This study investigates how article downloads from ScienceDirect changed after Temple University Libraries downsized its all-inclusive Elsevier big deal bundle to a selective custom package. After the libraries lost current-year access to nearly half of Elsevier's active journals, the total downloads from Elsevier journals declined by 16.2 percent…

Few librarians have examined the implications of Rolf Norgaard's theory of "writing information literacy," a rhetoric-based concept that situates research practices in context. Because the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education emphasizes research as a social practice,…

Research support services at The University of Queensland Library (UQ Library) have evolved in response to the global and national drivers, which have impacted on broader University strategy. UQ Library's success in responding to these drivers has involved leveraging the information within, and capacity of, the institutional repository, the core…

The research reported here is focused on a specific type of change in an organization: an innovation. In an empirical analysis of research libraries, it was found that five factors had a significant impact on the innovation performance of the library. These factors relate to the strategy, organizational structure, and leadership of the research…

Evidence-based practice (EBP), like information literacy, is concerned with an individual's knowledge, skills, and attitudes relating to using information. EBP is now a professional competency in fields as diverse as social work, nursing and allied health fields, and public policy. A comparison of the Association of College and Research Libraries'…

In the future, what role will the academic research library play in achieving the mission of higher education? This essay describes seven strategies that academic research libraries can adopt to become future-present libraries--libraries that foster what Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown have called "a new culture of learning." Written…

Although cited reference studies are common in the library and information science literature, they are rarely performed in nonacademic institutions or in the atmospheric and oceanic sciences. In this paper, we analyze more than 400,000 cited references made by authors affiliated with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration between…

"Terra Cognita" surveys the current landscape of archival research and the experiences of emerging scholars seeking to navigate it. Drawing on data from the Council on Library and Information Resources' (CLIR's) Mellon Fellowships for Dissertation Research in Original Sources, the report takes an in-depth look at how the conditions and…

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…

Recent years have seen a growing emphasis on modern special collections (in themselves no new phenomenon), with a dichotomy between guidance for detailed cataloguing in "Descriptive Cataloging of Rare Materials (Books)" (DCRM(B), 2007) and the value of clearing cataloguing backlogs expeditiously. This article describes the De la Mare…

In 2010, after two previous unsuccessful attempts at electronic resources management system (ERMS) implementation, Texas A&M University (TAMU) Libraries set out once again to find an ERMS that would fit its needs. After surveying the field, TAMU Libraries selected the University of Notre Dame Hesburgh Libraries-developed, open-source ERMS,…

Assessment in United States higher education has become very important in recent years. Virtually all colleges and universities are now striving to prove through empirical evidence that they are committed to improving student learning. Created in late 2005, the US Department of Education's Commission on the Future of Higher Education was charged…

The digital humanities (DH) are attracting considerable attention and funding at the same time that this nascent field is striving for an identity. Some research libraries are making significant investments by creating digital humanities centers. However, questions about whether such investments are warranted persist across the cultural heritage…

Since it was released on November 30, 2022, ChatGPT has offered numerous opportunities for higher education professors to improve their course offerings. However, not all information provided by the application is accurate. The application has been known to yield highly inaccurate information with high confidence. Yet, with that knowledge, ChatGPT…

The Association of College and Research Libraries developed information literacy standards and associated performance indicators for undergraduate psychology students. A survey of tenure-track faculty members and full-time lecturers in the Psychology Department at Eastern Michigan University was conducted to discover how those professors viewed…