Orienting patrons to library spaces, collections, and services is an important, but time-intensive, challenge for many librarians. Library tours are one strategy commonly employed to familiarize patrons with library spaces and services. Augmented reality provides a new opportunity for librarians to develop engaging and interactive unmediated tours. Augmented reality tours provide participants with an opportunity to explore library spaces and service points while affording librarians the chance to share valuable information about those spaces and services. This article details how one library constructed an augmented reality tour and shares assessment-based insights into participant responses to the augmented reality format.
This article describes the results of an extensive review of reference transactions from multiple service points at the University of Utah’s J. Willard Marriott Library. The review enabled us to better understand the types of questions asked at our service points and resulted in a new set of codes for categorizing reference transactions that focus on recording the kinds of expertise needed to answer each question. We describe the differences between our model and other scales for collecting reference questions. Our method for reviewing reference transactions and developing new codes may be useful to other libraries interested in updating how they collect reference statistics.
Academic libraries, together with their colleges and universities, are increasingly identifying first-generation college students as an underserved population that is likely to experience barriers to library access and usage. Less is known, however, about the information literacy skills of first-generation students, particularly in comparison with their continuing-generation counterparts. This study assessed the information literacy skills of first-generation college students in general education courses at Texas A&M University to inform information literacy instructional efforts and to inform advocacy efforts for developing substantial and sustained information literacy support for first-generation students at that campus. Study results indicate that firstgeneration students experience significant information literacy gaps in comparison with continuing-generation students at the same institution and in the same courses.
This article describes how the University of Utah's J. Willard Marriott Library implemented a competency-based, talent management system across the organization management system across the organization process to address organizational, departmental, and individual needs. Success of the implementation was mixed. Designing human resources systems around core competencies made organizational values and goals concrete but proved unsustainable in the long-term. Using core competencies to shape departmental goals, coach staff and library faculty, and onboard new employees proved beneficial at the middle management level.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.