Index to Volume 62

Library Investment Index – Why is it Important?

On 24 February 2022, Russia invaded and began a war in Ukraine. After it commenced, the international library and information community began responding. Specifically, formal public-facing response on the conflict were released by the American Library Association (ALA), Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA), Canadian Federation of Library Associations (CFLA), Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP), Danish Library Association (DLA), European Bureau of Library, Information and Documentation Associations (EBLIDA), International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA), Library Association of Latvia (LAL), and New Zealand Library Association Inc. (LIANZA). Chronicling and describing the international library and information community’s first public-facing responses addressing Russia’s war in Ukraine is the main objective of this article. Drawing upon a combined policy and thematic analysis of some of these first formal public responses, the article aims are to help account, review, and contextualize the ways in which this community considered the war during its first week and, in turn, reveal areas or issues of convergence or divergence between them. Specifically, it provides a snapshot in time revealing the international library and information community’s immediate perspectives and positions on the war during its earliest stages. For instance, the formal public responses released by the ALA, ALIA, CFLA, CILIP, DLA, EBLIDA, IFLA, LAL, and LIANZA during the war’s first week demonstrates international concern about the conflict and its affects on their Ukrainian counterparts and cultural heritage. Broad thematic convergence surfaces across the responses. Almost all plead for solutions to and resolution of the war. A majority offer solidarity for Ukrainian colleagues and all Ukrainians, support democracy and freedom of expression, asseverate for spreading accurate information about the war, and condemn Russia’s assault. Additional themes appearing in some of the responses include assisting Ukrainian refugees and displaying dismay regarding threats confronting Ukrainian cultural heritage.

Academic Library Residency Programs and Diversity Julie Garrison (bio) Since the 1940s, academic and research libraries have offered post-masters' residency programs (called internships, residencies, or fellowships interchangeably) to provide professional training and mentoring for new librarians entering academic library careers. Those who participate in residencies tend to appreciate the experience and find that it supports individual career growth. They report gaining useful knowledge, marketable skills, and professional connections. They also derive benefits from growing their networks, participating in professional-level work and meaningful projects, and experiencing the academic library culture.1 By the early to mid-1980s, residency programs began focusing on recruitment of minority librarians. Initially, these programs were inspired by affirmative action, a United States government policy that supported members of disadvantaged groups who had suffered discrimination. More recently, residency programs shifted to addressing the desire to grow a workforce more representative of society in general.2 Despite these efforts, however, change has been slow.3 Residents and Librarians: Still Predominantly White In 1997, Julie Brewer surveyed 230 prior post-master's residents. The majority of survey participants were white women, overrepresenting "the older, larger residency programs in government libraries." Only 19 of the 109 respondents stated they had taken part in a program "targeted to racial and ethnic minorities."4 Another survey of residency programs in 2013 more narrowly focused on evaluating residencies for librarians of color. It explored "the general structure of residencies, such as the number of residents in a cohort, efforts to promote diversity, and professional skills." Of the 68 who responded, nearly 40 percent (26) were white, and 84.8 percent identified as female.5 While the number of respondents from racially or ethnically diverse backgrounds in both surveys was small, each suggested that residencies attracted individuals who would not have otherwise considered academic librarianship as a career choice and succeeded in retaining professionals in library-related positions. [End Page 405] An examination of American Library Association (ALA) demographic data and Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) information indicates that the library profession remains predominantly white (86.7 percent according to the ALA in 2017, 87.8 percent per the BLS in 2019) and overwhelmingly female. While diversity has improved since the 2006 ALA membership report, in which 89 percent of members identified as white, the needle has scarcely moved toward building a more representative profession.6 A review of who received master's degrees in library and information science suggests that graduates have not increased in diversity either. A comparison of 2011 and 2017 graduation rates reported by the Association of Library Information Science Education (ALISE) shows that the percentage of Hispanic graduates doubled (6.2 percent in 2017 compared to 2.96 percent in 2011), but those from other racial groups increased by less than 1 percent. Given that fewer individuals graduate from LIS programs, the number of underrepresented minorities entering the profession remains nearly static. One caveat to these data is that both years report a relatively large pool of "unknown" and "international" students, and in 2017 an additional 2 percent (150) identify as "two or more races."7 The ACRL Diversity Alliance In 2014, when Jon Cawthorne became dean of libraries at West Virginia University (WVU) in Morgantown, he attempted to breathe new life into residency programs by forming the Diversity Alliance, a group of academic libraries that pledged to offer residencies to underrepresented groups. In addition to establishing a new institutional residency program at WVU, Cawthorne recruited like-minded institutions to do the same, growing a network of residencies aimed at supporting professionals from diverse backgrounds in "getting the experience they need to be successful in the academic library world." In 2016, the Diversity Alliance partnered with the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) to further expand its reach and broaden residency opportunities.8 For decades, ACRL had studied and analyzed opportunities for adding to the mix of ethnic and racial groups in the library profession. It had developed guidelines and stated its commitment to diversity in its strategic plans. It had produced reports with recommendations for advancing diversity efforts, and it had embraced the goal of recruiting a more representative workforce within academic libraries. The ACRL...

