The Commitment to Securing Perpetual Journal Access: A Survey of Academic Research Libraries

Current and emerging trends raise questions about the extent to which academic research libraries should continue to seek perpetual access provisions for journal acquisitions. To describe the questions being raised, this paper begins by framing perpetual access commitments within the contexts of the past, present, and future. The paper then assesses current views and practices by describing and analyzing the results of a survey of librarians. The results show that, while the respondents' libraries generally espouse strong commitments to perpetual access, a combination of factors is leading many libraries to take actions that weaken perpetual access provisions

Should NASIG Develop a Code of Ethics

This editorial discusses whether NASIG should develop a code of ethics

Collaborating to Analyze E-Journal Use Data: A Discussion of Cross-Institutional Cost-Per-Use Analysis Projects within the UNC System

This presentation discusses two projects within the University of North Carolina (UNC) system in which the system libraries collaborated to share data to make cross-institutional analyses of expenditures, use, and cost-per-use (CPU). The first project was initiated in 2011 and involved the analysis of e-resources at four UNC libraries. The second project was a UNC system-wide project that occurred in May 2012 and involved comparisons of expenditure and use data for e-journal subscriptions across the system

From Innovation to Transformation: A Review of the 2006-2007 Serials Literature

This paper reviews the leading trends in and contributions to the peer-reviewed and professional literature of serials librarianship published in 2006 and 2007. The review shows that a central topic in the literature is the nature and effect of libraries' ongoing transition from acquiring serials in print to providing access electronically. Propelled forward by user preferences, this transition is reflected in publications that reconceptualize collections and describe innovative initiatives and strategies for acquisition, access, and management. Throughout the literature, the review traces a prevailing sentiment that libraries are advancing well beyond the confines of print-centered models and are assuming new roles, imagining new possibilities, and developing new solutions

EXTENDING THE TECHNOLOGICAL, DISCURSIVE, AND RHETORICAL HORIZONS OF ACADEMIC RESEARCH LIBRARIES’ INFORMATION ARCHITECTURES: AN ANALYSIS OF NORTH CAROLINA STATE UNIVERSITY’S JAMES B. HUNT JR.

This dissertation analyzes how North Carolina State University's (NCSU) James B. Hunt Jr. Library extends the ways in which the information architectures of academic research libraries can function as a technology, as discourse, and as rhetoric. The starting point for the analysis is the libraries of antiquity, which functioned technologically as a means through which rhetors extended their recollective powers from the memories in their individual minds to the aggregate contents of library collections. As libraries evolved over many centuries, this technological functionality was joined by another such functionality: the capacity to extend users' powers of invention by providing information architectures for reading, reflection, and browsing. Through their capacities to extend users' recollective and inventive powers, libraries have become recognized as symbols of knowledge, and this discursive power has been leveraged by libraries and their controlling organizations for the purposes of rhetoric; in other words, the symbolic import of libraries has been drawn on by rhetors as an available means of persuasion. In the current information ecosystem of networked computing, the relevance of libraries in providing these functionalities is being thrown into question, and, as a result, libraries are staking out new roles and meanings. In this context, NCSU's Hunt Library constitutes a bold re-envisionment of libraries' traditional functionalities. Opened in 2013 and situated on NCSU's Centennial Campus, this library has an information architecture designed around technology-infused collaboration. Although a large collection of print materials is still present in the library, most of these materials are warehoused in a high-density shelving facilitate that is only accessible through an automated retrieval system. The dissertation's analysis of this information architecture shows that the Hunt Library reimagines the traditional functionalities of libraries as a technology, discourse, and rhetoric while opening significant new horizons for the operations and meanings of libraries

Reimagining the Library as a Technology: An Analysis of Ranganathan’s Five Laws of Library Science within the Social Construction of Technology Framework

© 2014 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. Published version: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/675355S. R. Ranganathan’s five laws of library science have long been a theoretical cornerstone of librarianship. This article draws on theories in the field of technology studies to advance the claim that the enduring relevance of the five laws is rooted in how they embrace the social construction of technology (SCOT) framework, which is based in the supposition that the actions of user communities shape a technology’s meaning. After briefly discussing the five laws along with the central principles of the SCOT framework, the article analyzes how the laws map within the framework and also how the laws confound the claims of a competing theory of technology, technological determinism. The article advocates that librarians use the laws’ SCOT-based principles as a guide to navigate through a period of transformative change