EN :

Objective – As academic libraries evolve to meet the changing needs of students in the digital age, the emphasis has shifted from the physical book collection to a suite of services incorporating innovations in teaching, technology, and social media, among others. Based on trends identified by the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) and other sources, the authors investigated the extent to which academic libraries have adopted 21st century library trends.

Methods – The authors examined the websites of 100 Association of Research Libraries (ARL) member libraries, their branches, and 160 randomly selected academic libraries to determine whether they adopted selected 21st century library trends.

Results – Results indicated that ARL member libraries were significantly more likely to adopt these trends, quite possibly due to their larger size and larger budgets.

Conclusion – This research can assist librarians, library directors, and other stakeholders in making the case for the adoption or avoidance of particular 21st century library trends, especially where considerable outlay of funds is necessary.

EN :

Objective – The Toronto Public Library has been frequently identified as having an exemplary multilingual collection to serve the information needs of the most diverse population in Canada; however, there is no evidence or collection assessment information available in the literature to validate those claims. This research sought to gain an understanding of the current state of their multilingual collection and compare it to the most recent multicultural population demographics.

Methods – This was a case study of the Toronto Public Library multilingual collection using data collected from their online public access catalogue in November 2017. Data was collected about all languages available, with English, French, and the 17 most spoken mother tongues explored in more detail. Language results from the Statistics Canada 2016 Census of Population were also collected. Data was used to calculate and compare the English, French, and language collections to the population of reported mother tongues spoken in Toronto.

Results – It was found that the Toronto Public Library has items in 307 languages. While the collection comprises many languages, there is far more focus on official language items than any other language compared to the population in terms of number of items and variety of formats. All 17 non-official languages that were studied had fewer items proportionally available in the catalogue than the proportion of speakers with that mother tongue.

Conclusion – The high circulation rates of the Toronto Public Library’s multilingual collection indicate that it has had some success in meeting the needs of its community. However, as the largest library system in Canada with a highly regarded multilingual collection and with many resources for collection development, the Toronto Public Library falls short of having a language collection that is proportional to the languages spoken within the community. While it may not be possible to have a multilingual collection that is entirely representative of the community, this study shows that libraries can use census data to monitor population shifts in order to be responsive to the information needs of their changing communities.

EN :

Objective – This cross-sectional, descriptive study seeks to address a gap in knowledge of both information literacy (IL) self-efficacy and IL skills of students entering Louisiana State University’s Master of Library and Information Science (MLIS) program.

Methods – An online survey testing both IL self-efficacy and skills was administered through Qualtrics. The online survey instrument used items from existing instruments (Beile, 2007; Michalak & Rysavy, 2016) and was distributed to two cohorts of incoming students; the first cohort entered the MLIS program in fall 2017, and the second entered in spring 2018.

Results – Data varied between cohorts and between survey instruments for both IL self-efficacy and skills; however, bivariate analysis of data indicated a moderate positive correlation between overall IL self-efficacy and demonstrated IL skill scores in both fall 2017 and spring 2018 cohorts.

Conclusion – The study indicates a need for a larger, multi-institutional study using a rigorously validated instrument to gather data and make generalizable inferences about the IL self-efficacy and skills of incoming LIS graduate students.

EN :

Objective – This study re-examines the findings of a paper (Ladd, 2010) that investigated whether evidence indicated print equivalent journal collections needed to be preserved, based on the quality of their electronic surrogates. The current study investigates whether: 1) electronic surrogate articles that failed (i.e., the print equivalent article needed to be consulted to view all the content/information) in the first study had improved in quality; and 2) there was evidence that poor-quality electronic surrogates could impact on research if the print equivalent articles did not exist.

Methods – Each of the 198 PDF documents identified in the 2010 study as failing were re-examined to assess whether any change in quality had occurred. To assess the possible impact for researchers if they needed to rely solely on poor-quality electronic journal surrogates, citation data were collected for each of the failed scholarly PDFs using Web of Science and Scopus, and usage count data were collected from Web of Science.

Results – Across the electronic journal backfiles/archives examined, there were 13.6% fewer failures of electronic surrogates for all PDF documents than in the original study, while for scholarly PDF documents (e.g., research papers) there were 13.8% fewer failures. One electronic journal archive accounted for 91.7% of the improvement for scholarly PDF documents. A second archive accounted for all the observed improvement for non-scholarly PDF documents. The study found that for the failed scholarly PDF documents from the original study, 58.7% had been cited or had Web of Science usage counts from 2010 onward.

Conclusion – The study demonstrates a continued need for retaining print equivalent journal titles for the foreseeable future, while poor-quality electronic surrogates are being replaced and digitally preserved. There are still poor-quality images, poor-quality scans of text-only articles, missing pages, and even content of PDF documents that could not be explained (e.g., incorrect text for images when compared to the print). While it is known that not all researchers will consult each of the papers that they cite, although it is best practice to do so, the extent of citations of the failed scholarly PDF documents indicate that having to rely solely on electronic surrogates could pose a problem for researchers.