Search results

In the spring of 1982, I published an article in Reference Services Review on marketing libraries and information services. The article covered available literature on that topic from 1970 through part of 1981, the time period immediately following Kotler and Levy's significant and frequently cited article in the January 1969 issue of the Journal of Marketing, which was first to suggest the idea of marketing nonprofit organizations. The article published here is intended to update the earlier work in RSR and will cover the literature of marketing public, academic, special, and school libraries from 1982 to the present.

The decade of the 1980s was unique for the sheer quantity of education reform reports and legislation. Virtually every state enacted education reform legislation, including reforms of teacher education, licensing, and comprehension. According to Darling‐Hammond and Berry, over 1,000 pieces of legislation related to teachers have been drafted since 1980, and “a substantial fraction have been implemented.” As I discussed in my 1989 RSR article, “Five Years after A Nation at Risk: An Annotated Bibliography,” two waves of 1980s reform reports were identified in the enormous body of primary and secondary literature dealing with education reform. The reform publications of the early 1980s stressed improvements in curricular standards, student performance outcomes, and changes to the education programs, such as salary increases, teacher testing, and stricter certification requirements. The second‐wave reform publications emphasized more complex issues centered around the concepts of restructuring the schools and teacher education programs, as well as empowering teachers to become more involved in curriculum and governance issues.

More than five years have passed since A Nation at Risk was published in 1983 by then‐Secretary of Education Terrance Bell's National Commission on Excellence in Education. Those years have seen the publication of an enormous body of both primary material, composed of research reports, essays, and federal and state reform proposals and reports; and secondary material, composed of summaries and reviews of the original reform reports and reports about effective programs that are based on reform recommendations. This annotated bibliography seeks to identify, briefly describe, and organize in a useful manner those publications dealing with K‐12 education reform and improvement. The overall purposes of this article are to bring organization to that list, and also to trace relationships and influences from the federal initiatives to the states and professional associations, and from there to the school districts and individual schools.

This descriptive research attempts to determine whether students are retaining knowledge from a single information literacy (IL) training session and whether there are other competencies that need to be covered in a 60 minute IL session.

A questionnaire was designed to measure IL learning outcomes that included formulating search strategies, evaluation of resources, and resource recognition. The tool was administered to students registered in an English class who were required to complete IL instruction. Students were given the test prior to IL instruction and post‐IL instruction.

The results of the study show a number of areas where the IL training sessions could be improved to better use the allotted 60 minutes. The trainers' findings gave clear directions on where to focus their efforts and where positive results are being achieved. The questionnaire was easy to administer and helped to fulfill the objectives of improving the IL training.

The questionnaire developed provides one more way for the IL team to assess student learning outcomes.

The value of this research has helped to provide structure to assessing the IL program and feeds into the current assessment culture. The questionnaire focuses on three common student learning outcomes which will be of value to academic instruction librarians.

Reports a survey of business librarians in the USA which investigates the role that they have played in the process of the accreditation of their business schools by the American Assembly of Collegiate Schools of Business. Two important findings are the reported lack of documentation available to the business librarians, and the perceived low levels of their involvement in the accreditation process. Argues that the involvement of the librarians will assist in the overall quality of business education and increase the visibility and usefulness of academic librarians to university administrators and teaching faculty.

In the Spring 1989 semester, the Interdisciplinary Studies Department of Salem State College first offered New Technologies for Information Retrieval. This three‐credit course provides an introduction to automated searching tools available to students directly at home or indirectly through libraries and colleges. Database searching, CD‐ROM, interactive videodisks, bulletin boards, electronic mail, and online catalogs are among the technologies discussed. This article will elaborate on the rationale, goals, development, execution, and outcomes of the course, and relate them to current discussions on the importance of expanding “information literacy” for students.

The aim of this paper is to determine whether or how academic libraries affect student achievement.

The paper uses computation of Pearson's r coefficients and predictor values for correlations of academic library statistics with first‐year retention and six‐year graduation rates reported to the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System by Southern Regional Education Board four‐year colleges and universities in 2010.

Book collection size in doctoral university libraries has the strongest correlation with retention and graduation rates, in the sample, and predicts for every 10 percent increase a 0.5 percent improvement in retention and a 0.7 percent higher graduation rate.

The paper documents the first impact study to correlate library statistics with both retention and graduation rates from a large sample of doctoral, Masters' and bachelors' degree‐conferring institutions. It calculates 21 predictor values of interest to academic administrators.

Randy Gadikian, Coordinator of Systems and Technology at the State University College at Buffalo (NY) Library, has been appointed interim chair of the IBM PC Library Users Group. Gadikian will preside over the first users group meeting, which will be convened in Chicago during the American Library Association's Annual Conference in July 1985. Rebecca Bills of the West Virginia School of Graduate Studies will serve as coordinator of the program for the initial meeting.

Have you ever wished your IBM‐compatible PC ran faster? Not everyone can afford a new AT, but for a few dollars and an hour's effort, you can increase the speed of your PC from five to ten percent. The secret of this increase is the new NEC V20 chip.