RefWorks is ideally suited for undergraduate students with team-based research projects as part of their course assessment. The Dorothy Hill Physical Sciences and Engineering Library at the University of Queensland taught students from three engineering courses how to use RefWorks to manage project references and to create team-based…

Biology undergraduates at Indiana University have often been expected to find information for course exercises or written reports, but the skills necessary to do so are not taught consistently in the curriculum. Other efforts described in the literature have been successful in teaching information literacy skills, but not always in a way that is…

Librarianship is one of a limited number of disciplines that deliberately learn and practice the art of the interview. For engineering librarians, this gives expertise and a role in teaching professional skills that are increasingly expected in the engineering profession. The reference interview and design interview have many similarities. Some…

The purpose of this study was to reveal influential journals used by life scientists; journals not currently included in "BIOSIS Previews," but included in either "PubMed" or "Science Citation Index Expanded". These 252 journals were revealed by the Eigenfactor, an iterative ranking scheme which quantitatively measures the scientific influence of…

Two science branch libraries at Penn State's University Park campus hosted film series centered on scientific documentary films. Although the reasons for starting the series differ, both have been successful in meeting their goals. Patron responses have been favorable, and the series have focused attention on the collections and services offered…

Impact factors for journals listed under the subject categories "ecology" and "environmental sciences" in the Journal Citation Reports database were calculated using citation data from the Scopus database. The journals were then ranked by their Scopus impact factor and compared to the ranked lists of the same journals derived from Journal…

This paper reports on the evaluation of local usage statistics of a specific set of chemistry journals at the University of Denver in Colorado, USA. The objective of the study is to demonstrate that commercial publishers in chemistry charge considerably more for their journals than those from the non-commercial sector. There are three variables…

This article describes a campus-wide customer satisfaction survey undertaken by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Research Library in 2007. The methodology, survey instrument, data analysis, results, and actions taken in response to the survey are described. The outcome and recommendations will guide the library both…

Many librarians at small academic institutions have been wondering if they can, or even should, support the use of geospatial technology on their campuses. At the Middlebury College Libraries, we have developed a model of support for geospatial technology which we think might be versatile and transferable enough to try elsewhere.

The development of an interactive web-based science information literacy tutorial that introduces undergraduate science majors to basic components of scientific literature is described. The tutorial introduces concepts, vocabulary and resources necessary for understanding and accessing information. The tutorial content is based on the Association…

We report on a citation analysis of Ph.D. dissertations in plant biology and zoology at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, undertaken to test the common assumption that scientists favor current research to such an extent that journal backfiles can be de-emphasized in academic library collections. Results demonstrate otherwise. The study is…

This article is based on services to library users in the area of chemistry at the Science and Engineering (S&E) Library of the University of Southern California (USC), to which I applied various new technologies as outreach approaches. Various Web 2.0 technologies such as a blog, tags, YouTube, RSS feeds, Instant Messaging, online presentation…

In summer 2008, a small group of Santa Clara University librarians were charged with exploring ways of making online library research guides more user friendly and interactive. In order to know how to enhance our guides, we first asked the question, "What makes a research guide useful?" What follows is a detailed process of discovery. The process…

University science education has been undergoing great amount of change since the commercialization of the Internet a decade ago. Mobile technologies in science education can encompass more than the proximal teaching and learning environment. Podcasting, for example, allows audio content from user-selected feeds to be automatically downloaded to…

This paper describes chat widgets, chunks of code that can be embedded on a web site to appear as an instant messaging system, and how they can be used on a science library web site to better serve library users. Interviews were conducted concerning experiences at science and humanities libraries and more similarities than differences were…