Economists have built a theory to understand markets in which, rather than selling directly to buyers, suppliers sell through a platform, which controls prices on both sides. The theory has been applied to understand markets ranging from telephony, to credit cards, to media. In this paper, we apply the theory to the market for scholarly journals,…

It has been approximately 20 years since distributing scholarly journals digitally became feasible. This article discusses the broad implications of the transition to digital distributed scholarship from a historical perspective and focuses on the development of open access (OA) and the various models for funding OA in the context of the roles…

This research provides the first review of publicly available assessment information found on Association of Research Libraries (ARL) members' websites. After providing an overarching review of benchmarking assessment data, and of professionally recommended assessment models, this paper examines if libraries contextualized their assessment…

Developing collection-level surveys to expose hidden collections in special collections and archives departments within ARL libraries has received a great deal of scholarly attention in the recent years. Numerous standards have been explored, and each has its strengths and weaknesses. This paper summarizes some of the major initiatives in…

Objective: The goal of this study was to examine the methodologies used to study librarian-faculty relationships and to use the Key Mediating Variable model (KMV) of The Trust and Commitment Theory of Relationship Marketing to assess the quality of the librarian-faculty relationship as it has been portrayed in the literature. Relationship…

There is increasing recognition that information literacy is essential for individual and community empowerment, workforce readiness, and global competitiveness. However, there is a history of difficulty in integrating information literacy with the postsecondary educational process. This paper posits that a greater understanding of the…

Today's students exhibit generational differences in the way they search for information. Observations of first-year students revealed a proclivity for simple keyword or phrases searches with frequent misspellings and incorrect logic. Although no students had strong mental models of search mechanisms, those with stronger models did construct more…

The Open Access movement of the past decade, and institutional repositories developed by universities and academic libraries as a part of that movement, have openly challenged the traditional scholarly communication system. This article examines the growth of repositories around the world, and summarizes a growing body of evidence of the response…

The increased focus on interdisciplinarity and collaboration in academia necessitates a re-evaluation of established mentoring practices. This article reviews the literature on traditional and peer mentoring models, explores Communities of Practice (CoP) within learning organizations, and discusses the implementation and evaluation of a CoP at the…

This paper proposes utilizing a combination of the Quality Function Deployment (QFD)-Kano model as a useful tool to evaluate service quality. The digital library of the University of Guadalajara (Mexico) is presented as a case study. Data to feed the QFD-Kano model was gathered by an online questionnaire that was made available to users on the…

Faculty and students at University College London (UCL) were polled online in November 2006 as part of a wider investigation into the impact of e-books in UK higher education. One of the survey questions probed the strategies that members of the academic community use to identify the conventional printed books that they need for work, study, or…

At the University of Massachusetts Amherst's W.E.B. Du Bois Library's Learning Commons, only reference librarians staff the Reference and Research Assistance Desk. Surveys, a focus group, reference question transcriptions, and question-type tallies indicate that this service model is strongly preferred by users and librarians over the previous…

Information-literate students should understand the relationships between primary and secondary sources. This article presents a new model for integrating primary and secondary sources into general library instruction. The model is based on collaboration between a Special Collections librarian and an instruction librarian. It emphasizes the use of…

Discusses service learning and presents models of instruction that academic libraries might offer to service learning pedagogy. Highlights include the role of information literacy; reflection; affective and cognitive learning outcomes of service learning; impact of service learning on libraries; learning process model; course objectives model;…

Discusses library models in higher education and user roles in relation to the transformative effects of technology. Explores how these models are changing our conceptualization of library assessment models, including measurement models, from a linear to a more cyclical and dynamic perspective shaping relations among input, output, quality and…