May 2008 Archives

Engaging Users: The Future of Academic Library Web Sites by Shu Liu is a a good summary of "current" academic library homepages highlighting Web 2.0 and RSS features. Suggestions for "MY library SPACE" (capitalization mine) may be portentous... could portals get a "second life"?

Using Circulation Systems for Special Collections: Tracking Usage, Promoting the Collection, and Addressing the Backlogs by Beth M. Whittaker - The fact that I skipped this article says more about me than anything else.

Organizational Learning in the Evaluation Procedures: A Qualitative Study by Kuan-nien Chen and Pei-chun Lin has 11 endnotes in the first 13 sentences, which starts a disturbing trend in this issue.

Librarians as Teachers: A Qualitative Inquiry Into Professional Identity BEST in issue by Scott Walter - The 78 endnotes, many of which contain several citations, in this article made my eyes start to pop out of their sockets. A twenty page article that is one quarter notes must be some kind of record (and the font on the notes pages is small!) However if you are interested in librarians as teachers, read it anyway. You will probably find a dozen other cool articles or books.
Note to the author: ACRL's Immersion program does include a focus on teacher identity

Citation Analysis of Ph.D Dissertation References as a Tool for Collection Management in an Academic Chemistry Library by Núria Vallmitjana and L. G. Sabaté is a very concise article with some most results following what you would assume, but giving numbers in the discipline of Chemistry to prove it. No good news in cost, really, except that the core journals were relatively easy to spot. What is the cost? Well, they estimate the resources used by one thesis to be 90 € = $142