Reviewed by: The Early Information Society: Information Management in Britain before the Computer Genevieve Williams The Early Information Society: Information Management in Britain before the Computer. By Alistair Black, Dave Muddiman, and Helen Plant. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2007. 288 pp. $114.95. £60.00. ISBN 978-0-7546-4279-4. The information society, defined as a society where commerce in information is a significant activity, is generally supposed to have begun concurrently to the computer age. Certainly, the term "information society" as well as the concepts it embodies and the widespread use of the word "computer" began to enter common parlance in the 1970s. Such is the basis for Black, Muddiman, and Plant's thesis, upon which they build the argument that the information society as both [End Page 355] a concept and a reality actually began substantially earlier—at least in Britain, the area under study, and the United States. The rise of the computer and its subsequent rapid integration into every aspect of modern life may then be interpreted as a response to a need: the need for a technological solution to the exponential rise in volume of information in the twentieth century, particularly scientific and technical information. The Early Information Society, then, posits an origin of the information society in the nineteenth century, not the twentieth, and demonstrates from a variety of perspectives the developing information infrastructure that preceded the desktop computer, the computer network, and the Internet. In support of its argument, it acknowledges the early prescient contributions to the notion of the information society, particularly the observations of Fritz Machlup that led to his 1962 book The Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States and Vannevar Bush's "As We May Think" from the July 1945 issue of Atlantic Monthly and claims that while these are also referred to by those who cite the origin of the information society around 1970, they are in fact products of a much earlier commodification of information. Instead of treating this history chronologically, Black, Muddiman, and Plant choose a faceted approach: in turn, they consider the environment in which the information society grew and developed (namely, infrastructure, networks, and the state), approaches to information management, and the information workforce during this period. Despite the fairly narrow focus of their study (a period of, at the outside, sixty years, and dealing largely with those organizations, collections, and services that fall under the designation "special" libraries or knowledge organizations), the authors uncover a wealth of previously largely invisible history that still influences libraries and information organizations. This includes the rapid proliferation of scientific and technical information, particularly after World War II; the development of professional library and information associations, especially the Association of Special Libraries and Information Bureaux (ASLIB); knowledge management in organizations of various kinds, notably the company library; and developments in education for the information professions. A chapter on the gendered nature of information work in Britain illustrates that the male domination of managerial positions in special libraries and knowledge organizations is nothing new and in fact can be said to have its origins in the period under discussion. Plant also shows how women's entries into lower-ranking special library positions were often their only access to scientific and research organizations that otherwise remained closed to them, often despite substantial academic preparation. Many of the themes revealed in this history will resonate with information professionals of the present day: the problem of managing burgeoning research literature; persistent issues of access, publication, and control; the recognized need for organization and coordination across an emerging professional discipline; separation and rapprochement between librarianship and information science; information overload and office management; and the emergence of the study of information as a distinct area of scholarship. Of course, it behooves the authors to draw these similarities between information-related concerns of the early twentieth century and those of the early twenty-first, since this supports their argument that these concerns are not new, and neither is the informational context from which [End Page 356] they arise. However, their case is a convincing one, not only detailing a previously little-known area of the history of library and information...

