Category Archives for User Services & Engagement
User Navigation in Large-Scale Distributed Digital Libraries: The Case of the Digital Public Library of America
This article presents the findings of a case study that examined user navigation in a large-scale digital library in the context of academic use. Using the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) as a case, the study explored user navigation … Continue reading
Evergreen 3.0 revolutionizes how library staff does business
The Evergreen community announced the release of Evergreen 3.0, a major upgrade that will change the way library staff use and interact with Evergreen.Evergreen 3.0 features a new staff client that can run in a web browser on a desktop, … Continue reading
Merged expertise, mutual benefits: Using a cross-disciplinary, same-campus research team to investigate academic libraries
Academic librarians have provided support to research teams on their campuses for many years. The main types of support discussed in the library literature include literature searching, citation management, data management, and information literacy instruction. Supporting research teams has been … Continue reading
Collaborating with public relations students to promote library subject specialists
In fall 2015, a group of librarians, who are members of the Library West Creative Team at the George A. Smathers Libraries at the University of Florida (UF), sought new methods for effectively reaching undergraduate students. Previous internal studies showed … Continue reading
Becoming a librarian BFF
At the ACRL 2017 conference in Baltimore, Maryland, we presented a poster on a program called, “The Librarian BFF Program for Distance Graduate Students.”1 The title is a tongue-in-cheek way of framing librarians to be students’ and faculty’s “best friend … Continue reading
A Reference for That: Six Words
Now, what I mean is that we are no longer able to think like regular members of the population when it comes to searching. We have come, more and more—over years on desk—to think like the indexer or taxonomist of … Continue reading
Supporting Librarians in Making the Business Case for OER
College textbook costs increased at three times the rate of inflation between 2002 and 2012 (United States General Accounting Office [GAO], 2013). One solution to high textbook costs is Open Educational Resources (OER) and institutional librarians, because of their reach … Continue reading
Autism and the Academic Library: A Study of Online Communication (preprint)
Increased prevalence of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) diagnoses within the general population is reflected in the growing number of college and university students with ASD. This exploratory study used an unobtrusive qualitative content analysis design to explore the experiences of … Continue reading
Exploring values-based (alt)metrics to enhance library services
This paper describes the HuMetricsHSS initiative, which calls for a major shift towards a values-based evaluation paradigm in academia and, by extension, academic libraries. HuMetricsHSS proposes that metrics only be used to measure a one’s progress towards embodying five core … Continue reading
Library Support for Text and Data Mining
Text and data mining (TDM) uses methods of automated extraction, combination, and analysis of data to create new information by revealing trends, patterns, and relationships. While considered together in this report, the mining of text and of data usually require … Continue reading