Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

How Scholars Work: Panning For Gold In Libraries, Judith M. Nixon, Marianne Ryan

Libraries Faculty and Staff Scholarship and Research

How do liberal arts scholars work? For example, where do they get their ideas? When beginning a research project, do they start with a Google search or the library's home page? How and when do scholars utilize libraries and library resources—especially library-funded databases? How has research changed since the advent of the World Wide Web? These are questions that the social science and humanities librarians at Purdue University Libraries have been asking. To begin to find answers, we invited selected faculty members and students to a How Scholars Work series. This article summarizes their comments.

Innovation, Creativity And Meaning: Leading In The Information Age, Tomalee Doan

Libraries Faculty and Staff Scholarship and Research

Today’s fast pace global environment requires information professionals to be leaders keeping pace with user needs. Two academic research libraries share their work seeking to ensure and leverage the creativity in their organizations focusing on the most meaningful innovative opportunities. The premise is that usefulness and appropriateness is achieved through strategic alignment – thereby opening the door of opportunity for innovative products and services. The ability to seize the opportunity each group seeks to meet is due to the recognition by the organization of that alignment. And so, organizational perception, awareness and value all impact the successful implementation of creativity. …

Intelligent Search From Multiple Resources Of Purdue Library, Dzung Hong, Luo Si, Paul Bracke, Michael Witt, Timothy C. Juchcinski

Libraries Research Publications

Besides web resources that are visible to traditional search engines such as Google or Bing, there are a large portion of the web that is invisible to them. For example, the Purdue Library has access to more than 400 databases. Most of them contain documents that are not reachable by traditional web crawlers due to security, technical limitations or copyright agreement. The only way to search and retrieve documents from those databases is through their service interfaces, which implement different methods of indexing and searching. Given a large number of databases available, it is difficult for users to select the …

Letters To The Editor, Bert Chapman, Jon Shuler

Libraries Faculty and Staff Scholarship and Research

Letter responding to an article predicting the phaseout of government information librarians in a survey of Association of Research Library (ARL) Directors. We criticize this conclusion maintaining that the multifaceted and interdisciplinary nature of government information makes it more critical that libraries users needing government information resources need to have highly trained and specializing librarians with extensive knowledge of these resources assisting them.

A Reprise, Or Round Three: Using A Database Management Program As A Decision-Support System For The Cancellation Of Serials, Judith M. Nixon

Libraries Faculty and Staff Scholarship and Research

Annual journal inflation rates of eight percent or higher have compelled libraries to cancel journals. Since 1992 Purdue Libraries have had three major cancellation projects. This article reviews how the Humanities, Social Science and Education Library approached this task in 2009 and developed a database management program to identify titles based on two criteria: low use and the availability of the title in full text in one of three aggregator databases. The education and humanities departments reached the cancellation goal, but several social science departments had to transfer funds from the book budget to accommodate their journal subscription costs. This …

The Right Book On The Right Shelf: Missing And Misshelved Books-- How Barcode Scanning Inventories Can Solve The Patrons' Dilemma, Judith M. Nixon

Libraries Faculty and Staff Scholarship and Research

After over thirty years of failing to conduct a comprehensive inventory of the book collection at a large liberal arts library, our patrons complained that they could not find one in five books. Study of the problem indicated that in fact 20% of our books were either missing or miss-shelved. This article discusses the investigation of the problem and the impact after five years of conducting an annual inventory by using hand-held devices to gather barcodes and interface these with our catalog records to find the missing and miss-shelved books. The missing book rate dropped from 5.6% to less than …

Librarians In The Hall: Instructional Outreach In Campus Residences, Catherine Fraser Riehle, Michael Witt

Libraries Research Publications

There is an old proverb, “If the mountain will not come to Mohammed, then Mohammed must go to the mountain.” It can be a challenge to reach out to incoming undergraduate students who are often overwhelmed by the high expectations of scholarship at the college level and the complexities of the modern information environment. Unconventional and creative approaches are needed to reach millennial learners where they are, both physically, in terms of where they reside on campus, and pedagogically, by employing innovative and engaging teaching methods that they can appreciate and understand. In the fall of 2007, two librarians with …

A Subject Librarian’S Guide To Collaborating On E-Science Projects, Jeremy R. Garritano, Jake R. Carlson

Libraries Research Publications

For liaison or subject librarians, entering into the emerging area of providing researchers with data services or partnering with them on cyberinfrastructure projects can be a daunting task. This article will provide some advice as to what to expect and how providing data services can be folded into other liaison duties. New skills for librarians and traditional skills that can be adapted to data curation work will also be discussed. A case study on the authors' experiences collaborating with two chemistry faculty on an e-science project serves as the framework for the majority of this article.

Developing Core Leadership Competencies For The Library Profession, Shorlette Ammons-Stephens, Holly J. Cole, Keisha Jenkins-Gibbs, Catherine Fraser Riehle, William H. Weare Jr.

Libraries Faculty and Staff Scholarship and Research

No abstract provided.

Positioning Libraries To Support The Goals Of Higher Education Institutions: The Peabody Academic Library Leadership Institute, Sharon A. Weiner, Patricia Senn Breivik, Timothy Caboni, Dennis Clark

Libraries Faculty and Staff Scholarship and Research

This article describes the genesis of Vanderbilt University's Peabody Academic Library Leadership Institute as an outcome of a particular philosophy. That philosophy is based on the concept that to fulfill their potential contributions, academic libraries need to direct their planning, resources, and services to support the priorities of their parent institutions. This article addresses the need for campus-focused leadership training; higher education leadership training for academic librarians; and the higher education context for libraries. It describes why Vanderbilt's Peabody College of Education and Human Development initiated a professional development institute for librarians. It describes the institute's history, curriculum, and assessment …