Library leadership development for BIPOC populations in research intensive environments

For centuries, libraries, archives and museums from across Europe have been the custodians of our rich and diverse cultural heritage. They have preserved and provided access to the testimonies of knowledge, beauty and imagination, such as sculptures, paintings, music and literature. The new information technologies have created unbelievable opportunities to make this common heritage more accessible for all. Recently, the European Commission commissioned a ‘Comité des Sages’ to make recommendations on ways and means to make Europe's cultural heritage and creativity available on the Internet and to preserve it for future generations. In the United States the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) endorsed a number of principle recommendations to its members regarding the digitisation of cultural heritage. Both the Comité des Sages and the ARL emphasize the added value of digitisation. The Comité underlines that the digitised material can in itself be a driver of innovation and can be at the basis of new services in sectors such as tourism and learning (Comité des Sages 2011) and the ARL stresses the added value for researchers (ARL Principles July 2010). For over a century, libraries have participated in successful resource sharing cooperatives that have made content widely accessible. According to both the ARL and the Comité, the same spirit should govern commercial digitisation activities. In the best of all possible worlds, there would in our view be some level of free access to all content, with only special value-added services restricted to a subscription model. A landmark in the discussion about Open Access to information is the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities. Referring to this Declaration, people often put emphasis on recent research publications. But the following is also one of the objectives of the Declaration: “encouraging the holders of cultural heritage to support open access by providing their resources on the Internet” (Berlin Declaration 2003). Therefore, in the spirit of the Berlin Declaration, the ARL encourages its members’ libraries to grant all non-commercial users “a free, irrevocable, worldwide, right of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship”. And: “If fees are to be assessed for the use of digitised public domain works, those fees should only apply to commercial uses” (ARL Principles July 2010). In our view, cultural heritage institutions should make public domain material digitised with public funding as widely available as possible for access and reuse. The public sector has the primary responsibility to fund digitisation. The involvement of private partners, however, is encouraged by ARL as well as the Comité des Sages. Private funding for digitisation is a complement to the necessary public investment, especially in times of economic crisis, but should not be seen as a substitute for public funding. As we can see from these reports there are a number of arguments in favour of digitisation and also of providing maximum accessibility to the digitised cultural heritage. In this paper we will investigate the legal aspects of digitisation of cultural heritage, especially public domain material. On the basis of these we will make an inventory of policy considerations regarding reuse. Furthermore, we will describe the conclusions the National Library of the Netherlands (hereafter: KB) has formulated and the arguments that support these. In this context we will review public-private partnerships and also the policy of the KB. We will conclude with recommendations for cultural heritage institutions concerning a reuse policy for digitised public domain material.

