Home July 2003 abstracts

College and Research Libraries
July 2003, Vol. 64, No. 4

Abstracts

The Role of the Academic Library in Promoting Student Engagement in Learning
George D. Kuh and Robert M. Gonyea
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This study examines the nature and value of undergraduate students’ experiences with the academic library. The data represent responses from more than 300,000 students between 1984 and 2002 to the College Student Experiences Questionnaire. Although library use did not appear to make independent contributions to desirable outcomes of college, such experiences were related to important educationally valuable activities. Because the emphasis a campus places on information literacy is a strong predictor of students becoming information literate, librarians should redouble their collaborative efforts to promote the value of information literacy and help create opportunities for students to evaluate the quality of the information they obtain.

Book Availability Revisited: Turnaround Time for Recalls versus Interlibrary Loans
David J. Gregory and Wayne A. Pedersen
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Librarians typically view interlibrary loan (ILL) as a means of providing access to items not owned by the local institution. However, they are less likely to explore ILL’s potential in providing timely access to items locally owned, but temporarily unavailable, particularly in the case of monographs in circulation. In a two-part study, the authors test the assumption that, on average, locally owned books that a patron finds unavailable (due to checkout) can be obtained more quickly via recall than via ILL. Phase 1 of this study establishes an average turnaround time for circulation recalls in a large academic library for comparison with well-established turnaround times for ILL borrowing transactions. In Phase 2, a more rigorous paired study of recalls and ILL compares the ability of each system to handle identical requests in real time. Results demonstrate that, under some circumstances, ILL provides a reasonable alternative to the internal recall process. The findings also underscore the need for more holistic, interservice models for improving not just access, but also the timeliness of access, to monograph collections.

Web Citation Availability: Analysis and Implications for Scholarship
Mary F. Casserly and James E. Bird
PDF version
Five hundred citations to Internet resources from articles published in library and information science journals in 1999 and 2000 were profiled and searched on the Web. The majority contained partial bibliographic information and no date viewed. Most URLs pointed to content pages with "edu" or "org" domains and did not include a tilde. More than half (56.4%) were permanent, 81.4 percent were available on the Web, and searching the Internet Archive increased the availability rate to 89.2 percent. Content, domain, and directory depth were associated with availability. Few of the journals provided instruction on citing digital resources. Eight suggestions for improving scholarly communication citation conventions are presented.

Slow Fires Still Burn: Results of a Preservation Assessment of Libraries In L’viv, Ukraine, and Sofia, Bulgaria
Brian J. Baird and Bradley L. Schaffner
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East Central European libraries face a serious threat of the potential disintegration of the vast majority of Slavic publications printed in the twentieth century. This loss will come as result of the combination of inferior materials used to produce most twentieth-century Slavic publications and inadequate facilities to house these collections. In an effort to gain a better understanding of the condition of Slavic publications, over the past two years, the authors have conducted collection condition surveys and reviewed the preservation operations of three major academic libraries in L’viv, Ukraine, and Sofia, Bulgaria. This paper presents the results of these surveys.