Focused on community colleges in North Carolina participating in the Scholars of Global Distinction initiative, the goal of this article is to assist librarians in their efforts to thoughtfully increase global and area studies online resources available at their libraries. Through this article, the author hopes to increase global library resources…

Database cancellation is one of the most difficult tasks performed by a librarian. This may seem counter-intuitive but, psychologically, it is certainly true. When a librarian or a team of librarians has invested a great deal of time doing research, talking to potential users, and conducting trials before deciding to subscribe to a database, they…

The ebook ecosystem has experienced many changes recently--having both positive and negative effects for the school library. On the positive side, many publishers have stopped seeing ebooks as the coming of the Apocalypse; instead, they are seeing that the publishing business survives and, indeed, flourishes. The different actors in this arena are…

Librarians are familiar with the single-line form, the consolidated index, which represents a very large portion of a library's print and online collection. Their end users are familiar with the idea of a single search across a comprehensive index that produces a large, relevancy-ranked results list. Even though most patrons would not recognize…

The explosion of Web 2.0 into libraries has left many smaller academic libraries (and other libraries with limited computing resources or support) to work in the cloud using free Web applications. The use of commercial Web hosting is an innovative approach to the problem of inadequate local resources. While the idea of insourcing IT will seem…

This study investigates librarians' satisfaction with general interdisciplinary databases for undergraduate research and explores possibilities for improving these databases. Results from a national survey suggest that librarians at a variety of institutions are relatively satisfied overall with the content and usability of general,…

When the electronic resource management system (ERM) at Kansas State University Libraries suffered a horrible data loss, the "contract db" presented a challenge for the librarians responsible for electronic resources. It was a decent data repository, but it had no ability to manage the tangled process of licensing, acquiring, activating,…

The University of Wisconsin-La Crosse's Murphy Library provides access to approximately 200 subscription databases. As with many academic libraries, methods and tools for managing these resources were sorely needed. However, the budget has been cut repeatedly over the past few years--thus the possibility of purchasing a commercial electronic…

After seeing growing frustration among inexperienced undergraduate researchers searching a popular aggregated interdisciplinary database, the authors questioned whether the leading interdisciplinary databases are serving undergraduates' needs. As a preliminary exploration of this question, the authors queried vendors, analyzed their marketing…