Ten years after the Medical Library Association (MLA) adopted its first research policy, the 1995 Using Scientific Evidence to Improve Information Practice [1], MLA President Joanne Gard Marshall, FMLA, appointed a task force to research and publish a new official statement [2]. The resulting MLA research policy statement, The Research Imperative, was approved by the MLA Board of Directors in 2007 and “challenges MLA members to build a supportive culture that values and contributes to a research base that is recognized as an essential tool for future practice” [2]. It describes domains of research as well as basic, advanced, and specialized research skills sets. The Research Imperative encourages health sciences library and information science (LIS) practitioners to take advantage of different educational opportunities to acquire and build on that skills set. Specifically, it recommends, “4. MLA will provide and promote education and training to support health sciences information research. To accomplish this recommendation, MLA will work with academic programs to ensure that opportunities to develop quantitative and qualitative research knowledge and skills appear throughout the curriculum, provide a complete range of basic and advanced courses in quantitative and qualitative research methodology through MLA's continuing education (CE) program, and encourage graduate LIS schools to require master's degree students to undertake a research project in information science” [3]. Curricular decisions for programs leading to the LIS master's degree (MLIS) are shaped by many factors, not the least of which is the very wide variety of careers that holders of such degrees can expect to have. Many will undoubtedly work in school, public, academic, or special libraries. Many others will be information professionals in archives, museums, corporations, and other organizations. In any case, a major driver for MLIS curricula is program accreditation by the American Library Association (ALA). The ALA Standards for Accreditation do not specify exactly what courses should be taught, but the accreditation seeks evidence of various curricular elements. In particular, the standards require that a program's mission, goals, and objectives include: “the importance of research to the advancement of the field's knowledge base…the importance of the contributions of library and information studies to other fields of knowledge [and]…the importance of the contributions of other fields of knowledge to library and information studies.” Furthermore, they seek evidence that the curriculum of an accredited program “emphasizes the evolving body of knowledge that reflects the findings of basic and applied research from relevant fields” [4]. Do MLIS academic programs “ensure…opportunities to develop quantitative and qualitative research knowledge and skills?” Do they “require master's degree students to undertake a research project in information science” [3]? Evidence of such opportunities would include (but not be limited to) courses and evidence of whether research projects are required for graduation from such programs. In a comparison of LIS research course requirements with those of other master's level programs in related disciplines, Park studied the 2002 graduate catalogs of fifty-two of the then fifty-six ALA-accredited MLIS programs as well as the catalogs of master's of business administration, master's of social work, and master's of education programs at some of those schools. She found that all but three of the MLIS programs offered research methods courses, but only twenty required such a course for graduation [5]. Park reported that “LIS does not use consistent terminology across schools to identify what constitutes a ‘research methods’ course” and that the courses “vary from comprehensive coverage of both quantitative and qualitative methods to superficial inclusion of simple survey methods.” Park discussed aspects of the MLIS degree that related to research “at the consumer level” and “at the contributor level” [5]. Evidence-based LIS (and other types of evidence-based practice) are examples of the use of the consumer level of research expertise. Practitioners in many fields can confuse the two functions, especially when the word “research” is taken to include searching literature for published scientific studies, as opposed to actually carrying out such studies. The Research Imperative quite rightly calls for health sciences librarians to practice as consumers of and contributors to research in the discipline. This study seeks evidence of the current availability of required or elective research methods courses and research projects as a graduation requirement in ALA-accredited masters' programs in library and information science.

PurposeAims to provide highlights from the American Library Association (ALA) 2005 Midwinter meeting.Design/methodology/approachProvides a brief report of the meeting held in Boston, MA. in January 2005.FindingsOutlines how the Public Library Association (PLA) debuted blogging at this meeting and provides a summary of the ever popular ALA Technology Showcase – the highlights of which included shared networks, library data mining and audio archives. Concludes with highlights from various Library and Information Technology Association (LITA) meetings and discussions and a detailed report on the Standards Interest Group.Originality/valueA report of interest to library and information management professionals.

