In the Fall of 2009, the Moraine Valley Community College Library, using guidelines developed by Jakob Nielsen, conducted a usability study to determine how students were using the library Web site and to inform the redesign of the Web site. The authors found that Moraine Valley's current gateway design was a more effective access point to library…

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,…

This article features the University of Liverpool's arts and humanities library, which applies a new search tool to improve the user experience. In nearly every way imaginable, the Sydney Jones Library and the Harold Cohen Library--the university's two libraries that serve science, engineering, and medical students--support the lives of their…

Far more people are familiar with their local public or college library facility than their library's website and online resources. In fact, according to a recent survey, 96% of Americans said they had visited a library in person, but less than one-third have visited their online library. Since everyone agrees that online library resources are…

ScanGrants (www.scangrants.com) is a free, online listing of grants, scholarships, and other types of funding in the health sciences. It is basically a launch pad for anyone looking for money to fund medical research or community/public health projects, or to finance their education in various healthcare fields. The goal is to enable researchers,…

In this article, the authors share their experiences as librarians, and offer their perspectives on issues critical to the new academic librarian. When the authors sat down to sort through ideas for this article, it became apparent that while their backgrounds, coursework, and experiences differed considerably, their passions and concerns are more…