Staff-Less Libraries: Innovative Staff Design considers the challenges of this approach, its pros and cons, identifies international experiences, and discusses best practices. It presents a step-by-step approach to implementing a staffless library and/or services, and seeks to inspire professionals to share experiences and optimize their library. Staff-less public libraries, enabled by technological developments, represent a significant and innovative aspect of the development of public libraries. The concept radically enlarges the availability of user access to public libraries. Some Danish public library branches have, for example, increased their weekly opening hours from 20 to 80 hours per week. In Denmark, the concept has been quite successful, increasing the number of staff-less libraries from 81 public library units in 2011 to 260 in 2014. From a longer view, however, the staff-less library concept contributes to the modernization of public libraries by further opening the library. Many library professionals have been surprised by the near absence of vandalism through the staffl-ess opening hours. According to the latest trend, the staffless library model is gradually moving from thinly populated rural areas and suburban neighborhoods to urban contexts. This book explores the concept, hence furthering the debate.
The field of distributed learning is constantly evolving. Online technology provides instructors with the flexibility to offer meaningful instruction to students who are at a distance or in some cases right on campus, but still unable to be physically present in the classroom. This dynamic environment challenges librarians to monitor, learn, adapt, collaborate, and use new technological advances in order to make the best use of techniques to engage students and improve learning outcomes and success rates. Distributed Learning provides evidence based information on a variety of issues, surrounding online teaching and learning from the perspective of librarians.
Selecting and Implementing an Integrated Library System: The Most Important Decision You Will Ever Make focuses on the intersection of technology and management in the library information world. As information professionals, many librarians will be involved in automation projects and the management of technological changes that are necessary to best meet patron and organizational needs. As professionals, they will need to develop numerous skills, both technological and managerial, to successfully meet these challenges. This book provides a foundation for this skillset that will develop and acquaint the reader with a broad understanding of the issues involved in library technology systems. Although a major topic of the book is integrated library systems (a fundamental cornerstone of most library technology), the book also explores new library technologies (such as open source systems) that are an increasingly important component in the library technology world. Users will find a resource that is geared to the thinking and planning processes for library technology that emphasizes the development of good project management skills.
Academic Search Engines intends to run through the current panorama of the academic search engines through a quantitative approach that analyses the reliability and consistence of these services. The objective is to describe the main characteristics of these engines, to highlight their advantages and drawbacks, and to discuss the implications of these new products in the future of scientific communication and their impact on the research measurement and evaluation. In short, Academic Search Engines presents a summary view of the new challenges that the Web set to the scientific activity through the most novel and innovative searching services available on the Web.
The cloud can be a powerful tool for conducting and managing research. The Librarian’s Guide to Academic Research in the Cloud is a practical guide to using cloud services from a librarian’s point of view. As well as discussing how to use various cloud-based services, the title considers the various privacy and data portability issues associated with web-based services. This book helps readers make the most of cloud computing, including how to fold mobile devices into the cloud-based research management equation. The book is divided into several chapters, each considering a key aspect of academic research in the cloud, including: defining the cloud; capturing information; capturing and managing scholarly information; storing files; staying organized, communicating; and sharing. The book ends by considering the future of the cloud, examining what readers can expect from cloud services in the next few years, and how research might be changed as a result.
The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) set forth Characteristics of Programs of Information Literacy that Illustrate Best Practices: A Guideline. Creating and Maintaining an Information Literacy Instruction Program in the Twenty-First Century provides readers with a real-world, practical guide for creating an instruction program step-by-step, as well as a framework for reviewing, assessing, and updating existing programs. Each chapter focuses on one of the main aspects of the ACRL guidelines. Current research, anecdotal evidence and tools provide the reader with the support and instruments needed to either begin, or reinvigorate, an instruction program.The book begins by placing information literacy in programme context. It then covers how to survey your current program, and how to develop and implementing a program plan. The next chapters concentrate on administrative and institutional support; curriculum integration and campus collaboration; present and future students; pedagogy for the information professional; program marketing and outreach; assessment and future trends. Finally, this book concludes by asking its readers to re-survey their information literacy instruction program landscape once again.
Cultural heritage professionals have high levels of training in metadata. However, the institutions in which they practice often depend on support staff, volunteers, and students in order to function. With limited time and funding for training in metadata creation for digital collections, there are often many questions about metadata without a reliable, direct source for answers. The Metadata Manual provides such a resource, answering basic metadata questions that may appear, and exploring metadata from a beginner’s perspective. This title covers metadata basics, XML basics, Dublin Core, VRA Core, and CDWA schemes and provides exercise in the creation of metadata. Finally, the book gives an overview of metadata, including mapping and sharing.
Despite new technologies, people do not always find information with ease. Do people still need help in finding the information they need, and if so, why? What can be made easier with new tools and techniques?Information Services and Digital Literacy is about the role of information services and digital literacies in the age of the social web. This title provides an alternative perspective for understanding information services and digital literacy, and argues that a central problem in the age of the social web and the culture of participation is that we do not know the premises of how we know, and how ways of interacting with information affect our actions and their outcomes. Information seeking is always a question of crossing and expanding boundaries between our earlier experiences and the unknown. We may not yet be well enough acquainted with the landscape of digital information to understand how we know, where the boundaries to our knowledge lie, how to cross them, and what consequences our actions may have.
Universal Design provides practitioners, graduate students, and other professionals interested in obtaining practical advice on how to effectively create and re-create interiors of academic libraries for teaching, learning, and research. The academic library ‘as place’ continues to evolve around the idea that the existing environment can have multiple uses. Partnerships with other college and university agencies, such as centers for teaching excellence and writing centers have compatible missions with those of academic libraries. Established within the building-proper these facilities will better serve students and faculty. The book fills the need for current information about how to effectively design and re-design academic library spaces to meet the ever-changing needs for today’s and tomorrow’s students, faculty, and researchers.
This book starts from the premise that the last decade has brought more changes for the academic research library than any ever previously known. The book provides an authoritative overview and analysis of the issues and challenges affecting academic research libraries from the closing years of the 20th century onwards. While the focus on this period of white water change is primarily British, with a number of case studies based on the transformative initiatives of the UKs Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and its seminal Electronic Libraries Programme (eLib), as well as on the Bodleian Libraries far-reaching responses to the complex demands of the digital age, the issues themselves are presented in their global context, with implications drawn for research libraries everywhere.