Ensuring More Inclusive Hiring Processes Carmen Cole (bio) and Emily Mross (bio) The American Library Association (ALA) considers demonstrating “the principles of effective personnel practices and human resource development” a core competency of librarianship.1 Yet, few librarians receive specific training to serve on hiring committees as part of their degree studies, though most find themselves asked to participate in searches, sometimes frequently, depending on their institution. As early career librarians, the authors have served on multiple committees in a large academic library, gaining more experience about the process each time. Their work on search committees sparked an interest in implementing best practices to ensure a good experience for job candidates and successful searches that improve services to the university community. Their experience also inspired a research interest. Search committees are gatekeepers. Who is kept out, and why? Exploring library hiring from an academic perspective brings to light uncomfortable truths. Each person on a search committee has biases that must be confronted to minimize preconceived ideas, and the group must work together so that each candidate receives a fair evaluation based on objective criteria. This decision-making can be complicated and challenging, depending on many factors.2 A successful search not only means that a good candidate is hired but also requires that the search committee works together, communicates well, develops and uses a fair rubric to assess the applicant pool, gives candidates proper and equal consideration, and chooses a well-qualified finalist who accepts the job offer. It is not impossible, but it is not easy. What further complicates the hiring task is the lack of diversity in librarianship. Homogeneous libraries create homogeneous search committees. Without thoughtful, introspective work, such committees can perpetuate a homogeneous library rather than a diverse, inclusive one.3 The authors are not experts in diversity or hiring. They are practitioners who strive to improve the library hiring process for everyone involved, toward the goal of equitable, inclusive libraries for employees and users. Their responsibilities necessitated much questioning, reading, and research. Members of current and future search committees [End Page 507] at any library should take a similar perspective toward their work. Without a collective understanding of the barriers to equity, diversity, and inclusion in library hiring, nothing will change—and change is far overdue. “Fit” and Academic Librarianship The need to diversify librarianship and the lack of progress toward this goal are common topics of conversation in formal and informal spheres of the profession.4 Similar conversations take place throughout academe as well. A culprit often examined in the literature and in practice is the nefarious yet ubiquitous concept of “fit” in hiring.5 Those who serve on search committees have tried to quantify the notion in nonsubjective ways, but the perennial problem is that fit tends to be ineffable. Committee members may declare that a candidate “feels right,” but they often say so because the applicant shares many similarities to them.6 These resemblances tend to reinforce homogeneity and hegemony because librarianship, much like academe as a whole, is overwhelmingly White. The problem does not begin at the hiring stage.7 The notion of fit tracks back much further and can cause people who do not conform to that image to decide against librarianship as a career long before they would ever apply for a job.8 The Librarian Pipeline Frequently, librarians blame the pipeline of new librarians for lacking diversity. The pipeline myth is the persistent idea that diversity remains a challenge for library hiring because of a shortage of qualified, degree-holding persons from historically minoritized groups to fill vacancies.9 Most students pursuing a master of library and information science (MLIS) degree and most recent MLIS graduates are White. In 2020, approximately 60 percent of MLIS students were White, even though the number has dropped approximately 15 percentage points since 1990; currently nearly 40 percent of degree candidates come from other racial or ethnic groups.10 Data from the Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE) show that in 2020, 62 percent of those receiving a master’s degree from an ALA-accredited program were White.11 The overall percentage of Whites holding a graduate degree in library...

For more than a decade, the Chinese government has poured copious resources into rural informatization as a means to increase agricultural productivity and rural economic growth. Such efforts so far have not produced definite results in rural areas, but increasing economic inequality and rising environmental threats have already forced the government to rethink its growth-centered development policy. Indeed, recent government releases clearly state the resolve to departure from the “GDP obsession” of the past. Meanwhile, the past three decades saw the rise of a powerful alternative development approach—the Capability Approach (CA), which focuses on empowering individuals and sees economic growth as one element of well-being. Given that the CA can potentially help devising a more coherent and holistic framework for Information and communications technologies for development (ICT4D), this paper examines the compatibility between the Capability Approach and the top-down socialist approach towards rural informatization in China. Built on two case studies of rural informatization in rural China, the present paper identifies potential obstacles to the adoption of the Capability Approach and discusses policy implications and suggestions.

