Journal of Academic Librarianship最新文献

WeChat official accounts (WCOAs) have emerged as a prevalent medium for information dissemination in Chinese academic libraries over the past decade. This study quantitatively analyzed the whole-year performance of 120 WCOAs from 117 medical college and university libraries, using the WeChat communication index (WCI) algorithm to evaluate communication power at three levels: macro-level accounts, meso-level content themes, and micro-level individual posts. The results showed that 55.6 % of the libraries have activated WCOAs, with an average annual output of 129 posts and 72 broadcasts per account. However, these accounts demonstrated a relatively low average WCI of 249.24, with a small percentage of high-impact posts. A deeper analysis reveals that reading promotion was the overarching theme, and basic library services and digital resource services were frequently highlighted with a high topic communication index. Notable concerns were also identified, including non-audience-centric posting schedules, a disproportionate focus on leisure-oriented content rather than academic support, and a scarcity of original posts. This study provides a snapshot of the developmental stages of WCOAs in Chinese academic libraries from a publication and communication perspective, and also offers pragmatic guidance for their development.

The purpose of this study was to better understand how individual research consultations (IRCs) with a librarian impact undergraduate social work students' feelings, thoughts, and actions during their information search process. Screencast videography was the primary method of data collection in this qualitative case study. Participants (n = 7) were sampled from a social work research seminar course at a regional university in the upper Midwest. Both prior to and after an IRC, study participants joined a recorded Zoom meeting with the researcher, share their screen, and talk aloud during their search process. Follow up interviews with participants were also conducted. Results showed participants' feelings moved from confused prior to the IRC to confident after the IRC. Participants had a more refined topic and were more effective in applying inclusion and exclusion criteria when selecting articles for their literature review assignment after the IRC. The actions students took after the IRC were more beneficial to their information search process, especially when it came to reading and understanding scholarly research. These results underscore the value IRCs can provide to undergraduate social work students. The findings of this study demonstrate and explain changes in student information seeking as a result of an IRC.

Librarian co-authorship of knowledge synthesis (KS) research is on the rise, demonstrating growing recognition of the value librarians bring to research teams. This study analyzes trends in KS research output at a mid-sized doctoral granting university between 2017 and 2022, with a focus on librarian involvement. Using PubMed, Scopus, and the Social Sciences Citation Index & Arts and Humanities Citation Index, all KS research published by researchers at our institution between 2017 and 2022 was retrieved. A content analysis was conducted, and findings reveal a 280 % increase in librarian co-authorship during this period, coinciding with a 54 % overall growth in KS publications. Health sciences continue to dominate as the primary creators of KS research, with <10 % of published KS published in the sciences, humanities, and social sciences. Notably, systematic reviews with librarian co-authors were published in journals with higher Journal Impact Factors (JIFs) than those without. This research underscores the vital role librarians play in advancing KS research, the importance of advocating for librarian co-authorship, and highlights the need for increased librarian engagement in non-health disciplines.

Information literacy is a crucial skill often overlooked by faculty in higher education, who expect incoming Gen Z students to have some ability to navigate the information landscape appropriately and efficiently either from prior high school instruction or simply by the ubiquity of information access. Assessments of college students' information literacy paints a different picture, indicating that information literacy instruction is required and that deliberate efforts should be made to aid students in proper evaluation and use of informational media. This study investigates the value of generalized information literacy instruction at a medium-sized, public 4-year university in a rural area. Student knowledge is assessed pre- and post-instruction to determine specific impacts of information literacy instruction on various facets of information literacy – source quality, relevance, and context. Specifically, the purpose of this research is to determine (1) whether information literacy varies across students in different fields/disciplines and (2) if so, whether generalized information literacy instruction tends to close those cross-disciplinary gaps or extend existing disparities. Data collected herein demonstrate that gains in information literacy vary substantially by academic discipline. For example, students in the College of Humanities and Fine Arts began with the second-highest average pre-instruction scores (75.00 %) and exhibited the largest gains between pre- and post-instruction assessments (+12.14 %). The results obtained in this study indicate that generalized instruction tends to inflate existing disparities in information literacy between disciplines. Based on these findings, there is ample evidence to suggest that discipline-specific information literacy instruction could provide students with larger individual gains and potentially allow information literacy to converge across fields.

