Barbara B. Moran

Restructuring the University Library: A North American Perspective.

As a result of rapid environmental changes, organisations of all types are rethinking their organisational structures in an attempt to provide greater effectiveness and efficiency. A few years ago business process re‐engineering (BPR) was considered the most promising way to restructure an organisation, but has become less popular as shortcomings associated with the process have become evident. Today, greater emphasis is being placed upon modifying the actual organisational structure. Most restructured organisations have moved away from rigid hierarchies to flatter, more flexible structures. Many of the same forces (including increased automation, changing information needs and expectations of users, reduced budgets and the need for staff to have more autonomy over their own work) that have precipitated the reshaping of other organisations have also affected academic libraries. This paper describes some of the factors leading to changes in the organisational structures of academic libraries and provides an overview of trends, excluding convergence, discernible in North America. The paper includes suggestions for steps to be taken to facilitate successful reorganisations, and comments on possible future developments that might radically alter the organisational structures of academic libraries.

Retrieval effectiveness of surname-title-word searches for known items by academic library users

This article reports the findings of an experiment using a simulated title page, author surnames, and title words, one-third of which were selected by each of the three authors, to determine the frequency of one-screen displays when used to search for known items in an implied boolean retrieval system. Searches comprising surname plus one significant title word produced one-screen displays 78% of the time; surname plus two words 97% of the time; and surname plus three words 98.5%. Three-quarters of the significant words were nouns.

Information Professionals 2050: Educating the next generation of information professionals

Over the past decade in the United States an enormous amount of critical attention has been focused upon all aspects of higher education. Much of this attention has been spawned by utilitarian concerns about economic costs and subsequent career return on investment,2 and by innovations in technology that lead to globalization and alternative modes of teaching and learning. Scientific and technical advances have become increasingly dependent on interdisciplinary teams that leverage diversity of thinking and work practices to solve complex problems and develop new fields of study that aggregate or subsume traditional boundaries. The structure and traditions of higher education resist development of interdisciplinary instructional degrees and programs. Critics of education have been especially harsh in judging those schools designed to educate individuals to enter various types of professions. Professional education has always faced tension in balancing theory and practice and today’s utilitarian concerns tend to emphasize translating theory to practice and embracing technology to improve productivity. These professional schools have been reproached for providing education that is outdated and inappropriate to meet the needs of the modern age. Professional schools of all types are now reconsidering long accepted pedagogical approaches and searching for ways to modernize both what is taught and how it is taught. Many large scale assessments of professional education in specific professions have attempted to provide new alternative approaches. For instance, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching has recently funded a series of studies examining the educational preparation for many professions, including medicine, nursing, engineering, law and the clergy [1,4,5,8,9]. The changes that are occurring within the environment in which professional schools operate necessitate a reexamination of the old patterns of education. These traditional models have become outdated in the modern world where the nature of higher education, libraries, and information resources are affected by globalization, new technologies, multiculturalism and both financial and environmental constraints. As part of this reexamination, it is time for the institutions which prepare information professionals to re-envision the education that will be needed for the next half-century. Information Professionals 2050

Surname plus recallable title word searches for known items by scholars

This experiment searches an online library catalog employing author surnames, plus title words of books in citations of eight scholarly works whose authors selected the title words used as being recallable. Searches comprising surname together with two recallable title words, or one if only one was available, yielded a single‐screen miniature catalog (minicat) 99.0% of the time.