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) Statistics Revision Task Force has released its final report. ARL charged the Statistics Revision Task Force to review the ARL Statistics survey and recommend ways to improve its structure and content so the data collected through this instrument is more useful to ARL member institutions. Task force members met on a regular basis beginning in spring 2022 to review the ARL Statistics survey and similar past work to revise it, engage current and former members of the ARL Research and Analytics Committee, and analyze the results of that engagement. Centering their work on ARL values, the task force generated several findings and lessons learned, which are discussed further in the report.

In 2007, the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) Joint Task Force on Library Support for E-Science issued its report outlining five goals to guide research libraries' burgeoning endeavors in offering e-science services and initiatives [1]. Since 2007 and the ARL report, the library scholarly literature, including recent communications from ARL e-science task force member James Mullins and task force liaison Neil Rambo, has contained a number of discussions on roles for librarians and libraries pursuing e-science initiatives [2–,6]. The ARL report included strategies and actions for libraries to take to prepare and position themselves to support this emerging process of scholarly communication. The report's third outcome states that librarians should seek to become “knowledgeable and skilled research library professionals with the capacity to contribute to e-science and to shape new roles and models of service.” Although the scholarly literature discussing e-science collaboration is growing [7–,10], few articles exist that have actually addressed how and where current and future health sciences and science and technology librarians should turn to develop the specific e-science capacity prescribed in the ARL report. In the summer of 2009, the Lamar Soutter Library at the University of Massachusetts Medical School applied for and was awarded funding from the National Network of Libraries of Medicine, New England Region (NN/LM NER), to begin the construction of an e-science educational web portal specifically for librarians wanting to develop this capacity. The motivation for the portal came from feedback and conversations with librarians attending a regional e-science symposium and subsequent science boot camp, jointly sponsored by the Boston Library Consortium (BLC), the University of Massachusetts Libraries, and the NN/LM NER.

Three Years and Counting—The Economic Crisis is Still With Us Charles B. Lowry, PhD (bio) Introduction Where library budgets are concerned, there is every evidence now, after three years, that we have arrived at "the new normal." That is, we do not expect a return to systematic and regular additions to Association of Research Libraries' (ARL) budgets in order to support ever-increasing prices that are out of proportion to inflation. These are facts that ought to be understood as matters of survival not only by librarians but also in the library market place generally. The economic crisis that we have faced during the last three years has allowed us to make hard decisions—or as Rahm Emanuel famously said, "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before."1 Early indicators point to the fact that the "serious crisis" is not going to waste for research libraries around the world. The evidence is that ARL libraries are grappling with the economic crisis by accelerating the rate of adaptation of the research library model. Data Collection ARL has been collecting the data on budget allocations from its members since fiscal year 2008–09. The first two iterations of that effort appear in the published record and in presentations that are available online.2 These data are not the same as those published in our well-known annual statistical survey of library expenditures. In simplest terms, we asked members, "How much money did you get, not how much did you spend?" In order to achieve maximum comparability, for this year's survey we repeated the request for data from years one and two, as well as asking for additional data about year three, that is FY 2010–11. Of our 115 academic library members, 80 responded. Table 1 shows a distribution of the 80 respondents that is representative of our libraries by size of expenditure and by type. [End Page 757] Click for larger view View full resolution Table 1. ARL Library Expenditure Levels by Library Type Total Library Budget Allocations I want to start with the big picture—that is, an analysis of the bottom line for three years' total budget allocations. Our first survey, conducted two years ago, reported serious levels of reductions in budgets in 2008 at the beginning of the downturn (see figure 1). These initial cuts were made well into the fiscal year. The hard data from that first survey showed that 55 of 100 responding ARL member libraries had reductions ranging from less than .04 percent to a high of 9.4 percent. Both the mean and median reductions were 3 percent. Therefore, as we examine the change from years one to two, and two to three, remember that nearly 55 percent of ARL members were already starting from a year-one base of reduced budget allocations. Things definitely got worse. Table 2 demonstrates the trends. In year two, 46 libraries, or nearly 60 percent, had flat or reduced budgets. In year three, there were 36, or nearly 47 percent, with flat or reduced budgets—hardly a positive trend. Keep in mind the obvious—flat budgets are as good as cuts when price rises of both periods are taken into account. It goes without saying that this is an unprecedented period of budget constraint, and the magnitude of some cuts is truly draconian—over 20 percent. The worst-case scenario for a library was to experience three consecutive years of budget cuts. We used scatter plots to try to understand how individual institutions did over time.3 The first scatter plot showing percent changes from 2008–09 to 2009–10 (x axis) and 2009–10 to 2010–11 (y axis) helps us explore whether there are consistent patterns of decline or increase in the individual library's budget allocations for the three fiscal years (see figure 2). Each of the symbols represents a library. The majority of the institutions cluster around zero, with no indication of a clear linear trend for the totality [End Page 758] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure...

