Bibliometric measures for evaluating research units in the book-oriented humanities and social sciences are underdeveloped relative to those available for journal-oriented science and technology. We therefore present a new measure designed for book-oriented fields: the â libcitation count.â This is a count of the libraries holding a given book, as reported in a national or international union catalog. As librarians decide what to acquire for the audiences they serve, they jointly constitute an instrument for gauging the cultural impact of books. Their decisions are informed by knowledge not only of audiences but also of the book world, e.g., the reputations of authors and the prestige of publishers. From libcitation counts, measures can be derived for comparing research units. Here, we imagine a matchup between the departments of history, philosophy, and political science at the University of New South Wales and the University of Sydney in Australia. We chose the 12 books from each department that had thehighest libcitation counts in the Libraries Australia union catalog during 2000â 2006. We present each bookâ s raw libcitation count, its rank within its LC class, and its LC-class normalized libcitation score. The latter is patterned on the item-oriented field normalized citation score used in evaluative bibliometrics. Summary statistics based on these measures allow the departments to be compared for cultural impact. Our work has implications for programs such as Excellence in Research for Australia and the Research Assessment Exercise in the United Kingdom. It also has implications for data mining in OCLCâ s WorldCat.

The frequency distribution on online library resource usage by individual users (mostly students) at a distributed education graduate school is notably skewed, with a relatively small number of users showing frequent usage, and a large number of users showing infrequent usage.

LibQUAL+TM is a web-administered library service quality assessment protocol that has been used around the world in hundreds of different types of libraries. Data have been collected from almost 500,000 library users. The protocol has been used in several language variations. The purpose of the present study is to characterize the stability of LibQUAL+TM score norms across both time and various user cohorts. Library staff may place more confidence in benchmarking conclusions if the stability of the score norms can be demonstrated.

The Public Libraries Survey is conducted annually by the National Center for Education Statistics through the Federal-State Cooperative System for Public Library Data. The data are collected by a network of state data coordinators appointed by the chief officers of state library agencies in the 50 States, the District of Columbia, and the outlying areas. Data are collected on population of legal service area, service outlets, public service hours, library materials, total circulation, circulation of children's materials, reference transactions, library visits, children's program attendance, electronic services and information, staff, operating income, operating expenditures, capital outlay, and more.

Although the widely appreciated advantages of electronic journals in the sciences would indicate that they should be the preferred form of publication, they still persist in print as well. This study examines the relative use of bound and unbound journals in an academic biol¬ogy library to elucidate whether the use patterns of journals can give criteria for what journals should still continue in both formats. The data suggest that only a very small number of the journals studied are appropriate for continued publication in both print and electronic formats; almost all would be more appropriate as electronic only. The current collection policy of the Princeton Biology Library is therefore to obtain all appropriate titles that do not have significant browsing use in electronic format only.

This article examines selected economic and social indicators of our multiracial and multiethnic society at the end of the twentieth century to provide an information base for wise decisions about effective library services. The statistical profile describes the demography, economic well-being, and education attainment of the principal racial and Hispanic origin groups. The data show that progress in our nation's well-being has occurred, but a great deal remains to be done to achieve the goals of equity and equality of opportunity.

A survey was conducted of 969 science researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This long survey concluded with three questions requesting usersâ perceptions of the strengths and weaknesses of the campus libraries, and what single improvement the libraries could make to support scientific research and education. While the scope of these questions was more limited than large-scale surveys such as LibQUAL+TM, the results largely confirmed information from a local implementation of that survey. In addition, an interactive visualization tool was developed to help with analysis of the resulting comments. A summary of the major findings, recommendations for library improvements, and overall conclusions is given.

SFX is an XML based product designed to inter-link electronic resources with other resources in context-sensitive manner. SFX was first developed at the University of Ghent by Herbert Von de Sompel and has been released as a commercial product by Ex Libris. Use statistics garnered from SFX's statistics module since the implementation July of 2001 are discussed in the context of an academic research library environment. The results from usability testing conducted at Washington State University are reported. These usage statistics demonstrated a pattern of increasing use and exceptional use from FirstSearch databases.

This research explored the information needs of patient families and hospital staff at a pediatric hospital system in Dallas, Texas. Library statistics recorded in four hospital libraries from 2011 - 2013 were used to analyze the information requests from patient families and hospital staff. Crosstabulations revealed the extent to which patient families and hospital staff used the libraries to satisfy their information needs. The data showed that patient families used the libraries very differently than hospital staff. Chi-square tests for independence were performed to identify the relationships between the Classification (Patient Family, Hospital Staff) and two descriptors of information needs (Request Type, Resources Used). There were a total of 1,406 information requests analyzed. The data showed that patient families and hospital staff information requests differed greatly in the number of information requests, the type of information requested, the resources used and the time the library staff spent on the requests. Chi-square analyses revealed relationships statistically significant at the p < .05 level; however, the strength of the relationships varied.

Sachsen verfügt über ein vergleichweise dichtes Netz an Stadt- und Gemeindebibliotheken, die unterschiedliche regionale und lokale Aufgaben besitzen. Für die sächsische Bevölkerung standen 2009 203 kommunale Öffentliche Bibliotheken mit ihrem umfangreichen Medienangebot zur Verfügung. Die demographische Entwicklung in Sachsen und der damit verbundene Rückgang der Bevölkerung werden sich auf die Arbeit der ÖBs in den nächsten Jahren auswirken. In den Folgejahren sind die Bibliotheken gefordert, mit neuen Ideen und Kooperationsmodellen die Bürgernähe zu wahren.