Current Issue: February 2020
Feature
Sarah Kantor
Reference speed dating
Creating a spark at the reference desk
Reference services, whether face-to-face or virtual, have been and remain a core library service. The importance of reference services is reflected in the library and information science (LIS) curriculum, but it is often overlooked in continuing ...
Feature
Tracy Elliott
The 2018 ACRL Academic Library Trends and Statistics Annual Survey
Survey results and how to use them
The editorial board of the ACRL Academic Library Trends and Statistics (ALTS) Annual Survey is thrilled to announce a 19.8% increase in survey participation over the past 4 years. Along with this increased participation comes a better understanding of what is happening in academic libraries and more impactful data for participants and researchers. ...
Feature
Delevan and LoRusso
Library outreach as a model for staff inreach
A method for sharing success
Libraries have been successful at focusing their outreach efforts to users, but may not be as strong with communicating to their own staff. In recent years, libraries have acknowledged this siloed nature of their organizations, and have sought to ...
Scholarly Communications
Goben and Sandusky
Open data repositories
Current risks and opportunities
As data sharing has become a more familiar obligation for academic researchers, there has been a correlating increase in the roles that librarians play supporting open data repositories and providing data management consulting and services. These repositories are sponsored by governments, funding agencies, academic institutions, professional societies, and scholarly publishers.
While the landscape continues to evolve, particular threats to and opportunities for the creation and sustainability of open data repositories have appeared. By understanding the potential for librarians to lead in advocacy for infrastructure and collaboration, we ...
Feature
Cathryn Copper
Experimentation in academic libraries
How to do it, and why libraries need it
One of the most sought after skills in innovation industries is curiosity. The brilliant thing about curiosity is anybody is capable of it. It does not require intelligent genes or an expensive education. The only requirement is a willingness to try something new. Trying new things is how we advance our disciplines, so curiosity is key to any innovative field. Not surprisingly, curiosity often manifests in experimentation because experimentation, at its core, is about trying new things.
In experimentation there are no commitments. This is the essential reason librarians have so much to benefit from experimentation. ...
Feature
Cox, Kelly, and Neuhaus
Knowing when to cry uncle
Balancing instructional initiatives
About five years ago, the University of Northern Iowa Rod Library began building a credit-bearing information literacy course from scratch. Envisioned to be something more than simply “how to use the library,” the course was also designed to focus on Google resources and the trends and issues associated with the online world of information. We named the course Beyond Google. From the start, we aimed to teach students how to be more effective and thoughtful Google users, and more skeptical consumers of information.
A significant amount of human capital was invested in developing, teaching, and revising Beyond Google. Substantial time was also required to keep course ...