An e-book usage survey was sent through departmental mailing lists to the graduate students, scientists and faculty members of the Chemistry Department and Biology Department of Indiana University, Bloomington (IUB). Several faculty members, scientists and graduates students from the Chemistry Department and Biology Department were also contacted…

How should colleges deal with incidents of illegal file sharing on their campuses? At the Technology Forum, aspects of that question were discussed by Cheryl A. Elzy, dean of university libraries at Illinois State University; Jim Gibson, an associate professor of law at the University of Richmond; Stewart McLaurin, executive vice president for…

The purpose of this article is to describe the scope and depth of the historic corporate annual report collections in twelve academic/research libraries in North America. For many decades, a few major academic business libraries have been collecting and preserving corporate Annual Reports (ARS), the reports sent to shareholders documenting the…

"Research Library Issues" ("RLI") is a bimonthly report from ARL (Association of Research Libraries), CNI (Coalition of Networked Information), and SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition). This issue includes the following articles: (1) Celebrating 10 Years of ARL's Initiative to Recruit a Diverse Workforce (Mark A. Puente);…

Institutional repositories have been established by most university libraries but their level of success has varied. Determining what belongs in such repositories has been the subject of some discussion but research would suggest that a broader rather than narrower compass is a positive approach to adopt. By seeking out a variety of content types,…

In fall 2008, a collaborative partnership was formed between the libraries of two Indiana universities--Marian College's (now Marian University) Mother Theresa Hackelmeier Memorial Library, and the University Library at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). The authors discuss the digital nature of this collaboration, which…

Offering a separate, popular reading collection can be a valuable public service in academic libraries. Popular reading is also known as leisure reading, recreational reading, and reading for pleasure. These phrases are synonyms for an interest in reading bestsellers, mysteries, romance novels, biographies, graphic novels, humor, self-help, or…

This report presents statistics on how Association of Research Libraries (ARL) member libraries spend money on electronic resources. This report indicates that 108 ARL libraries purchased 25,006,758 electronic books. In 2006-2007, there was an ARL median of 243,725 acquisitions of electronic books (this includes one institution that purchased…

Gathering qualitative information about usage behavior of library Web sites is a time-consuming process requiring the active participation of patron communities. Libraries that collect virtual reference transcripts, however, hold valuable data regarding how the library Web site is used that could benefit Web designers. An analysis of virtual…

We investigated whether American dissertations that were deposited in university libraries or disseminated on microfilm prior to 1978 were "published" for copyright purposes. This question has direct bearing on the copyright status of these works today. In the absence of a directly relevant legal decision to clarify the matter, the…

This article features Richard J. Klarchek Information Commons (IC) at Loyola University Chicago, an all-glass library building on the shore of Chicago's Lake Michigan that is not only a state-of-the-art digital research library and study space--it also runs on cutting-edge energy technology. The building has attracted attention and visitors from…

This article aims to present a comprehensive review of MPhil and PhD research theses produced by library and information science (LIS) schools in Pakistan from their beginning to 2015. It also explores the research trends in LIS, identifies gaps, and presents an agenda for future research by LIS scholars. The origin, development, and current…

"Research Library Issues" ("RLI") is a bimonthly report from ARL (Association of Research Libraries), CNI (Coalition of Networked Information), and SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition). This special issue includes the following articles: (1) Themes within the ARL Strategic Plan 2010-2012 (Charles B. Lowry); (2) ARL…

"Research Library Issues" ("RLI") is a bimonthly report from ARL (Association of Research Libraries), CNI (Coalition of Networked Information), and SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition). This issue includes the following articles: (1) Strategies for Opening Up Content: Laying the Groundwork for an Open…

The inclusion or not of chat services within Virtual Reference (VR) is an important topic for university libraries. Increasingly, email supported by a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) database is suggested in the scholarly literature as the preferred, cost-effective means for providing university VR services. This paper examines these issues and…