Supporting both learning and research in a UK post-1992 university library: a case study

Nationally, there has been debate on the role of research within higher education and increased interest in the teaching/research nexus. A team of Academic Liaison Librarians at Anglia Polytechnic University was awarded funding to investigate the extent to which learning resources overlap with research resources, whether researcher/teachers encourage their students to use the resources they use themselves and how far electronic resources have affected the relationship between learning and research materials. Semistructured interviews were carried out with 21 academics who are both teachers and researchers. They proved to be committed to using research in their teaching. Students were encouraged to engage with research through the recommendation of resources, seminar discussion, and researchers’ own work for reading and illustrating methodologies. Respondents claimed to be making significant use of the APU library website, online databases and journals. The majority of them were also recommending the same resources to their students. Convenience, speed and variety of information sources were quoted as some of the advantages of the new e-environment. A loss of a relationship with librarians and with the physical library was cited as an example of negative effects of the electronic resource environment

Self-archiving and the Copyright Transfer Agreements of ISI-ranked library and information science journals

A study of Thomson-Scientific ISI ranked Library and Information Science (LIS) journals (n = 52) is reported. The study examined the stances of publishers as expressed in the Copyright Transfer Agreements (CTAs) of the journals toward self-archiving, the practice of depositing digital copies of one\u27s works in an Open Archives Initiative (OAI)-compliant open access repository. Sixty-two percent (32) do not make their CTAs available on the open Web; 38% (20) do. Of the 38% that do make CTAs available, two are open access journals. Of the 62% that do not have a publicly available CTA, 40% are silent about self-archiving. Even among the 20 journal CTAs publicly available there is a high level of ambiguity. Closer examination augmented by publisher policy documents on copyright, self-archiving, and instructions to authors reveals that only five, 10% of the ISI-ranked LIS journals in the study, actually prohibit self-archiving by publisher rule. Copyright is a moving target, but publishers appear to be acknowledging that copyright and open access can co-exist in scholarly journal publishing. The ambivalence of LIS journal publishers provides unique opportunities to members of the community. Authors can self-archive in open access archives. A society-led, global scholarly communication consortium can engage in the strategic building of the LIS information commons. Aggregating OAI-compliant archives and developing disciplinary-specific library services for an LIS commons has the potential to increase the field\u27s research impact and visibility. It may also ameliorate its own scholarly communication and publishing systems and serve as a model for others

Twenty-five years of end-user searching, Part 1: Research findings

This is the first part of a two-part article that reviews 25 years of published research findings on end-user searching in online information retrieval (IR) systems. In Part 1 (Markey, 2007 ), the author seeks to answer the following questions: What characterizes the queries that end users submit to online IR systems? What search features do people use? What features would enable them to improve on the retrievals they have in hand? What features are hardly ever used? What do end users do in response to the system's retrievals? Are end users satisfied with their online searches? Summarizing searches of online IR systems by the search features people use everyday makes information retrieval appear to be a very simplistic one-stop event. In Part 2, the author examines current models of the information retrieval process, demonstrating that information retrieval is much more complex and involves changes in cognition, feelings, and/or events during the information seeking process. She poses a host of new research questions that will further our understanding about end-user searching of online IR systems.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/56093/1/20462_ftp.pd

Adoption and diffusion of Encoded Archival Description

In this article, findings from a study on the diffusion and adoption of Encoded Archival Description (EAD) within the U.S. archival community are reported. Using E. M. Rogers' (1995) theory of the diffusion of innovations as a theoretical framework, the authors surveyed 399 archives and manuscript repositories that sent participants to EAD workshops from 1993–2002. Their findings indicated that EAD diffusion and adoption are complex phenomena. While the diffusion pattern mirrored that of MAchine-Readable Cataloging (MARC), overall adoption was slow. Only 42% of the survey respondents utilized EAD in their descriptive programs. Critical factors inhibiting adoption include the small staff size of many repositories, the lack of standardization in archival descriptive practices, a multiplicity of existing archival access tools, insufficient institutional infrastructure, and difficulty in maintaining expertise.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/48777/1/20236_ftp.pd

From Research Libraries Group

UMI/Data Courier and the Research Libraries Group (RLG) announce an agreement to offer fixed-cost access to several of UMI/Data Courier's most popular databases. By spring of 1992, searchers on RLIN will be able to access ABI/INFORM, Newspaper Abstracts, Periodical Abstracts, and Dissertation Abstracts for a fixed annual fee.</jats:p