This article considers the role of teaching and learning departments within academic libraries and how they may differ from reference and instruction departments. The author used website analysis to profile and compare the two types of departments across multiple institutions. Initial findings indicate that the two have several roles in common,…

Reference services in academic libraries often focus on user education and giving students the skills to perform their own searches. This article describes a new Research Concierge Service established in response to the COVID-19 pandemic by Ozarks Technical Community College (OTC) in southwest Missouri. The service entails library staff curating a…

During the 2020 and 2021 summer semesters, the University of Michigan Biological Station (UMBS) transitioned to hybrid classes that were primarily distance learning with two-week inperson sections. The library offered both synchronous and asynchronous reference assistance over the summer term. An analysis showed that students favored using the…

For decades, declines in library reference use have been inextricably tied to technological improvements. This article asserts that reference staffing models may be a significant predictor of a decline in reference questions. Using two years of data, collected from a large public university, the researchers determined user preferences among five…

This study focuses on the roles of organizational stories among librarians who work at the reference desk. Twenty librarians employed in four academic institutions were interviewed. Most of the organizational stories shared among the participants and their colleagues were rich in tacit knowledge and can be classified according to four main roles:…

Zines have begun to gain a place in higher education as pedagogical tools studied or made by students, and many academic libraries maintain zine collections. The library literature reveals little about how nonlibrarian faculty use zines in their classrooms. This paper describes the results of a survey of faculty from a range of academic…

Academic librarians have been engaged in embedded librarianship for nearly 15 years, yet there are few published research studies on the impact of physically embedded librarians, who work alongside departmental faculty. This study leveraged a change in reference service to analyze what happened when subject librarians moved from the library…

The intent of this case study was to gain insight into the information needs and research behaviors of upper-division performing arts students, and how to best address those needs. This article presents findings from focus group interviews of thirty music, dance, and theater majors at the University of Wyoming in Laramie. The data revealed several…

The purpose of this article is to explore location-based questions as a weakness of virtual reference consortia and discuss how to mitigate related issues. Content analysis of how both local and non-local academic librarians responded to location-based questions provides insight into considerations academic libraries must make when participating…

This article explores student, instructor, and librarian perceptions of chat reference in the context of an introductory composition course. Participants in a mixed-method study responded to an anonymized chat transcript. While student respondents valued speed and efficiency, they were willing to receive instruction and open to questions that…

Librarians seek opportunities to improve outreach to faculty and promote shared interests in information literacy. A comprehensive review of syllabi for all undergraduate courses offered during one academic term examined course-level learning outcomes and graded assignments to see how well they aligned with the five Association of College and…

In this article, I imagine a library that prioritizes teaching users how to find, evaluate, and use information over the traditional library public service activities of collection development, access to materials, and reference services. If I ran the library, all services would support end-user education. (Contains 1 graph and 1 note.)

The Mississippi State University Libraries' Virtual Reference Service collected statistics about virtual reference usage. Analysis of the data collected by an entry survey from chat and e-mail transactions provided librarians with concrete information about what patron groups were the highest and lowest users of virtual reference services. These…

A customer contact center offers academic libraries the ability to consistently improve their telephone, e-mail, and IM services. This paper discusses the establishment of a contact center and the benefits of implementing the contact center model at this institution. It then introduces a practical methodology for developing a valid measurement…

This paper identifies key methodological issues affecting quality of data in the evaluation of remote reference services. Despite a growing number of studies in this area, no comprehensive effort has been made to identify potential problems and suggest solutions. The strategies proposed in this paper offer practical ways in which libraries can…