Seeking to better understand the longitudinal association between online usage of library-licensed content and short- and long-term student performance, we linked EZproxy logs to institutional university data to study how library usage impacts semester and cumulative GPAs. Panel linear mixed effects regression models indicate online library usage…

Librarians are excellent research collaborators, although librarian participation is not usually considered, thereby making access to research funds difficult. The University of Michigan Library became involved in the university's novel funding program, MCubed, which supported innovative interdisciplinary research on campus, primarily by funding…

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…

A traditional mixed methods research model of citation analysis, a survey, and interviews was selected to determine if the Bruce T. Halle Library at Eastern Michigan University owned the content that faculty cited in their research, if the collection was being utilized, and what library services the faculty used. The combination of objective data…

This article builds on the 2007 College and Research Libraries article, "The Librarian, the Machine, or a Little of Both." Since that time, Oakland University Libraries implemented changes to its instruction program that reflect larger trends in teaching and assessment throughout the profession; following these revisions, librarians…

This article describes the card-sorting techniques used by several academic libraries, reports and discusses the results of card-sorting usability tests of the Western Michigan University Libraries' Web site, and reveals how the WMU libraries incorporated the findings into a new Web site redesign, setting the design direction early on. The article…

The successful development and implementation of an electronic resources management (ERM) system depends on an undertaking that includes many key factors. Some of these key factors include determining user groups and their needs, evaluating implementation and technical issues, testing the system, exploring how the system will be used, setting…

The Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), a unit within the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, is the world's largest social science data archive. The data sets in the ICPRS database give the social sciences librarian/subject specialist an opportunity of providing value-added bibliographic…

The University of Michigan Library wanted to learn more about the kinds of searches its users were conducting through the "one search" search box on the Library Web site. Library staff conducted two investigations. A preliminary investigation in 2011 involved the manual review of the 100 most frequently occurring queries conducted…

When looking for ways to improve library services, we considered what data sources were readily available to us and how we could harvest and use this data. We investigated three years of chat reference statistics at Central Michigan University, a large research institution, to gain a better understanding of our patrons' chat behavior. We then…

With both budget dollars and buying power shrinking for academic library collections, the selection of materials is a series of crucial choices. With increases in numbers of online programs, how can we determine if what we are buying is in fact what our users need? E-reserves are an increasingly popular way to provide digital copies of course…

Automated storage/retrieval systems (ASRSs) are playing an integral part in today's library operations and collections management. Eastern Michigan University installed an ASRS as part of the new Halle Library, which opened in May 1998, to provide "storage" for up to 800,000 items. Over the past 10 years our policies and procedures have…

This article describes the development of the "Electronic Journal Finder," a TDNet installation for the University Libraries of Western Michigan University. Topics covered include: rationale for subscription project timeline, content, product customization, set-up, maintenance issues, reporting functions, directing URL links, searching…

Five of the world's largest libraries have joined Google in a herculean effort to digitize millions of books and make every sentence searchable. The project involves libraries at Harvard and Stanford Universities, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and the University of Oxford, in England, as well as the New York Public Library. It could…

In many ways, science classrooms and school library media centers are parallel universes struggling with their own reform issues and with documenting their own positive impacts. As the trend toward data-driven decisions grows in the school setting, it is increasingly important for every component of the learning environment to have demonstrable…