Library News, Reviews, and Views
Credo and Libraries Thriving will release the full results of What Students Know about Information Literacy, a survey of primarily undergraduates, on April 11 at the Association of College and Research Libraries conference in Indianapolis. Among the key takeaways from the study for academic libraries is yet more confirmation that most students begin their research process on the open web, though library resources aren’t totally out of the running.
Ithaka’s strategic consulting and research service today released the results of the fifth of its periodic surveys of college and university faculty. For the first time, the survey was developed with the help of an advisory committee (which included librarians) and conducted online. Some 5,261 faculty members responded.
Every patron’s overall experience will be formed by each touchpoint used at the library–each interaction enhances or detracts from the experience. Each time users are confused, a bit of goodwill is depleted and the user’s experience sours. Conversely, each time they find what they need or easily accomplish a task, the reservoir is filled.
The Department of Education recently ruled to give colleges and universities more flexibility in allowing competency-based programs for degree credit. This rethinking of how students can earn credit creates new opportunities for academic librarians to help students accumulate those competencies. Who says higher education is the most change resistant institution? Admittedly, some of the traditional practices, such as face-to-face lecturing, majors, and credit hours, remain the same after hundreds of years. But throughout that time there are notable pockets of experimentation. One of the big ones is about to commence. Change indeed!
More than 50 academic libraries, in collaboration with the Educopia Institute, founded the Library Publishing Coalition (LPC) this January. The project initially emerged from conversations between Purdue University, the University of North Texas, and Virginia Tech. LJ caught up with the co-authors of the LPC’s founding documents—Julie G. Speer, Associate Dean for Research and Informatics, University Libraries Virginia Tech, and Charles Watkinson, Director and Head of Purdue Libraries’ Scholarly Publishing Services and the Purdue University Press—to find out how the LPC is progressing.
For mutually fostering a beneficial connection, Canton and its library have won the inaugural LibraryAware Community Award, cosponsored by Library Journal and LibraryAware, a product of EBSCO Publishing’s NoveList Division. The Canton Public Library will receive $10,000 and the township will receive a plaque. The award was created to honor a library for “getting out to the community and demonstrating its value” and to highlight a community that values its library, says Nancy Dowd, product lead for LibraryAware.
Library conferences can be great places to pick up new ideas, with roundtables, seminars, and sessions filled with stories of successful projects from peers, vendors, and professionals from other fields. Information from these sessions can help other libraries get started on new initiatives without having to reinvent the wheel.
But all projects involve some degree of risk, and some projects can fall apart as the result of preventable problems. At the recent Code4Lib 2013 event held at the UIC Forum at University of Illinois at Chicago, a group of librarians found during their Fail4Lib pre-conference workshop that discussing failed or problematic projects can be as constructive as discussing success.
how should libraries participate in assisting students with identifying and acquiring cheaper course materials, especially those that come from a source other than the campus library? Does the creation of a research guide or flyer for textbooks that points to commercial sources other than the campus bookstore fit into the library’s mission and role on campus? More generally, what is the library’s responsibility when it comes to textbooks?
SIrsiDynix, one of the largest ILS companies, is poised to roll out a new system later this year that the company says will integrate its product lines in a cloud architecture.
Various aspects of the BLUEcloud Suite (BCS) have been discussed previously, and some products that it comprises–such as Enterprise, BookMyne, and Social Library–are already on the market. But, at the Cosugi conference held in Salt Lake City March 14-16, BCS was announced as a re-engineered technology stack and holistic brand that company officials say will become the architecture upon which the company will build its products in the future.
INFOdocket by Gary Price
OverDrive & Big (Private) Data | Editorial
Who owns library and patron user data? Libraries think they do but will that matter in an increasingly competitive landscape where data is very valuable?