Library Security Gates: Effectiveness and Current Practice

For years, library personnel have relied on security gates to prevent theft from their collections. However, recent anecdotal evidence suggests that libraries are removing the gates for various reasons, including cost and patron frustration with false alarms. This study examines current practices via a survey of libraries and security gate vendors and analyzes the effectiveness of security gates by empirical testing of alarms and with loss inventories of collection samples, supplemented by lost item statistics from interlibrary loan. Thus we use three primary methods to assess libraries’ approaches to security gates

ATG Interviews Kristine S. Baker

Jonathan Harwell, Head of Collections & Systems at Rollins College, interviews Kristine S. Baker, Director of Digital Sales at YBP, about demand driven acquisition

Common Intellectual Experiences and Academic Libraries

As discussed throughout this volume, colleges and universities have explored ways to integrate high-impact practices into their campus learning. At Rollins College, a small liberal arts college with a graduate business school in Winter Park, Florida, faculty members have been essential in fostering initiatives that center on creating a common learning experience for their students. As library faculty members at Rollins, we have been heavily involved with the rFLA (Rollins Foundations in the Liberal Arts) curriculum for undergraduates. This chapter presents our work as a case study

An Asynchronous, Virtual Lab Course Model using the Framework to Reshape Student Responses to Media Narratives

This chapter describes a lab course redesigned by two librarians in a small liberal arts college. The course is tied to an undergraduate methods course, Research, Media, Culture, in a Critical Media & Cultural Studies program. The lab had previously been taught as a synchronous course over three weeks. As a response to lower enrollments in the major, as well as the virtual teaching mode for the main course, we adapted the lab component into a six-week asynchronous course pilot with a goal of delving more deeply into information literacy pedagogy than the previous course format allowed. We also embedded ourselves in the main course over those six weeks, joining discussions of documentaries and readings and answering questions on research and analysis. We designed the new course around the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education and each week focused on one of the six frames, with readings and online discussion questions in Canvas, some involving search exercises. The final assignment for the lab course was a short reflective essay (300–500 words). In this chapter, we describe the coursework, the discussion prompts, and an assessment of the pilot based on student responses to discussion board questions, in which we clarified certain misunderstandings of concepts; as well as excerpts from the reflective essays and the students’ evaluations of the course, anonymized and selected for relevance to the transformative educational aims of the course. We present this asynchronous course pilot as a model for other courses that seek to help students engage in transformative learning, with the discussion questions and readings included for reuse or adaptation

The Secret Lives of Ebooks: A Paratextual Analysis Illuminates a Veil of Usage Statistics

This study applies the method of paratextual analysis to six electronic books, or ebooks, in an academic library collection at a small liberal arts college. Two books are selected from each of three platforms: ebrary, EBSCO, and SpringerLink. The characteristics of each book are described, including design and readership, as well as 2 years of usage statistics from the specific library, and altmetrics where available. The paratextual study leads to a closer investigation of the usage statistics themselves and concludes that despite industry standards, they are not calculated consistently across vendor platforms and that while these data are invisible to researchers outside of the library, there are also essential elements that librarians mistakenly take at face value when comparing ebook usage from multiple vendors