The internationally recognized "NMC Horizon Report" series and regional "NMC Technology Outlooks" are part of the NMC Horizon Project, a 12-year effort established in 2002 that annually identifies and describes emerging technologies likely to have a large impact over the coming five years in every sector of education around the…

This paper describes the process whereby a university library investigated the value of its subject guides to its users. A literature review and surveys of library staff, library users and other libraries were carried out. Existing library subject guides and those of other higher education libraries were evaluated. The project team reported…

In recent years, libraries have made efforts to create games, often for the purpose of information literacy instruction. Games can provide an interactive alternative to traditional instruction by introducing research tools and resources while also teaching problem solving skills within a collaborative learning environment. Despite the benefits,…

Western Illinois University Libraries has cut online serials subscriptions in the past 2 years. The librarians were guided by the statistics for downloads provided by the publishers of the journals. However, questions were raised by both professors and librarians regarding the exact meaning of the statistics. This caused the electronic resources…

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…

The expectations placed on library instruction programs by the Association of College and Research Libraries are high. Many universities also include information literacy competencies as learning objectives to be assessed at the institutional level. With those standards in mind, it is becoming increasingly difficult to adequately educate students…

This article reports the results of a case study in which an experimental wiki knowledge base was designed, developed, and tested by the Brill Science Library at Miami University for an undergraduate engineering senior capstone project. The wiki knowledge base was created to determine if the science library could enhance the engineering literature…

This paper describes chat widgets, chunks of code that can be embedded on a web site to appear as an instant messaging system, and how they can be used on a science library web site to better serve library users. Interviews were conducted concerning experiences at science and humanities libraries and more similarities than differences were…

As more users access library services remotely, it has become increasingly important for librarians to reach out to their user communities and promote the value of libraries. Convincing the faculty and students in the sciences of the value of libraries and librarians can be a particularly "hard sell" as more and more of their primary…

A usability survey was conducted at the University of Mississippi Libraries as part of the ongoing assessment of the library and its services. By setting criteria to measure the success of the survey, librarians at UM were able to assess if the library home page successfully met the goals and mission statement of the library.

As electronic resources for scholarship proliferate, more and more scholars turn to their computers rather than to print sources to conduct their research. The decentralized distribution of these new model works can make it difficult to fully appreciate their scope and number, even for university librarians tasked with knowing about valuable…

Librarians have long struggled to find user-friendly mediums to provide meaningful information to patrons using bibliographies, pathfinders, and subject guides with varying degrees of success. Content management systems, such as Springshare's LibGuides, have recently been developed to facilitate the creation of online subject guides. Special…

In the last few years, technology-savvy librarians have begun turning their attention to a host of new tools to connect with their users and colleagues. The umbrella term for these new technologies--Web 2.0--began gaining traction in 2004. Many librarians were quick to embrace the new wave of technology. Early adopting libraries used blogs to…

The digital age has freed information from the restrictive hierarchies of traditional cataloging methods, notably Dewey. Although libraries still deal with the challenge of physical books, online content is a different matter. Thanks to the unregulated, grassroots cataloging effort known as tagging, the Web presents a glorious chaos of…

Modern academic libraries have a great number of information resources available online in the form of electronic catalogs, books, journals, and subject subscription databases. To determine whether users can easily retrieve the information they are seeking, academic librarians conduct usability testing of their libraries' Web sites. There has been…