This pedagogy shows promise for implementing and evaluating a successful flipped information literacy program.

This article describes the results of a survey that gathered data on perceptions and use of e-books from undergraduate students, graduate students, faculty, and staff. The investigators analyzed the results based on user affiliate status and subject discipline and compared the results with the findings of a similar, smaller-scale study conducted in 2012. The study concludes with a discussion of the major findings and their implications for academic libraries and publishers, as well as areas for further inquiry. Yet, considering the wide range of academic programs at UMD, the 2012 e-book study, which did not include users from STEM disciplines, left considerable room for further research. While users within STEM disciplines are generally presumed to be more accepting of e-books, recent studies indicate that they may share many of the same frustrations as users in the humanities and social sciences. 3 If similar aspects of e-book usage frustrate users across different disciplines, libraries might be better served by examining e-book usage and perceptions at a macro level. Many of the large studies in this area date from more than five years ago. 4 Moreover, the user interface designs for e-book platforms change so rapidly that such studies provide only "a snapshot of platforms at a certain moment," rather than definitive accounts of e-books and the academy. 5 Consequently, the conclusions drawn from these studies may not reflect user reactions to the most recent changes in e-book availability and platforms, or the increased availability of mobile devices that support e-books. 6 Despite numerous studies of e-books and academic libraries, a number of points of contention remain. One such disagreement is the impact of e-reader ownership on user attitudes toward e-books. The market penetration of e-readers has increased dramatically, with Forbes estimating that Amazon sold 20 million Kindle devices in 2013 alone. 7 One of the major findings of the UMD Libraries 2012 study was that e-reader ownership led to increased e-book use. 8 Likewise, Barbara Glackin, Roy Rodenhiser, and Brooke Herzog found that access to multiple mobile devices "significantly increased" how frequently a user accessed e-books. 9 However, a study by Julie Gilbert and Barbara Fister at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota, found little correlation between such ownership and student attitudes toward e-books. 10 While many aspects of the role of e-books within libraries are fraught with controversy and disagreement, a number of findings appear to be coalescing. For example, users are more inclined to turn to e-books than anecdotal evidence and professional intuition suggest. 11 Many users recognize the benefit of the immediate, aroundthe-clock access that e-books provide. 12 In addition, users view reference titles as especially well-suited for electronic formats. 13 However, user awareness of the availability of e-books from academic libraries is low. 14 Another barrier to e-book adoption is that users are frustrated by the systems, plat...

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To gain firsthand insights into the daily workflows of researchers and to create opportunities to engage in the full research life cycle, engineering librarians at North Carolina State (NC State) University launched a pilot project to embed themselves into campus research groups by attending weekly lab meetings. This article provides details on the program's implementation, the ethnographic assessment methods used to capture the activities of researchers during weekly lab meetings, and an analysis of the data collected. Based on these findings, the authors provide potential implications for professional practice, offering suggestions for how this pilot program could be expanded into an enterprise-level service as well as areas for further research.

Objective: Entrepreneurship and innovative product design in health care requires expertise in finding and evaluating diverse types of information from a multitude of sources to accomplish a number of tasks, such as securing regulatory approval, developing a reimbursement strategy, and navigating intellectual property. The authors sought to determine whether an intensive, specialized information literacy training program that introduced undergraduate biomedical engineering students to these concepts would improve the quality of the students’ design projects. We also sought to test whether information literacy training that included active learning exercises would offer increased benefits over training delivered via lectures and if this specialized information literacy training would increase the extent of students’ information use.Methods: A three-arm cohort study was conducted with a control group and two experimental groups. Mixed methods assessment, including a rubric and citation analysis, was used to evaluate program outcomes by examining authentic artifacts of student learning.Results: Student design teams that received information literacy training on topics related to medical entrepreneurship and health care economics showed significantly improved performance on aspects of project performance relevant to health care economics over student design teams that did not receive this training. There were no significant differences between teams that engaged in active learning exercises and those that only received training via lectures. Also, there were no significant differences in citation patterns between student teams that did or did not receive specialized information literacy training.Conclusions: Information literacy training can be used as a method for introducing undergraduate health sciences students to the health care economics aspects of the medical entrepreneurship life cycle, including the US Food and Drug Administration regulatory environment, intellectual property, and medical billing and reimbursement structures.