This article reports on the findings of assessment tools designed to measure undergraduate students' academic engagement, psychological factors (self-regulation), factors affecting academic work, and students' evaluation of their academic success. Two assessment tools (Student Academic Engagement and Success Survey and Online Weekly Journal) were developed to explore these relationships. The Student Academic Engagement and Success Survey was distributed online to undergraduate students and the Online Weekly Journal was used to measure student engagement over an 8-week period with a subgroup of the survey participants. The use of the physical and online library emerged as the top two frequently utilized campus resources. Factors that affected students' performance related to their academic work included stress, social media, and socializing with friends. Students who perceived themselves as not meeting their academic success goals may have compensated by utilizing library resources more frequently. The findings highlight the complex dynamics of students' characteristics, academic engagement, library utilization, their ability to manage their behaviors, and various factors shaping their perception of academic success.

Academic libraries now host specialized units capable of digitally reproducing three-dimensional (3D) objects-of-study. Deployed in virtual and augmented reality, these surrogates provide the means for researchers and students to remotely experience diverse scholarly materials first-hand, though this content seldom finds its way into institutional repositories or peer-reviewed literature where it could be reused and cited. The following, then, is intended as a survey of interrelated - but administratively disparate - 3D data production, (immersive) analytics, and preservation methods, which combine to connect a range of computational processes. By illuminating the complete lifecycle of 3D data in this way, current and future practitioners – including those positioned withing more traditional library facilities and service units – can implement scalable processes that ensure the scholarly rigor of 3D contents, thereby preserving these materials as credible (i.e., FAIR) primary sources for downstream citation by researchers across disciplines.

This study investigates the ability of voice assistants and generative AI tools to respond to reference questions traditionally received by academic librarians. The authors created a sample of 25 questions based on queries received on the virtual reference service at their institution. They then created a rubric to evaluate the quality of the answers that the AI powered tools provided. The authors determined that the tools understand reference questions well and provide relevant answers but that the quality of the references provided, and the accuracy of the answers can be lacking. They suggest that more research needs to be done to understand the place of AI powered tools in reference services.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has entered libraries in various ways and raised concern about its potential ethical consequences therein. A number of approaches have been developed to encourage ethical AI and audit the ethics of specific AI applications, but very few approaches have been applied or tested, especially in a library setting, and so it remains unclear which, if any approaches are suitable or useful for encouraging ethical AI in libraries. We applied Ethical Foresight Analysis as an approach to identify possible ethical risks of an AI project for (semi-)automated subject indexing in a large research library. Specifically, to identify risks we conducted a two-round ethical Delphi study wherein experts on AI development, library practices, and AI ethics sought consensus on potential risks and their relative importance. The experts' post-test reflections on the procedure were then collected to inform an evaluation of the approach's feasibility. A variety of ethical risks of the specific project and of general AI indexing were indeed identified, most notably discrimination and under-representation stemming from attributes of the bibliographic training data provided by the library (e.g. varied historical contexts and gaps left by unindexed items). However, we identified some drawbacks of the approach tested: (1) it is time-consuming, which is likely prohibitive for many libraries, and (2) the identified risks were mainly well-known issues of AI and its training data rather than the subtle, application-specific, and human-centred issues that ethical foresight analysis might be employed to identify. Thus, although libraries should continue to model ethical AI through careful planning and auditing, alternative development and auditing approaches may be more practical to undertake and more effective at identifying novel or application-specific issues.

For many reasons, not every organizational member will have equal access to career progression or senior leadership positions. Barriers to advancement have been widely studied with demographic differences (e.g., gender, race) but little research has focused on deep-level, cognitive differences. Reasons for disproportionate advancement may be related to individual differences between groups, perceptual biases, or contextual factors. The present study investigated differences between two groups of information science professionals, one that readily advances to senior positions, and the other that does not. In a sample of 460 librarians and archivists, it was found that the two groups were largely similar on individual differences yet varied in their experiences at their organization. Both groups had overlapping personal values and similar levels of worry/concern about leading. However, archivists were significantly lower in engagement at work, leadership support/development, and affective motivation to lead. Recommendations for future research are discussed and it is suggested that organizations pay attention to imbalances in engagement and opportunities across units/specialties.

Library and information science (LIS) has long consisted of more women than men, at least in sheer numbers of library employees, but men are the primary authors of library literature. This study explores LIS literature published between 2003 and 2021 to identify if there are differences in the publishing patterns of women and men. The authors used content analysis to code the entire sample to identify overall subject trends after authors were categorized as women or men by mainly automated methods, using two R packages, genderize and ssa. The results show that there are overall inequities when compared to the profession as whole between the publishing rates of women and men in LIS, as well as differences in publication patterns by subjects and within specific journals. Shifts in subjects over the period under investigation did not increase the percentage of women publishing in the selected LIS journals. The authors conclude more research needs to be conducted to determine the cause of inequities in publishing not just among women and men, but all underrepresented voices in LIS.