Little Changes to Interlibrary Loan Services Make a Big Difference at a Small Academic Library

Over the past five years, McGrath Library at Hilbert College has made its interlibrary loan services more convenient, efficient, and beneficial to both students and faculty. As a direct result, use of ILL has increased. This article discusses what small changes McGrath Library has made to improve interlibrary loan services and how these changes benefit both students and faculty. Just a few little changes have added up to a big increase in interlibrary loan use at McGrath.     

Leading campus OER initiatives through library–faculty collaboration

With the rising costs of tuition and textbooks, Open Educational Resources (OERs) are becoming increasingly important. The university library, in collaboration with faculty, is a natural leader of OER initiatives at institutions of higher education. Cleveland State University's Michael Schwartz Library embraced this leadership role by assisting a faculty member with developing an OER, which involved balancing the workload between librarians and the faculty member, determining successful modes of communication, taking advantage of graphic design skills, and more. The success of this initial collaboration has led the Library to expand its support of OER initiatives on campus.     

Processing Reserves,Seeking Permissions and Engaging the Campus

Abstract

The Library has a dual role on campus, providing access to materials in compliance with fair use guidelines and informing teaching faculty about these guidelines and how they impact classroom teaching and beyond.

Library staff members have an extensive knowledge of copyright pertaining to reserve materials. The Library must maintain a delicate balance, upholding interpretation as it relates to procedures and service, while acting as a copyright information resource for faculty. The Library is involved in campus-wide efforts to inform faculty about copyright through online tools, conferences and ongoing conversations.     

The Senior Art Purchase Prize

Each spring, the Lilly Library at Earlham College sponsors a senior art contest. The Library Director and Art Department faculty judge entries. The library purchases and permanently displays the winning work. Problems are minimal and there are several benefits: not only does the library enhance its public relations and appearance, but it also demonstrates its concern for students as people.     

Finding the right balance: campus involvement in the collections allocation process

Many libraries have sought the best approach to allocating the collections budget. “History plus increment” is the standard for many libraries in the allocation of any new dollars to collections budgets. Other libraries have identified factors that help make the process of disbursing new money more objective including counts of faculty and students, literature size and costs, and program changes on campus.The Library of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is striving toward a more open and understandable allocation process that uses an allocation formula, professional judgment of its librarians, and input from campus faculty and administration. Through this process, we work to achieve balance between formula and professional judgment, between decisions made outside the Library and within the Library, between competing disciplines and old and emerging fields for budget dollars.     

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 Faculty Support for Remote Storage: A Survey of Collection Behaviors and Preferences

A seismic retrofitting project required the UCSB Library (University of California, Santa Barbara) to permanently reduce its on-site collections by 120,000 volumes. To accomplish this successfully, a strong collaboration with the faculty was essential. This article describes a planning process in which the library worked with a faculty committee to implement a campus-wide survey of faculty and graduate students regarding their behaviors and preferences in accessing and using the collections. The survey outcomes informed a common understanding of which physical materials should remain on-site and which could be moved to storage with the least impact on research and teaching.     

Expanding Library Support for Faculty Research in Historically Black Colleges and Universities

ABSTRACT

The Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) Library Alliance conducted a study to assess library services in support of faculty research. Funded by an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant, and with support from LYRASIS, the study involved two different assessments. The first assessment was of faculty members and their support needs for research. The second assessment was of librarians to understand current capacity and needs related to support libraries provide to faculty. While the HBCU Library Alliance acknowledges that libraries do not have the capacity to address all the challenges to faculty research, the results from this study can serve as a tool to augment the academic infrastructure to support research.     

Promoting Faculty Scholarship Through The University Author Recognition Bibliography at Boise State University

One of the most important contributions by any university is its faculty members’ scholarship. Providing an interface to view the full scope of an institution's academic accomplishments is vital for promoting both the scholarship and the university at large. Because of their unique information skills and services, librarians can facilitate the discovery of this scholarship on behalf of their institutions. This article explores how Albertsons Library at Boise State University utilizes an institutional repository to produce a faculty publication bibliography. Processes for collecting academic scholarship and organizing the citations within a repository structure are also discussed. Library staff found that this approach not only reduced redundancy and increased the usability of researcher publication data, it also increased the profile and value of the institutional repository.     

Use of UGC-Infonet E-resources by Social Science Academics in Indian Universities: An Evaluation Study

UGC is providing access to scholarly electronic resources (e-resources) to Indian universities through the UGC-Infonet Digital Library Consortium. Access to subscribed e-resources is being provided free of cost to member universities. The whole program is funded by the UGC and executed by the INFLIBNET Centre. Now, the UGC-Infonet Digital Library Consortium is in its 11th year and it has been expected that privileged academicians are utilizing available e-resources extensively and optimally. In this paper an effort is being made to assess, how social science faculty working in Indian universities have been using e-resources, what are the problems they are facing in accessing them, and what are the efforts made by INFLIBNET to spread awareness about such an ambitious initiative of UGC among social science faculty members. This paper also highlights some important issues with respect to use, acceptance and planning of this consortium.     

