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 LJ ’s first readers’ advisory (RA) survey in eight years found that RA is a growing practice, but librarians want more training and tools to do it better, particularly in genres they don’t read for pleasure. Can crowdsourcing help RA keep up?

Flat budgets, price increases, and a reliance on status journals for tenure and promotion keep familiar pressures on the serials marketplace.

More than one-third (37%) of academic library materials budgets go to database subscriptions and electronic reference materials, followed by journals and serials (23%), print books (22%), ebooks (11%), and media/streaming media (5%), according to the Academic Library Collection Development Survey 2017, conducted by LJ’s research department and sponsored by EBSCO. Book holdings are still weighted toward print, with survey respondents, on average, describing print as 60.3 percent of their overall collection, and ebooks as 39.7 percent.

When LibGuides 2 was released in 2015, Texas A&M University Libraries seized the opportunity to rethink radically our LibGuides program. Instead of transferring existing content to the new platform, we chose to start from scratch with a renewed focus on the user experience within Guides. A pivotal part of this reconstruction involved training more than 60 librarians and staff members who serve as LibGuides creators.

In a May 2 statement, the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) announced that Louisiana State University (LSU) filed a lawsuit against academic publishing company Elsevier for breach of contract on February 27. According to the complaint, Elsevier cut off the LSU School of Veterinary Medicine’s (SVM) access to content that was legally licensed by LSU Libraries. For many reasons, especially Elsevier’s often contentious relationship with libraries over the decades, this will be one of the more interesting cases to watch unfold.

The shift to digital delivery of serials content has had a profound effect on the information ecosystem. Powerful discovery and social networking tools expose users to an incredibly rich world of commercially produced and open access (OA) content. Most publishers have explored new ways of pricing their content—such as population served, FTE (full-time equivalent), tiered pricing based upon Carnegie classification, or other defining criteria—or the database model, which treats all content within an e-journal package as a database, eliminating the need for title by title reconciliation. However, in the end, the pricing conversation always seems to circle back to the revenue generated by the annual subscription model.

Although every library would benefit from running usability studies, not every library has a dedicated staff available to conduct those studies. Anecdotally, librarians seem to feel incapable of undertaking usability studies for reasons including time, budget, and expertise.

Many academic repositories contain a vast amount of material beyond the requisite theses and dissertations. Those that do ingest them often contain such documents dating back to the 1800s or, in some cases, earlier. That might not sound like something to get too excited about. But, do you know who does get enthusiastic about that? The web surfer who stumbles across something her beloved great-great-grandfather wrote in 1886, or his father presented at a conference in 1970, or a whole host of other legacy material that can be found in an institutional repository.

Smartphone ownership is quickly becoming the norm, and smartphones have become a primary Internet access point for low income consumers. Here's a look at a few emerging trends, as libraries adapt to this growth by launching apps and responsive websites.