Current State of Scholarship in Christian Liberal Arts Schools A Study of CCCU Teaching Faculty and Librarians

This is the first of two articles that explains the results of an in-depth research study of teaching faculty and librarian scholarship within the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU). This article examines the nature and extent of that scholarship and the article examines its necessit

Information Outlook, December 2006

Volume 10, Issue 12https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_io_2006/1011/thumbnail.jp

Skating With Donovan: Thoughts on Librarianship as a Profession

James M. Donovan’s article: Skating on Thin Intermediation: Can Libraries Survive?, 27 Legal Reference Services Q. 95 (no. 2-3, 2008) argues that librarians place more emphasis than they might on providing service to library users at a time when information seekers are relying less on intermediaries, and that over-emphasizing service to the detriment of other values diminishes the status of librarianship as a profession. The article presents two contrasting models of librarianship. This article discusses Donovan’s models and comments on the continuing importance of the service model to librarianship

A Philosophy Of Christian Librarianship

While a number of Christian librarians have explored the implications of the Christian world view for particular issues in library practice, few have attempted to develop a thoroughgoing philosophy of Christian librarians/zip. Those who have done so have generally failed to center their proposals around the Christian view of truth. The knowability, objectivity, unity, practicality, and spirituality of truth should impact the way librarians at Christian colleges carry out major library functions, including collection development, reference services, bibliographic instruction, research and publication, and management

DeWitt Wallace Library Annual Report 2015-2016

Summary of library and media services activities for 2015-201

Skating With Donovan: Thoughts on Librarianship as a Profession

James M. Donovan’s article: Skating on Thin Intermediation: Can Libraries Survive?, 27 Legal Reference Services Q. 95 (no. 2-3, 2008) argues that librarians place more emphasis than they might on providing service to library users at a time when information seekers are relying less on intermediaries, and that over-emphasizing service to the detriment of other values diminishes the status of librarianship as a profession. The article presents two contrasting models of librarianship. This article discusses Donovan’s models and comments on the continuing importance of the service model to librarianship

Information Outlook, September 2000

Volume 4, Issue 9https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_io_2000/1008/thumbnail.jp

The potential effect of making journals free after a six month embargo

This report commissioned by the UK Publishers\u27 Association finds that providing open access to research publications after 6 months rather than 12 might have a material effect on libraries’ subscriptions; and that the impact on publishers’ revenues would be considerable. Higher Education Institutions’ libraries may be impacted by the collapse or scaling down of academic publishing houses. The world’s most distinguished research institutions would, the report suggests, be impacted the most, since published outputs are essential for the work carried out by their researchers. The reports’ results indicate that  Scientific, Technical and Medical (STM) publishers could expect to retain full subscriptions from 56% of libraries, compared with 35% for Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences journals (AHSS) publishers.  The report documents the results of a survey carried out to obtain a significant body of information on how the acquisitions policies of libraries might be affected by an across-the board mandate to make journals articles free of charge six months after publication. The report analyses the results of responses from 210 libraries across the world who were asked whether they would continue to subscribe to research journals were their content freely available within six months of publication. Libraries were asked to send separate responses for Scientific, Technical and Medical (STM) journals and Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences journals (AHSS)

Christian Academics Need to Increase their Publishing: A Study of CCCU Teaching Faculty and Librarians

This is the second of two articles that explains the results of an in-depth research study of teaching faculty and librarian scholarship within the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU). The first article examined the nature and extent of that scholarship and this article examines its necessity

Understanding patterns of library use among undergraduate students from different disciplines

Objective The objective of this study was to test whether routinely-generated library usage data could be linked with information about students to understand patterns of library use among students from different disciplines at the University of Huddersfield. This information is important for librarians seeking to demonstrate the value of the library, and to ensure that they are providing services which meet user needs. The study seeks to join two strands of library user research which until now have been kept rather separate – an interest in disciplinary differences in usage, and a methodology which involves large-scale routinely-generated data. Methods The study uses anonymised data about individual students derived from two sources: routinely-generated data on various dimensions of physical and electronic library resource usage, and information from the student registry on the course studied by each student. Courses were aggregated at a subject and then disciplinary level. Kruskal-Wallis and Mann Whitney tests were used to identify statistically significant differences between the high-level disciplinary groups, and within each disciplinary group at the subject level. Results The study identifies a number of statistically significant differences on various dimensions of usage between both high-level disciplinary groupings and lower subject-level groupings. In some cases, differences are not the same as those observed in earlier studies, reflecting distinctive usage patterns and differences in the way that disciplines or subjects are defined and organised. Arts students at Huddersfield use library resources less than those in social science disciplines, contradicting findings from studies at other institutions, although music students are high users within the arts subject-level grouping. Computing and engineering students were relatively similar, although computing students were more likely to download PDFs, and engineering students were more likely to use the physical library. Conclusions The technique introduced in this study represents an effective way of understanding distinctive usage patterns at an individual institution. There may be potential to aggregate findings across several institutions to help universities benchmark their own performance and usage; this would require a degree of collaboration and standardisation. This study found that students in certain disciplines at Huddersfield use the library in different ways to students in those same disciplines at other institutions: further investigation is needed to understand exactly why these differences exist, but some hypotheses are offered