A content analysis of 220 job advertisements that appeared in College & Research Libraries between 1973 and 1998 demonstrates that by 1998, all academic library jobs routinely included computer technologies, that instruction had become an integral part of reference work, and that behavioral skills, especially oral and written communication skills, had emerged as new job requirements. The master’s degree from a program accredited by the ALA continues to be widely accepted as the appropriate professional degree for academic librarians.

This paper examines how history graduate students at one research university seek information and how they use the university library in their information-seeking process.The general question framing the study was whether graduate students in history demonstrate the same infor mation-seeking behavior as established scholars. Related questions explored the use of new technologies and the reliance that history gradu ate students place on reference librarians and librarians in special col lections.niversity librarians count historians among their most important users. Librarians have built major collections of primary source materials, including large repositories of archival and unpublished materials, in order to support the historical scholarship being carried out by the faculty and students. Long back files of journals and large monographic collections also have been acquired to support the work of historians; in these collections of secondary scholarly materials are published the results of historical research.As library collections grow and historical scholarship expands, librarians want to know more about the kinds of materials used by historians. Librarians also seek ways to keep informed about the general areas of historical scholarship in which the local scholars are working. Although investigations of the information-seeking behavior of humanistic scholars have been growing in number and sophistication, there have been few studies of historians. Only when scholarship in history began to shift from a narrative enterprise to one using many approaches more closely related to those of the social and behavioral sciences did studies emerge that emphasized the information-seeking behavior of historians. Furthermore, interest continues in the materials and formats used in historical research, for it is artificial to separate the methods historians use from the materials they use. In addition to the materials historians use, Roberto Delgadillo is a Graduate Student in Latin American Previous InvestigationsThe broader study of the informationseeking behavior of humanists has provided useful information. 2These studies have helped shape this present investigation. Most of them were carried out before information technology, particularly the Internet, made its impact on libraries. Libraries had catalogs, databases, and abstracts online in the 1980s, but the explosion of the Internet and the rapid expansion of textual materials online had not yet occurred. In the previous discussions of formats and materials used by humanists, little use of online texts was reported. Humanists have used computers for word processing since the mid-1980s or so, but as has been reported by William Goodrich Jones:Humanists [including historians] are essentially solitary workers, accustomed to spending hours with textual materials, whatever the format, and required to do so by the methodologies of the humanities. Close reading of texts and a mastery of the contents of a large number of documents are necessities. The availability of sophis...

book, Academic Library Centrality. This paper reports the results of interviews conducted in 2004 with the presidents and provosts of six universities and compares them with Grimes' findings. The analysis shows that major changes have occurred in the attitudes of university leaders toward their libraries during the last decade. These new findings provide direction for library leaders as they seek out new models of library service and reshape old models to fit the current environment of American higher education. The findings also point to the emergence of new competencies, skills, and knowledge as essential components of the job of the library director. The results of this study call into question the applicability of the centrality concept to libraries in universities and indicate the need for research that offers a relevant model for use in those settings.

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