Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Digitizing And Cataloging A Corporate Annual Reports Collection: A Canadian Perspective, Alie Visser, Elizabeth Marshall, Joyce Cheung

Western Libraries Publications

Corporate annual reports provide a snapshot of a company's operations and financial status. Reviewing and comparing years of annual reports can provide a rich history of knowledge on a corporation. Preserving, storing, and digitizing Canadian annual reports has been a mission of the C.B. “Bud” Johnston Library in London, Ontario, Canada. In late 2019 when Western Libraries migrated to a new library services platform, Alma, there was a new opportunity to catalog and provide access to the digitized annual reports collection. This article describes a decade long plan to digitize the print collection by library staff and a subsequent project …

Keep@Downsview: An Evolving Shared Print Project, Harriet Rykse

Western Libraries Publications

Keep@Downsview is a shared print partnership between six Canadian academic institutions. This article describes the evolution of the partnership from what began as simply an operationally focused collaboration for shared preservation space, in order to release collections space in on-campus libraries, to a partnership that is involved in the larger shared print discussions in North America and which has refocused its strategic directions enabling a more intentional evolution of the partnership.

Four strategic directions were identified prior to the outbreak of the pandemic. Since the onset of Covid-19 it has become apparent that several influencing factors related to the pandemic …

Online Chat Reference: Question Type And The Implication For Staffing In A Large Academic Library, Debbie Meert-Williston, Rachel Sandieson

Western Libraries Publications

This study investigated the types of questions asked in an academic online reference chat service to ascertain the level of library staff expertise needed to answer the questions. The transcripts from a large academic library were analyzed to determine both the type of questions asked, and the complexity of the reference questions asked. The data showed that 75% of the questions asked were non-reference, 17% of the questions asked were ready-reference, and 8.6% of the questions asked were in-depth or complex reference questions. Library staff with the capacity to answer both circulation and general reference questions would have the optimum …

Not On The Same Page: Undergraduates’ Information Retrieval In Electronic And Print Books, Selinda Adelle Berg, Kristin Hoffmann, Diane Dawson

Western Libraries Publications

Academic libraries are increasingly collecting e-books, but little research has investigated how students use e-books compared to print texts. This study used a prompted think-aloud method to gain an understanding of the information retrieval behavior of students in both formats. Qualitative analysis identified themes that will inform instruction and collection practices.