With the increase in undergraduate and graduate programs for creative writing at institutions of higher education in North America, literary journals and magazines now serve as leading scholarly publishing outlets and research resources for creative-writing faculty and students. This study analyzes ten years of citations from nineteen leading…

This article discusses a project undertaken to assess the journals in a Big Deal package by applying a weighted value algorithm measuring quality, utility, and value of individual titles. Carried out by a national library consortium in Canada, the project confirmed the value of the Big Deal package while providing a quantitative approach for…

This bibliographic essay examines the difficulties associated with the selection, licensing, acquisition, and management of e-books in academic libraries. The potential advantages of e-book technology are likely to be realized only to the extent that they advance the economic goals of e-book suppliers and are consistent with the legal framework…

This article reviews the history of open access (OA) policies and examines the current status of mandate policy implementations. It finds that hundreds of policies have been proposed and adopted at various organizational levels and many of them have shown a positive effect on the rate of repository content accumulation. However, it also detects…

Technological advances have raised expectations for data sharing; and financial exigencies have brought the issue into sharper focus, especially as grant-funding institutions are beginning to require shared access to research results and the data that support them. These data are increasingly linked to publications and related resources, thereby…

This study examines the process of requesting copyright permissions through the Copyright Clearance Center's (CCC) pay-per-use service for electronic course reserves at the Penn State University Libraries in 2008. The authors investigate the efficiency of this process as a function of the percentage of permission requests successfully mediated by…

This study uses citation analysis to examine students' dissertations and theses in history, psychology, and education, noting changes in research practices since the introduction of electronic journals and other online sources. Some findings challenge earlier studies, showing that students are making greater use of journal backfiles and that this…

In this article, I imagine a library that prioritizes teaching users how to find, evaluate, and use information over the traditional library public service activities of collection development, access to materials, and reference services. If I ran the library, all services would support end-user education. (Contains 1 graph and 1 note.)

Our institutions of record are facing a new digital knowledge management challenge: stakeholder communities are now expecting customized Web interfaces to institutional knowledge repositories, online environments where community members can contribute content and see themselves represented, as well as access archived resources. Digital curation…

This research probes future roles for libraries in the scholarly communication process through the use of scenarios. The researchers asked 20 ARL library directors to read and provide constructive comments on the scenarios, name the scenarios, and either select a scenario that most closely matched their vision or propose a new scenario. The…

An online survey of institutional repository (IR) managers identified copyright clearance trends in staffing and workflows. The majority of respondents followed a mediated deposit model, and reported that library personnel, instead of authors, engaged in copyright clearance activities for IRs. The most common "information gaps" pertained to the…

In anticipation of current and future mass digitization projects in which the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's Library will participate, the Library's Conservation Unit began to gather data on the "scannability" of our general book collections to anticipate potential effects on conservation and preservation work flows. The findings…

We investigated whether American dissertations that were deposited in university libraries or disseminated on microfilm prior to 1978 were "published" for copyright purposes. This question has direct bearing on the copyright status of these works today. In the absence of a directly relevant legal decision to clarify the matter, the authors…

This article addresses the need for quantitative investigation into students' use of information resources in historical research. It reports the results of a citation analysis of more than 3,000 citations from master's level history theses submitted between 1998 and 2008 at a mid-sized public university. The study's results support the hypotheses…

The Commons on Flickr, comprised of an international community of select libraries, museums, and archives, was a project initially launched in 2008 by the Library of Congress and Flickr. Primary goals of The Commons are to broaden exposure to rich cultural heritage photographs and to observe and participate in the communities of engagement and…