Recently in Library Literature Category

Every Library’s Nightmare? Digital Rights Management, Use Restrictions, and Licensed Scholarly Digital Resources Kristin R. Eschenfelder - Eh.  An intriguing examination of "soft" DRM, such as warnings or limitations on use that have workaround or obfuscated solutions.  The paper does categorize these "soft" restrictions for later researchers.  Engineering was one of the subjects studies, but only a few specific instances were noted (one old) and no quantitative list was presented.

Status of Approval Plans in College Libraries Beth E. Jacoby - This would have been useful required reading before the PSU Libraries Collection Development retreat where we looked at coordinating our approval plan among one main campus and 23 college campuses (one university, geographically distributed), but I got behind in my C&RL reading.  I found out Penn State used to have a "Ogontz" campus, name changes keep my mind boggled.

What’s in a Name? Using Card Sorting to Evaluate Branding in an Academic Library’s Web Site Peter Hepburn and Krystal M. Lewis - Shocking reality check about library branded services.  A must read for any library web committee (at least the Findings and Table 1 sections for the time challenged)

Adjusting to the Workplace: Transitions Faced by New Academic Librarians Joanne Oud - Best Article (for me and Russ anyway)  Though it is about University Librarians in Canada, this will be a landmark study in my research agenda.  Great survey of new academic librarians that impacts mentoring, job training, hiring, collection development, and instruction (Russ!).  The questions were well contructed and the results are sometimes surprising and always quantitative.  I would love to duplicate this survey in the U.S. or at Penn State.

Transition to Electronic Resources in Undergraduate Social Science Research: A Study of Honors Theses Bibliographies, 1999–2005 Leslie Kriebel and Leslie Lapham - co-writing my own article about electronic resources in a subject area has taught me not to skip an article if it doesn't directly address your subject area.  This is a good study of undergraduate theses that reinforces our expectation that Websites are increasing in student citations, E-journals are trumping print, yet perhaps surprisingly e-Books are a flop (only 1% of citations where almost 9% of the citations were available as e-Books).  This reminds me to look at habits of grad students and not just faculty in my own citation studies.

Better than Brief Tests: Coverage Power Tests of Collection Strength by Howard D. White was the last article in the March 2008 C&RL issue that I didn't get to in my last review of the journal.  This was a pretty long article on a topic that I am recently interested in exploring: assessing collection development.  It does open with the disclaimer "When this article was first submitted, WorldCat users could easily perform coverage power tests as described below.  They cannot now...", which leaves me wondering if I can try to repeat the Methodology at all.  I hope so, this is a very good article on what comparing holding lists with OCLC really can mean, when the quantitative data is most meaningful, and the author is an experienced expert on the process.  A good background read, but perhaps less a less practical example.

Research Productivity Among Librarians: Factors Leading to Publications at Penn State by Joseph Fennewald paints an encouraging environment for professional publication that does indeed exist here at Penn State. I also like the fact that the most productive type of faculty librarian (in journals and books) is MLS plus a second Masters (like me).

A Mixed-Methods Investigation of the Relationship between Critical Thinking and Library Anxiety among Undergraduate Students in their Information Search Process by Nahyun Kwon reinforces an earlier study on correlation between anxiety and success for library users. A good map (textual and visual) for library service desk interaction and advice for general interaction of library staff with users.

Measuring Students’ Information Literacy Skills through Abstracting: Case Study from a Library & Information Science Perspective by Maria Pinto, Andrés Fernández-Ramos, and Anne-Vinciane Doucet is a very long article with lots of figures and tables on abstracting, which I found out from a colleague is a totally separate "profession" in some ways to librarianship. I certainly didn't study it in library school (should I have gone to Spain?)

Better than Brief Tests: Coverage Power Tests of Collection Strength by Howard D. White

My first peer reviewed (co-authored) article appeared in May and my first solo article in a major journal appears in June, here are the citations.

Meier, J.J. & Conkling, T.W. "Google Scholar's Coverage of the Engineering Literature: An Empirical Study," Journal of Academic Librarianship, May 2008

Meier, J.J. "Chat widgets on the library website: Help at the point of need," Computers in Libraries, June 2008

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

Undergraduate Use of Federated Searching: A Survey of Preferences and Perceptions of Value-added Functionality should be subtitled "Count the number of times 'Google' is mentioned in this article" and has some good data for both those that like federated searching and that don't. The listed methods and rubrics are thorough, though they produced small statistical significance. To the visually inclined I challenge you to compare Figures 1&2, which are ratings of federated vs. non-federated search as given by undergraduates & predicted by librarians at a conference.

My "should be" sections are dedicated to Russ Hall. Should I start individually blogging each article?

Attitudes of Presidents and Provosts on the University "provosts' and presidents' newly stated indicators of centrality - such as innovation, campus visibility, and acquisition of outside funding - and then linking the library's strategic issues and actions to them"

The Development and Validation of the Information Literacy Test should probably be read by those responsible for general information literacy or coordinate those efforts at their university

The University Library and the Problem of Knowledge should be called "Libraries involvement with university program reviews and the impact on collection development"

Finding Information in a New Landscape: Developing New Service and Staffing Models for Mediated Information Services should be called "How to staff your information commons" and will be a useful read to some of my colleagues working on the Knowledge Commons, but Science Librarians should pay special attention to their Reference and Circulation study and findings. Also has an interesting review of real dollar $$ savings from Chat reference. Best article in the issue and lots of different topics.

Critical Thinking Disposition and Library Anxiety: Affective Domains on the Space of Information Seeking and Use in Academic Libraries - Hey, I love empirical data and studies as much as the next engineer turned librarian, but SKIP TO THE CONCLUSION.

The Elusive User: Changing Use Patterns in Academic Libraries 1995 to 2004 Charles Martell has data that is a bit out of date and not that surprising: cost of journals WAY UP and electronic use UP (exceptions: circulation in Ivy League libraries has gone UP, reference transactions at Columbia UP). There is a great final quote in the conclusion, from another reference, "Among the most critical [frontiers for librarians to explore] are those that facilitate interaction between the virtual user and the library professional." I believe this is a great endorsement for all the Web 2.0, chat, and other related efforts of librarians.

Academic Subject Guides: A Case Study of Use at San Jose State University Shannon M. Stately was a good read and well summarized by the abstract (link above). Though the results first seemed a death knell for Subject Guides, the Online Articles & Databases pages as well as E-Journals and Web Site Search Engines were familiar to over 50% of most students. The data was from Nursing, Journalism, and Organization & Management students, primarily undergraduate upperclassmen. Best point: Library instruction leads to greater subject guide use.

Analysis of a Decade of Library Literature Kelly Blessinger and Michele Frasier will be primarily useful when deciding what journals to browse or where to submit those pre-tenure papers, but isn't really a revelation about the subjects of contemporary library literature.

The book reviews were pretty good, I am now aware of a pretty significant book on The Economics of Attention

There is a new website (web 2.0 tool) called Liszen Trends that facilitates posting of library news (mostly via blogs) and voting less than 24 hours after I wished for a digg-like tool for library literature. So I didn't quite get my wish, since the topics sometimes discuss professional books but that is a review ON a blog.

What I want is to be able to tag and vote on both the Old Literature and the New since both are information sources for professionals and, believe it or not, the Old has good stuffs.