Purpose – This paper explores the roles of libraries within Second Life from the viewpoint of the librarians experienced in experimenting within virtual worlds. Design/methodology/approach – Exploration of currently available literature was undertaken to determine the important issues affecting libraries and librarians within virtual worlds. To explore these issues further, ten Second Life libr...

THE woRD "TENURE" is used by some academic libraries in the same sense in which it is applied to faculty appointments of professorial rank. A considerable number of directors of other academic libraries would follow the spirit of faculty tenure but would apply the term in a special way to the appointments of librarians. What is the basis for this special meaning of tenure in the case of librari...

OBJECTIVE The research explored the roles of practicing clinical librarians embedded in a patient care team. METHODS Six clinical librarians from Canada and one from the United States were interviewed to elicit detailed descriptions of their clinical roles and responsibilities and the context in which these were performed. RESULTS Participants were embedded in a wide range of clinical servi...

Are gender issues in information needs and services really a “trend” worthy of examination in the first decade of the twenty-first century? Isn’t this a passé topic? Aren’t we well into the “post-feminist” era? As the editors of this issue, we answer these questions with a resounding “no!” Although North American society has made enormous strides in the past half-century, we have yet to reach t...

Purpose – The prevalence of virtual learning environments (VLEs) in higher education is well-documented and has been promoted in the UK by government-funded projects, but there has been little empirical research on the level of involvement of subject librarians with VLEs. The survey was designed to investigate how VLEs are affecting the work of subject librarians and to examine factors influenc...

Regional accreditation agencies have established mandates for higher education institutions to implement information literacy programs and to assess the resultant learning outcomes. This mandate calls for a shift in the established library instruction paradigm at many institutions. Responsibility shifts from librarians teaching students how to locate materials for particular assignments, to fac...

Chapter 3 provides an analysis of the survey outlining some of the challenges that institutions face in hiring diversity librarians. The area of job expectations is one challenge that can contribute to the difficulty in finding qualified applicants. Feedback from librarians emphasized the importance of making job expectations both clear and reasonable. The chapter concludes with suggestions for...

Background: In-service training courses are one of the most available programs that are used to improve the quantity and quality level of the staff services in various organizations, including libraries and information centers. With the advent of new technologies in the field of education, the problems and shortcomings of traditional in-service training courses were replaced with virtual ones. ...

Linked Data has become an important issue, not only for the process of building the web of data, but also for the mutual knowledge transfer between libraries and the web of data. Based on a study concerning Linked Open Data applications in libraries and the qualifications of future librarians involved in the development of such applications, we built a one day training program for academic libr...