Library Literature: March 2008 Archives

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.