Makerspaces supply a venue for students to construct a variety of real-world products at the collegiate level using science and technology standards. The maker movement is sweeping the science learning community by storm in the library setting with remarkable success. The maker movement provides an opportunity to transform the library into a…

"Special Libraries, Special Challenges" is a column dedicated to exploring the unique public services challenges that arise in libraries that specialize in a particular subject, such as law, medicine, business, and so forth. In each column, the author will discuss public service dilemmas and opportunities that arise in special libraries.…

Modern digital scholarship requires faculty to navigate an increasingly complex research and publication world. Liaison librarians are uniquely suited to assist faculty with scholarly communication needs, yet faculty do not identify the library as a provider of these services. Proactive promotion of scholarly communication services by librarians…

This case study describes several courses that resulted from a teaching partnership between an instructional technologist/professor and a librarian that evolved over several semesters, and the information literacy implications of the course formats. In order to increase student engagement, active learning and inquiry-based learning techniques were…

Using surveys, interviews, and a rubric-based assessment of student research essays, the St. Mary's College of Maryland Assessment in Action team investigated the relationship between faculty-librarian collaboration in a First Year Seminar (FYS) course and students' demonstrated information literacy (IL) abilities. In gathering information on the…

When University of Idaho (UI) Extension brought the Idaho 4-H Teen Conference to UI's main campus, the conference organizers collaborated with UI librarians to organize a workshop in the library's newly established makerspace, the Making, Innovating, and Learning Laboratory (MILL). In the MILL, the students used cutting-edge technology to foster…

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…

Academic librarianship has had a traditional role encompassing various specialisms: subject support, training, journal subscription management, collection development and user engagement front of house. While many of these roles remain, they should be re-evaluated. New competencies and skillsets in teaching, publishing, bibliometrics, impact, data…

In today's technological world, school librarians planning to be leaders should be ready to keep up with advances in standards significant to the profession. The professional standards, specifically American Association of School Librarians (AASL) Standards and International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) Standards for Coaches offer…

Librarians offer a variety of library instruction utilizing multiple formats. Many struggle with the task of transferring instruction to the online environment. Principles of instructional design can be leveraged to effect quality change in the delivery of instruction to make teaching more effective, efficient, and appealing to learners. Although…

This article makes the case for librarians to engage with second-year students as part of the burgeoning movement in higher education to provide dedicated programming and experiences for second-year students. Grounded in development theories and transition theory, the article describes the special needs characteristic of typical second-year…

At the State University of New York at Oswego (SUNY Oswego), a faculty member and advisement coordinator, both of the biological sciences department, and the biological sciences librarian have worked together since 2013 to present a workshop called Writing for the Biological Sciences. Offered once per semester, the workshop is sponsored by the…

The economic downturn of 2007-08 forced many academic libraries in the United States to cancel journals. We surveyed life sciences librarians from ARL libraries to find out about their experiences with journal cancellations during 2008-12. Overall, we discovered that two factors were essential in decision-making: faculty consultations and data.…

Heather Turner is school librarian at Solvay Middle School in Syracuse, New York. She states that "a school library is a space that continues to evolve with the needs of its users. It is unique among spaces in that it impacts the entire school." Creating a space for the needs of all students is a mighty undertaking, and the…

LibGuides, as a method of creating pathfinders for instruction of information literacy and content management has long been used by academic libraries, but has not been widely used by school libraries. This article describes a collaborative plan between a distance education librarian and a professor of school library media using LibGuides to…