There is a new buzzword in education: "MOOCs." These massively open online courses (MOOCs) can serve hundreds or thousands of students without the institutional hurdles found in classes at a university, such as acceptance requirements and physical location. Some schools are working with partners like Udacity and Coursera, while others…

Holocaust denial literature has been treated inconsistently in library collections. At one time Holocaust denial literature was classed and subject headings assigned with Holocaust literature. After specific Library of Congress classification numbers and subject headings for Holocaust denial and Holocaust denial literature became available in the…

Reference transactions in academic libraries have been on the decline since mid-1990. The Academic Library Survey from the National Center for Education Statistics shows an average drop of 25% in reference use from 1996-2004 with higher numbers at some institutions such as the University of Maryland which plummeted 47% (Martell, 2008). The…

This project was originally defined to explore the potential for ARL libraries to provide support to small, print-only publishers in order to ensure long-term digital access to their content. Research library publishing programs vary widely, from posting PDFs in an institutional repository to full-fledged publishing operations. During the life of…

This report features syntheses of select Causality: School Libraries and Student Success II (CLASS II) research findings as they relate to the Shared Foundations of Inquire, Include, Collaborate, Curate, Explore, and Engage from the The American Association of School Librarians' (AASL) "National School Library Standards for Learners, School…

The American Association of School Librarians' (AASL) Causality: School Libraries and Student Success II (CLASS II) project was the first step in developing a long-term, three-phase school library research agenda to investigate causal relationships between school libraries staffed by professionally prepared school librarians and student learning.…

In their Top Trends of 2012, the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) named data curation as one of the issues to watch in academic libraries in the near future (ACRL, 2012, p. 312). Data curation can be summarized as "the active and ongoing management of data through its life cycle of interest and usefulness to scholarship,…

This call for action addresses the high-level benefits of adopting a university-wide policy regarding research data management. It identifies the various university stakeholders and suggests that the library initiate a conversation among them in order to get buy-in for a proactive, rather than reactive, high-level policy for responsible data…

The objective of this study was to reveal how the national economic recession has affected the nature and extent of support for tenure track librarians at Association of Research Libraries (ARL) member institutions. The authors surveyed 43 ARL Deans and University Librarians to discover the criteria for achieving tenure and the current…

Creating a learnable, effective, and user-friendly library Web site hinges on providing easy access to search. Designing a search interface for academic libraries can be particularly challenging given the complexity and range of searchable library collections, such as bibliographic databases, electronic journals, and article search silos. Library…

The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) has a long history of data collection, environmental scanning, and trends analysis. Its most recent work, "Futures Thinking for Academic Librarians," uses a 15-year horizon to look beyond the worries of the current economic cycle and the short-term future in order to anticipate the changing…

This user's guide was developed to advance local planning at ARL member libraries. It is written for library leaders writ large and for anyone leading or contributing to research library planning processes. Users do not need advanced facilitation skills to benefit from this guide, but facilitators charged with supporting scenario planning will…

Where library budgets are concerned, there is every evidence now, after three years, that research libraries have arrived at "the new normal." That is, they do not expect a return to systematic and regular additions to Association of Research Libraries' (ARL) budgets in order to support ever-increasing prices that are out of proportion to…

Research librarians should be literate in locating government resources at both federal and state levels. Although assistance with policy research may not be as frequently requested as other subjects, librarians need to be knowledgeable in this subject area. Policy resources produced by federal and state legislative and executive agencies can be…

The concept of the embedded librarian takes subject specialization to another plane. The article that follows discusses the embedded librarian as an evolutionary product and speculates on the reasons driving the change from the library to the department or center for the delivery of information services. Four drivers for change are explored with…