model allows stakeholders -mainly faculty and librarians- to detect the current status regarding faculty attitudes, thereby providing them with the opportunity to promote attitudinal improvement initiatives with positive consequences for their levels of knowledge and skills. The model could be applied in different academic contexts.     

Changing the Library Brand: A Case Study

ABSTRACT

This article outlines some of the opportunities and challenges of changing what the library “brand” means to academic and professional services staff in the rapidly changing environment of UK higher education, taking the University of Leicester as a case study. It makes a practitioner contribution to the growing body of evidence of how libraries are extending their role and how their customers are responding. It begins by considering the drivers for change in the higher education and scholarly information environments and how these are influencing the development of library services at the University of Leicester. The topics considered include researcher development, Digital Humanities, Open Access, independent learning, and curating the university's own information assets. The impact of these developments is outlined and how an evolving approach to strategic marketing is beginning to change perceptions as the boundaries of the library's role extend.     

Facebook as a Communication Tool for an Academic Library: East West University Library,Bangladesh Perspective

The primary objectives of this research article are to explore the concept of communication tools using Facebook, and to evaluate the performance of the East West University (EWU) Library Facebook page as a communication tool. The EWU Library Facebook page uses a variety of strategies and techniques to engage with its patrons. The author's intention is to examine this library Facebook page, which is explored using a case study method. This article also focuses on how Facebook facilitates collaborations between the library and the patron's community, as well as the implications for academic libraries in the future. This case study reviews the literature on the use of social networking while focusing on Facebook as a communication tool and engaging libraries in social networking. The article emphasizes the author's experience of working in an academic library to identify the main trends in providing services based on posting various topics through the Facebook page of the EWU Library, Bangladesh. The numerous issues in adapting Facebook as a communication tool and an exploration of the opportunity and drawbacks of the use of the Facebook application in academic libraries are also discussed.     

Circulation Services for Distance Education: A Case Study Comparing Two Institutions

The way students experience higher education in today's world is rapidly changing, and students have the choice to earn their college degree in a number of non-traditional ways. Library services also need to transform to meet the needs of all students regardless of how they experience higher education. The following article outlines how library circulation and document delivery services can be provided to distance education students. Two institutions' services are compared: the distance education circulation services offered at the Leatherby Libraries at Chapman University and the equivalent services at the Ottenheimer Library at University of Arkansas at Little Rock. This case study provides examples of how document delivery and interlibrary loan can fill the resource needs of distance education patrons.     

The Accidental Archivists: Lessons Learned from a Digital Archive Project

This article tells the story of the University of Colorado Law Library's successful effort to develop its first digital archive. The sudden death of the law school's dean was the catalyst for this project, with a goal to unveil the archive at a memorial symposium scheduled nine months in the future. The University of Colorado Law Library staff had never tackled a project of this type or scale before. This article discusses the technological, cataloging, and management issues that were encountered during the project. It also provides advice and tips on how librarians in their own institutions can accomplish such a project.     

Using Scopus to Study Researchers’ Citing Behavior for Local Collection Decisions: A Focus on Psychology

In recent years, the University of Houston has engaged in a campus-wide effort to raise the university to Tier-One status. The initiative has led to a significant increase in faculty's research output in the field of psychology. This dynamic change inspired the Psychology Librarian and Collection Coordinator to embark on a citation analysis to investigate two questions: how has faculty been using information for their research and how does the library's collection meet the research needs of faculty? In addition to reporting these findings, the article also describes how to use features in Scopus to simplify the data collection process.     

Retention Matters: Academic Libraries Leading the Way

Academic libraries have always strived to be purposively involved in the university's mission attainment efforts. Today, the increase of retention levels is paramount, and, in many cases, it is at the center of higher education institution's strategic plans. For Andrews University, for example, the goal is to reach 80% in the next five years. In the United States, student retention efforts become even more critical due, in part, to declining enrollment numbers set off by soaring higher education costs. Academic librarians are aware of the library's role in the university's overall efforts to increase persistence rates and curtail attrition. Through a literature review, this article highlights how academic libraries are participating in this process. This study focuses on how academic libraries can be leaders in their Institutions by adopting a user-centered philosophy and services that will promote life-long learning, enhance students’ academic experience, and promote engagement, leading to retention.     

Center Stage: Performing a Needs Assessment of Campus Research Centers and Institutes

Outreach to research centers and institutes is often overlooked in academic libraries. This article discusses a needs assessment conducted by the Liaison Services Department at the University of Houston Libraries that reviewed library services to centers and institutes at the University of Houston's main campus. The assessment was conducted for two purposes: to build collaborations with centers and to determine how the libraries might create new services and/or market existing services to meet the centers and institutes' growing research needs.     

Carnegie Mellon University and University Microfilms International "Virtual Library Project"

Carnegie Mellon University and University Microforms International (UMI) are collaborating on a three and one-half year development project for a virtual library. More than 650 bitmapped journal titles from UMI will be available through the University's Library Information System to Carnegie Mellon University students and faculty over the campus fiber optic network. The paper provides an overview of the project and discusses how journal information is presented to users. An overview of the economics of full-text journals online is also provided.     

Why Did We Buy That? New Customers and Changing Directions in Collection Development

This article describes the new role of academic libraries in higher education and shows how it has changed collection development objectives to serve a nontraditional constituency not served in the past. This is illustrated, in part, by Kent State University Library's review and selection of language-learning software, motivated by the university's strategic initiatives for globalization. It demonstrates a new trend to purchase resources that support administrative agendas and non-teaching programs, and the impact this has on how libraries frame collection development policies and allocate dollars for library content. As collection managers are redirecting support to revenue-building objectives, are they compromising support of educational objectives?     

Integration of Library Impact Statements into the Curricular Review Process

ABSTRACT

Library impact statements can be key tools in evaluating a library's collection and determining what additional resources should be acquired to support a new course, major, or program. An academic institution's curricular review process can benefit from the inclusion of library impact statements. The application of library impact statements at Missouri State University and Southwest Baptist University will be examined. Information will be presented concerning the creation process, the types of research required, presentation formats, how the impact statements benefit both the library and the institution, and a selective review of how a number of other libraries handle the process.     

Managing a 21st-Century Library Collection

Matt Goldner, the OCLC Product & Technology Advocate, delivered the keynote address at the MidSouth eResource Symposium, held at Mississippi State University, Mitchell Memorial Libraries on August 11, 2011. From a service provider's perspective, Goldner shared some emergent but critical issues that arise with the electronic revolution and how these issues might affect the future of academic libraries. The focus of this presentation is centered on how librarians should work actively and positively to seek solutions to those issues.