Ten Steps to Increase Library Impact on an Academic Health Sciences Campus

In summer 2009, the Norris Medical Library decided to increase outreach efforts in an attempt to revitalize its role in the USC School of Pharmacy for the upcoming academic year. Active networking in the summer and early fall resulted in an increase in use of both educational and reference services by pharmacy students and faculty; the number of planned instruction sessions for the 2009–2010 academic year increased fivefold. This article identifies ten steps that allowed the Library to expand its role considerably in just a few months. If followed wholly, or in part, these ten steps will help any library become more involved on a health sciences campus.     

Deep in the Weeds: Faculty Participation in a Large Scale Deselection Project

In 2014, the Pollak Library at California State University, Fullerton embarked on a project to simultaneously address an outdated collection and to provide more student oriented collaborative space by creating a large-scale deselection plan. The interim University Librarian believed it prudent to offer campus faculty the ability to provide input on the deselection plan and an online application was created to allow faculty to request retention of titles selected for weeding. Feedback from an initial weeding pilot program was instructive and the tool was updated for the following deselection rounds to compel faculty to justify reasons for retaining titles and deter arbitrary requests for retention. While ultimately successful in deselecting 95,074 titles, future weeding projects will focus on the most invested partners, rather than the entire campus community. This article describes Pollak Library’s weeding project and analyzes the results of three years of faculty feedback.     

The Great Transition of Scholarly Communication at the Thomas G. Carpenter Library

The library’s place in scholarly communication can be emphasized in many different ways. At the Thomas G. Carpenter Library at the University of North Florida (UNF), librarians have been able to preserve, organize, and promote community and academic resources very creatively. The UNF Digital Commons is used as a way to showcase faculty, staff, and university special collections and make them accessible to all users. Library space is also changing to invite faculty collaboration in areas previously devoted to print periodicals.     

MEDLINE end-user survey: the University of Florida experience

The University of Florida Health Science Center Library (UF-HSCL) surveyed MEDLINE end-user activities of the faculty from the six colleges which the UF-HSCL serves. A questionnaire was developed and sent to all faculty members. The Basic SAS program was used to analyze the collected data. This survey was intended to identify the users, the reasons for faculty members not being end users, the purpose for searching MEDLINE, the information retrieval methods, the level of end-user satisfaction, and the librarian's role in information retrieval activities. Many findings from this survey were in agreement with those of the 1988 study by the National Library of Medicine.     

Using Assessment Results to Reinforce Campus Partnerships

In response to calls for accountability, academic libraries have increased their assessment efforts. Although the University Library at Colorado State University–Pueblo has been engaged in student learning outcome assessment for several years, it has recently expanded its system of evaluation to share the results of information literacy assessments with teaching faculty. This was done in an effort to demonstrate the value of library instruction to the faculty of a small, regional campus. Several benefits have been realized as a result of this move, including stronger partnerships with course instructors and other departments engaged in academic support.     

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.     

Computer-stored faculty publication file using the MT/ST in a medium-sized medical center library.

The Bowman Gray School of Medicine Library has implemented a computerized faculty publication file adapted from an existing system that utilized a Magnetic Tape/Selectric Typewriter for catalog card production and computer storage. The faculty publication file has provided printouts for the school's annual report and monthly faculty bulletins. After the data for all faculty bibliographies have been stored in the file, it will be possible to retrieve complete author and departmental listings. The file will be continuously updated by adding current citations and the bibliographies of new faculty members and by deleting data when faculty members leave the staff.     

Implementing an Electronic Reserve System in an Academic Branch Library

Abstract

The Rodgers Science and Engineering Library which serves students, faculty and researchers in the fields of science, engineering and nursing at the University of Alabama abandoned centralized scanning of electronic reserve materials and moved to branch library scanning in 2003. This article is about how the Library handled the transition in terms of management issues such as planning, executing, training, supervising, monitoring quality and promoting the remote service to faculty and students.     

Using Buttons to Better Manage Online Presence: How One Academic Institution Harnessed the Power of Flair

This article provides a case study of how the University of Nebraska College of Law and Schmid Law Library use “buttons” to manage Law College faculty members’ and librarians’ online presence. Since Google is the primary search engine used to find information, it is important that librarians and libraries assist Web site visitors in finding relevant information about faculty members at an academic institution. Easily identifiable buttons allow visitors to navigate to faculty scholarship in the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Digital Commons, SSRN Web site, or both, in an academic service such as lessons from the Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction and in social software sites like Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. The case study includes (1) how the project was implemented, (2) the feedback and results of a survey, and (3) an analysis of Web site statistics, clicks, and links data gathered via Google Analytics. This project was a partnership between the Law College Communications Department, Law College Administration, and the Law Library, involving law faculty, staff, and librarians. The buttons project was considered a successful venture by participating faculty members; it also provided an opportunity for face-to-face conversation between faculty members and librarians about digital scholarship and social media in the academic environment.     

Desktop Delivery of Printed Materials at Auburn University

Abstract

In 2000, Auburn University Libraries implemented a new service, named AUBIExpress, to provide desktop delivery of print materials held at its three campus libraries. AUBIExpress provides electronic PDF copies of articles and book chapters from print resources located at Draughon Library (the main campus library), the Library of Architecture, Design and Construction, and the Veterinary Medical Library. The service is available, free, to Auburn University faculty, staff, graduate students, persons with disabilities and distance education students. There is a maximum request limit of five items per person per day and an item size limit of 50 pages. Requests, submitted through an online form, are usually processed within 2-4 business days.