Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Library Publishing Is Special: Selection And Eligibility In Library Publishing, Paul Royster

UNL Libraries: Faculty Publications

Traditional publishing is based on ownership, commerce, paid exchanges, and scholarship as a commodity, while library activities are based on a service model of sharing resources and free exchange. I believe library publishing should be based on those values and should not duplicate or emulate traditional publishing. University presses have mixed views of library publishing, and libraries should not adopt those attitudes. Library publishers are not gatekeepers; their mission is dissemination. Libraries need to publish because traditional publishing suffers from high rejection rates, required surrender of intellectual property, long production schedules, high cost of products, and limited dissemination. Nebraska’s Zea …

Librarians Going Mobile: Applying “Threshold Concepts” To The Design Of E-Booklets For Library Instruction., Lorna M. Dawes

UNL Libraries: Faculty Publications

Assuming that students no longer read printed handouts, many librarians have stopped producing printed handouts after observing the piles of paper that remain after library sessions. Libraries have transitioned comfortably to providing online access to handout information via subject and course guides, and now need to make a more complete transition to making them mobile. Although only four in ten college students own a tablet, 75% own a smart phone, and over a third of students intend to purchase either a tablet or a smart phone in the next six months. (“Pearson Student Mobile” 7). Librarians are all aware that …

Don’T Fear The Reader: Librarian Versus Interlibrary Loan Patron-Driven Acquisition Of Print Books At An Academic Library By Relative Collecting Level And By Library Of Congress Classes And Subclasses, David C. Tyler, Joyce C. Melvin, Marylou Epp, Anita M. Kreps

UNL Libraries: Faculty Publications

Recently, a great deal of literature on patron-driven acquisition (PDA) has been published that addresses the implementation and results of PDA programs at academic libraries. However, despite widespread worries that PDA will lead to unbalanced collections, little attention has been paid to whether patrons’ and librarians’ purchasing differ significantly. This study analyzes librarians’ and PDA patrons’ acquisitions at an academic library by relative collecting level and by subject (that is, Library of Congress class and subclass) to determine whether concern over patrons’ collecting are warranted.

Foxes Propose New Guidelines For Henhouse Design: Comments On Niso’S Proposed Open Access Metadata Standards, Paul Royster

UNL Libraries: Faculty Publications

This commentary is in response to: NISO RP-22-201x, Open Access Metadata and Indicators (draft for comment), which is available at: http://www.niso.org/apps/group_public/document.php?document_id=12047

NISO is the National Information Standards Organization, a non-profit industry organization whose mission statement reads: “NISO fosters the development and maintenance of standards that facilitate the creation, persistent management, and effective interchange of information so that it can be trusted for use in research and learning.” Their recently-issued proposed guidelines for new metadata fields to be attached to scholarly works purport to address and clarify issues of access and re-licensing surrounding the electronic distribution of journal articles. Briefly, they …

The Language Of Academic Librarianship: The Discourse Of Promotion And Tenure, Mary K. Bolin

UNL Libraries: Faculty Publications

This article examines the discourse of appointment, promotion, and tenure (APT) documents for academic librarians. Discourse analysis can illuminate the social role of language, social systems, and social practices. This qualitative research analyzes the APT documents for librarians from a group of US universities (n= 50) whose librarians are tenured faculty (n = 35). Linguistic features were examined to identify genre (text type) and register (language variety) characteristics. The documents showed strong relationships with other texts; vocabulary from the language of human resources (HR); grammatical characteristics such as nominalization; passive constructions; few pronouns; the “quasi-synonymy” of series of adjectives, nouns, …

African Poetry Book Fund-African Poetry Library Manual: How To Manage And Set Up The Library., Lorna M. Dawes, Charlene Maxey-Harris

UNL Libraries: Faculty Publications

The African Poetry Library Initiative, an initiative of the African

Poetry Book Fund, is a collaborative venture to establish

accessible and user-friendly small poetry libraries on the African

continent to support aspiring and established poets and to give

them access to contemporary poetry in books and journals, and

to serve as a resource for poets interested in publication in Africa

and around the world. The initiative will be guided by

collaboration between US and UK publishers of poetry, literary

arts organizations, poet’s libraries and literary journals and

African libraries, writers co-ops or cultural centers, and poets and

will be coordinated …

Management Of Content Development And Subject Engagement Through An Arts Matrix Model: A Case Study, Casey D. Hoeve, Ellen R. Urton, Thomas W. Bell

UNL Libraries: Faculty Publications

From 2007 - 2009, Kansas State University Libraries (K-State Libraries) committed to strategically assess and redevelop their organizational structure. The Libraries’ Strategic Plan and position redistributions commenced in 2007 and 2009 respectively, with adjustments in 2010 to accommodate the university’s “K-State 2025” Strategic Plan. Together, these plans changed the roles of former subject librarians, dividing and transferring responsibilities for outreach, reference, instruction, and collection development. Among the more significant changes was the creation of departments devoted to patron groups, rather than specific academic disciplines. Illustrating how the reorganization changed the roles of traditional library services, this chapter will outline the …

Second Life Librarianship And The Gendered Work Of Care In Technology, Scout Calvert

UNL Libraries: Faculty Publications

Of the persistent images of librarians, one in particular caricatures them as stubbornly refusing to adopt new information technologies. From outside the field of library and information science, this perception is unsurprising, given the pop-cultural image of the librarian as a joyless and sexless spinster, hell-bent on protecting books from the hands of the unwashed—the literally heathen—patron. From within the field, though, the stereotype smarts all the more because the visage of the technophobic librarian appears to be empirically unfounded, and it would seem, therefore, counterproductive for those working within the discipline to perpetuate this view. As I will argue, …

Evaluating The Effectiveness Of Tools For Online Database Instruction, Yvonne Mery, Erica Defrain, Leslie Sult, Elizabeth Kline

UNL Libraries: Faculty Publications

The intent of this study was to evaluate the Guide on the Side (GotS), an online learning tool developed by the University of Arizona Libraries, and a screencast tutorial for teaching information literacy and database searching skills. Ninety undergraduate students were randomly assigned into three groups: group 1 completed a GotS tutorial; group 2 viewed a screencast presenting identical content; and a control group. Each group completed an identical 16-item post-test. An analysis of variance revealed statistically significant differences between the control group and both treatment groups; however, there was no statistical difference between treatment groups. Limitations of the study …