Education Commons^™

Your Ir Is Not Enough: Exploring Publishing Options In Our Increasingly Fragmented Digital World, Adam Blackwell

Charleston Library Conference

When people talk about the downside of open access publishing, they typically focus on things like high article processing charges and the difficulties that arise in differentiating between reputable peer-reviewed journals and low-quality journals from predatory publishers. But when OA publishing is equated with making articles and other academic content available exclusively via OA sites like (most) institutional repositories, there is arguably an even more serious downside: the effective quarantining of scholarly research.

We’ll explore how institutional mandates to promote a library’s IR sometimes override a researcher’s desire to make research available to peers via Google Scholar and other common …

When You Don’T Know What You Don’T Know: How Two New Collections Librarians Right-Sized A Collections Budget, Cara M. Cadena, Marcia Lee

Charleston Library Conference

Due to impending campus-wide downsizing, the Grand Valley State University (GVSU) Libraries projected that a worst-case scenario would result in a 14% cut to the library’s collections budget for fiscal year 2020. In the same year, GVSU Libraries welcomed several new members of its leadership team, including the dean, two associate deans, head of systems, head of collections, business administrator, and a vacancy after the long-time acquisitions manager retired. Budget cuts and staff turnover are tough, but they prompted a much-needed reassessment of roles, culture, and priorities in the library. Different approaches to spending and curating the library’s collections were …

What Are Students Saying About Their Reference Needs?, Damon Zucca

Charleston Library Conference

Libraries and publishers rely on transactional data to support evidence-based decision making. However, by itself quantitative information does not provide a full picture. To anticipate the evolving needs of our audience we also need to hear from the individual users themselves. In this article, I will review the findings from several recent examples survey-based research into the question of how students use reference materials in and outside of their libraries. What are students actually saying about their needs and preferences when it comes to reference? While some uses cases for reference are moving out of the library into the open …

The 2014 Credo Survey, Allen Mckiel

Charleston Library Conference

The Credo Survey addressed student research skills. Two parallel surveys over the same questions were addressed separately to students and faculty, which had respectively 2,606 and 472 respondents. Just less than 90% of the students were undergraduates split nearly evenly in progress to completion, with 87% of respondents attending full‐time and a fairly representative spread of majors. Just less than 50% of the faculty had taught over 10 years with nearly even proportions spread across the first 10 years and with a representative sampling of disciplines. Seventy‐seven percent were full‐time. The majority of responses came from about a dozen institutions—half …