Mandatory Student Fees and the Academic Library

As academic libraries' budgets remain flat while their expenditures rise, library leaders must seek out alternative sources of funding. One option is a mandatory student fee dedicated to the library. This article presents the results of a survey of 152 deans and directors of public R1 and R2 research universities that were asked whether their libraries benefit from mandatory student fees. While a library-specific fee is unusual, nearly half of responding libraries are eligible to receive some portion of another mandatory student fee. Study results can serve as evidence for libraries preparing to make a case for the significant, positive impact possible through even a modest library fee.     

拥抱技术的变革:智媒时代对公共图书馆服务重塑的启示

随着信息和人工智能等技术的发展,"智媒时代"正在加速来临,智能化、场景化、共享化成为内容传播的三大趋势,图书馆与用户、内容的关系也将重新连接、深度交互。作为推广"全民阅读"重要阵地的公共图书馆,已经迎来了发展和变革的重要时间节点,以人、馆和资源之间的智能互联为特征,公共图书馆的运营模式、服务转型和空间生态都在发生深刻变化,一切职能转型和服务创新都必须围绕用户的需求和体验进行,进而成为提供智能化、泛在化、人性化服务的——"智慧型"第三文化空间,实现从"书的图书馆"到"人的图书馆"的终极跨越。     

Bringing the Law to the Library: The Importance of Librarian Mediation in Access to Justice Services

Library access to justice programs and services help people who need legal information and who cannot afford an attorney. Librarian mediation is a critical component in the provision of access to justice services. However, the value of library mediation, or assistance with using library resources, is often unrecognized, particularly where members of the public are trying to access electronic legal information sources, online legal forms, and other law technologies. This article will explore the role of librarians in providing access to justice services from the perspective of the work of Richard Susskind, which emphasizes technological approaches to providing legal services. While there is a place for technology in access to justice services, there is also a valuable role that librarians play in contributing to access to justice.     

Managing a Biomedical Library’s Instruction Program: Redefining Scope

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) library instruction program provides training services to staff, clinicians, and researchers across NIH and several Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) operating divisions. The audience, training needs, and training topics are diverse and constantly changing. The NIH library has developed several new services and class topics to meet the needs of its NIH and HHS communities. Context, strategies, and future directions for the NIH library instruction program are described.     

Strength in Numbers: Encouraging Every Staff Member to Work to Capacity

Libraries play a critical role in enhancing the learning landscape of the schools they support. In order for any library to become a powerhouse and a community meeting place, all library team members need to align with the library's vision, own it and begin to add their own strengths and talents purposefully. This article explores practical strategies for developing a visionary team, including supportive leadership, daily stand-up meetings, weekly staff meetings, special-focus teams, rostering and the “five conversations” approach. These effective strategies can be implemented across a broad range of library workforce contexts in order to ensure the most effective workforce teams are built.     

On the same page: Improving the connection between public services units in academic libraries

Communication quality between public service units in academic libraries can make the difference between mediocre and exceptional service. If units do not communicate well, patrons may receive inaccurate information and experience short-term frustration, leading to long-term damage to the library's reputation. Poor communication creates adverse effects on employees through decreased productivity, negative work culture, and low morale. This article explores the importance of quality communication through a review of the literature and a case study at one academic library. The authors share practical communication improvement strategies for libraries of every size and fiscal ability.     

Spatial Discovery of Linked Research Datasets and Documents at a Spatially Enabled Research Library

Current publishing practices in academia tend to result in datasets that are difficult to discover. This is because datasets are not well-integrated across academic domains and they are often not linked to the documents that reference them. For these reasons, discovering datasets across domains can be challenging; for example, discovering archeological observations and biological specimens using the same search is not widely supported, even if both datasets share a similar spatial extent, like Mesoamerica. It is also challenging to retrieve relevant documents that reference datasets; for example, retrieving a series of field reports that reference archeological observations is typically not supported. Our work develops an extensible method for: (1) geographically integrating collections across disciplinary repositories and (2) connecting datasets to related documents. We describe a collection of spatially-referenced researcher datasets, capturing their metadata elements and encoding them as linked open data. We then leverage existing library services to formalize links from datasets to documents. The system described in this work has been deployed, resulting in an experimental open data site for the UCSB campus. Results indicate that this system can be scaled-up with support from an institutional repository in the near future.     

The IR Has Two Faces: Positioning Institutional Repositories for Success

This article describes the ongoing efforts at University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) Libraries to evolve the role of the institutional repository (IR) and to effectively position it within the context of the Libraries’ collections, research support, and scholarly communication services. A major component of this process is re-examining the fundamental aims of the IR and aligning it to the Libraries and the campus strategic goals. The authors situate UNLV Libraries’ experience within the context of the current literature to provide background and reasoning for our decision to pursue two, at times conflicting, aims for the IR: one for scholarly communication and another for research administration.     

大学图书馆规程的制订与思考——以《重庆大学图书馆规程》为例

“十四五”即将到来,图书馆需要在教育部颁布的《普通高等学校图书馆规程》的基础上,制订单馆的管理和服务流程规范,作为整个管理体制的纲,以《规程》为统领,梳理本馆的管理和服务模式,以利于图书馆治理能力的深化,在真正意义上提升图书馆效能,实现内涵式发展。文章以《重庆大学图书馆规程》为例,论述了整个编制过程和主要思想。