The change to the ACRL Framework from a set of standards that was created in 2000 has been the subject of much debate. The impact on community colleges is considered in this opinion piece.

Being advocates, or evangelists, for certain tools is not a new idea for many librarians in terms of promoting our digital resources. However, what is new is our involvement in promoting digital technologies used for teaching and engagement to faculty and other college stakeholders. In addition, our role has expanded to working with those…

Focused on community colleges in North Carolina participating in the Scholars of Global Distinction initiative, the goal of this article is to assist librarians in their efforts to thoughtfully increase global and area studies online resources available at their libraries. Through this article, the author hopes to increase global library resources…

This paper discusses aspects of adopting, adapting, and building Open Educational Resources (OER) that have the potential to influence student learning but are sometimes overlooked by OER advocates. The author makes recommendations for ensuring that OER initiatives have a positive impact on student learning and argues that librarians can be…

This article explains how the South Piedmont Community College librarians educated faculty members about how they guide student use of the library and how it is advantageous for them to require high-quality resources for student papers. As documented by observations at SPCC and in the library literature, students use the tools they know to find…

The purpose of this article is to chronicle and discuss a unique research opportunity at LaGuardia Community College when Hurricane Sandy caused a week of class cancelations, including library instruction sessions for ENG101 students. Librarians took advantage of the natural sample, paired with randomly selected classes that had previously…

Two research questions guided this study: (1) Is there a gap in customer service quality perception between librarians (service providers) and patrons (service beneficiaries)?; and (2) How do patrons perceive the relational service qualities of librarians who staff the reference desk? Quantitative results based on a Likert scale survey showed no…

The "Information Literacy Framework" from ACRL presents a nationally recognized set of skills that can be used to demonstrate the value of individual academic libraries and groups of libraries that want to benchmark learning. Not only does the Framework fill the role of the rescinded Standards, but it is a better fit for community…

SpringShare LibGuides, and CMS are popular applications within the library community, but the reporting functionality of these tools is minimal. Google Analytics (GA) can enhance usage reporting if integrated with LibGuides CMS. This article outlines various types of site activity to track and describes how to set up GA reporting on the activity.

In 2015, surveys of students, faculty, and librarians and other library staff elicited their perceptions of the contributions of community college libraries to student success, both directly and via librarian collaboration with faculty. The three surveyed groups agreed substantially that libraries and librarians contribute to student success, both…

This case study investigates the learning process of students participating in an online information literacy program embedded in English composition classes at a small community college. The pilot program integrated concepts from the Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education into online learning modules. After the pilot, librarians…

For decades, popular culture was neglected and frowned upon by academics. In recent years, cultural critics, including librarians, have found popular culture materials to be didactic tools, and vital to the study of society and the zeitgeist that has prevailed at the time of their production. As a result, many academic librarians have found it…

Popular culture is extremely influential in both academe and society at large. However, formal disciplinary study of popular culture lags far behind that influence. Anthropology, film studies, history, musicology, and sociology are only some of the disciplines that frequently include popular culture as a research focus. This article advises on how…

Financial literacy is the ability to understand how money works in a person's day-to-day life: how someone earns money, manages it, invests it, and donates it to help others. As librarians, we must realize that when patrons come to us for guidance in the area of financial literacy, they are trusting us to provide not only reliable information for…

This study analyzes the effectiveness of implementing four information literacy sessions within two different English classes in a community college setting. The study found significant improvement in the comfort level of students starting, researching, and writing papers. Additionally, students showed an increased understanding in areas of…