A Review of:
 Brown, Cecilia M. and Ortega, Lina. “Information-Seeking Behavior of Physical Science Librarians: Does Research Inform Practice?” College & Research Libraries (2005). 66:231-47.
 
 
 Objective – As part of a larger study exploring the information environments of physical science librarians (Ortega & Brown), the authors’ overall objective for this study is to profile physical science librarians’ information behaviours. The authors’ two-part hypothesis was that first, peer-reviewed journals would be preferred over all other sources for research dissemination, resembling the preferences of scientists, and second, that peer-to-peer consultation would predominate for practice-oriented decisions. 
 
 Design – Mixed methods: survey questionnaire followed by citation and content analysis. 
 
 Setting – Five internationally disseminated professional association electronic mailing lists whose readership comprised those with interests in science librarianship: the American Library Association (ALA) Science and Technology Section; the American Society for Information Science & Technology (ASIST) Science and Technology Information Special Interest Group; the Special Library Association (SLA) Chemistry Division and its Physics-Astronomy-Mathematics Division; and the American Geological Institute Geoscience Information Society.
 
 Subjects – Seventy-two physical science librarians voluntarily responding to an online survey.
 
 Methods – A questionnaire was distributed to inquire about physical science librarians’ professional reading practices as well as their perceptions about the applicability of research to their work. Participants were asked to rank preferences among 11 resource types as sources supporting daily business, including personal communication, conference attendance, electronic mailing lists, and scholarly journals. Differences between the mean rankings of preferences were tested for significance by applying the Friedman test with p>0.0005. Journals identified most frequently were analyzed using the Institute for Scientific Information’s (ISI) Web of Science index and Ulrich’s Periodical Index to measure proportions of research and non-research citations, as well as the general topic areas covered by the journals. Next, content analysis was performed for the years 1995, 1997, and 2000 in order to characterize research methodologies used in the previously identified journals according to a previously tested schema (Buscha & Harter). Results from this portion of the study were compared with participants’ responses about journal usage. 
 
 Main Results – Librarians reported using personal communication (both face-to-face and electronic mailing lists) more frequently as a means of information gathering than professional journals, Web sites, conferences, trade publications, monographs, or ‘other’ resources. Variations in responses appeared to correlate with years in the profession and in the respondents’ time in their current positions, although there are indications that the importance of all information resources to practice and research declines over time. The relative importance of resources is also shown in time spent reading journal literature, less than 5 hours per week for 86% of participants. 
 
 Conclusion – For the first hypothesis, the authors found that unlike scientists, survey participants did not prefer research publications as vehicles for dissemination of their research results. For the second, librarians ranked peer-reviewed journals third in preference after personal communication and electronic mailing lists as sources of information supporting daily practice, supporting the second hypothesis that respondents would emulate the information use practices of mathematicians.

Review(s) of: Strategic Planning for Results, by Sandra Nelson for the Public Library Association. PLA Results Series. Chicago: American Library Association, 2008. 312 pp. US$65.00 (ALA members US$58.50). Soft cover ISBN 13: 978083835736.