The CRAAP Test (Currency, Relevance, Authority, Accuracy, Purpose), is a popular tool among academic librarians for instructing students in resource evaluation. Its applicability to web-based information makes it particularly useful for students as they think about information they encounter both inside and outside of scholastic settings. However,…

Online tutorials are a way many librarians connect with students. The main benefit is the ability to reach more students than traditional face-to-face instruction sessions. In 2016, the Life & Health Sciences Librarian received instruction session requests for a freshman biology lab to teach students how to search for articles and use proper…

Describing, preserving, and providing access to data is now the purview of many science librarians, although the emphasis has been on data in electronic format. Data in paper or analog format might be found in many places around our campuses. At the University of Minnesota we conducted a preliminary investigation of analog data through discussions…

A citation analysis of chemistry PhD dissertations at the University of Texas at Austin yielded data on how often graduate students cite books in their bibliographies, and on the characteristics of the books cited, in terms of age and local ownership. The analysis examined samples of dissertations selected from five discrete years--1988, 2006,…

Patent and Trademark Resource Centers are located in libraries throughout the U.S., with 43 being in academic libraries. With the importance of incorporating a knowledge of intellectual property (IP) and patent research in university curricula nationwide, this study developed and evaluated a partnership program to increase the understanding of IP…

With limited campus resources for faculty scholarship, the College of Science (CoS) at San José State University (SJSU) developed scholarly output metrics as a way to add a quantitative component to the distribution of funds, to ensure objectivity, and to reward proven researchers. To support CoS's efforts to identify and quantify science faculty…

Many academic librarians are revising their instructional practice to integrate ACRL's "Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education." The authors collaborated with science faculty to develop and pilot lesson plans with learning goals derived from the "Framework." We implemented the lesson plans in both…

Geospatial services in academic libraries are now common at many institutions, especially in the United States. The challenge now faced by geospatial services providers is to evolve and adapt their skills and service offerings in response to changes in research, teaching, and learning communities. Online survey instruments are a common tool used…

Many libraries have expanded their opening hours to a 24/5 or 24/7 model. But does this reflect when students actually study? Little evidence about when medical or professional students study is available. By mounting a prominently placed poster with a graphical timeline that students could affix self-adhesive dots upon, the Flower-Sprecher…

In 2012, this author published a paper describing a method for using the raw data from Web of Science to examine the journals cited by any given group of researchers and then compare that list to lists of 'top journals' of similar disciplines. It was not a straightforward method to use and required a great deal of effort and spreadsheet work by a…

The authors analyzed 21,005 citations from 124 Ph.D. theses submitted to ten departments in the Faculty of Science, University of Ibadan, in Nigeria, during the period 2006 to 2013. The overall analysis of the cited information sources revealed that journals (67.6%) were the most cited sources, followed by books/monographs (13.6%), and conference…

The authors conducted six focus group semi-structured interviews consisting of graduate students and postdoctoral researchers within the College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in order to understand their roles within research groups and their ability to manage research data. More specifically, participants…

Advice for librarians' professional development sometimes includes encouragement to attend classes, but the benefits for STEM librarians have not been well defined. This article describes a study in which engineering librarians at the University of Vermont and Montana Tech of the University of Montana observed class sessions across first-year…

Agricultural researchers and science librarians must understand which research literature databases provide the most comprehensive coverage of agricultural subjects to support their inquiries. Once the domain of a few specialized databases, agricultural research literature is now covered by broad, multidisciplinary databases. The purpose of this…

Collaborative research is standard practice in many academic disciplines as it has been shown to increase author productivity, article quality, and publication rate. Even so, little is known about publishing patterns among academic librarians and non-library faculty who have collaborated on research. With whom are academic librarians partnering?…