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The purpose of this paper is to outline the development of a Skype‐based, study abroad reference service.

The paper discusses the criteria used for technology and situates the project in the literature on study abroad reference services.

Using Skype, a free video‐conferencing software, allows librarians to offer reference services to study abroad students effectively, easily, and without new technologies or significant cost.

The paper offers other librarians strategies for developing and launching similar programs and shares challenges encountered to prepare librarians for success in their own projects.

This paper aims to explore the attractiveness of Library and Information Science (LIS) careers to students and alumni and examine their decision-making process and perceptions of the field with an eye on discerning the best ways to build and develop the recruitment narrative.

The authors reached out to 57 LIS graduate programs in Canada and the USA accredited by the American Library Association through a Web-based survey; the questions presented a combination of multiple-choice, short-answer and open-ended questions and generated a wealth of quantitative and qualitative data.

The online survey has disclosed that students may not have an in-depth understanding of current trends, the diversity of LIS professions and the wider applications of their education. A significant disconnect exists in how the goals of LIS education are seen by certain groups of practitioners, students and faculty members.

Creating a program narrative for the purposes of recruitment and retention, departments should not only capitalize on the reach of the internet and the experiences of successful practitioners. They should also ensure that faculty know their students’ personal backgrounds, that students empathize with demands of contemporary academia and that a promotional message connects pragmatic educational goals to broader social applications. By exposing and embracing the complexity of LIS education and practice, the paper chooses a discursive path to start a conversation among major stakeholders.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the results of Marquette University Libraries’ survey measuring faculty knowledge and attitudes about the institution’s repository, for the purposes of creating a marketing plan for the institutional repository (IR).

The paper adopts a quantitative approach through the use of a survey.

Like many other endeavors to measure faculty engagement with the IR, the investigators discovered that faculty knowledge of the IR is not universal. Moreover, the perceived values and motivators for faculty use of the IR were also not surprising, with faculty viewing online dissemination of their work to be the most valuable feature offered by the IR, and furthering their own careers was the prime motivator. The importance of continual and varied methods of marketing is reaffirmed.

Whereas many articles on faculty recruitment for IRs agree on the importance of marketing, very few suggest specific strategies. The investigators make suggestions for continual and varied marketing methods based on their findings.

The underrepresentation of women in engineering has important consequences for meeting the need for a larger, talented scientific and technological labor force. Increasing the proportion of women faculty in engineering will help increase the persistence probabilities of women undergraduate and graduate students in engineering, as well as contribute to the range and diversity of ideas toward innovations and solutions to the greatest engineering challenges. This study aims to examine the association among gender, family formation and post-PhD employment patterns of a cohort of engineering doctorates.

Using the National Science Foundation’s Survey of Doctorate Recipients data, 2001–2010, descriptive and multinomial logit regression analyses are conducted to illustrate the career trajectories of engineering PhDs over a ten-year period.

The career trajectories of engineering PhDs are nonlinear, and transitions between employment sectors commonly occur over the ten-year time period studied. Although women engineering PhDs with young dependents are less likely to be employed initially after PhD completion, they tend to enter the workforce in the academic sector as time progresses. Early post-PhD employment as a postdoctoral researcher or in the academic sector contributes to the pursuit of the professoriate downstream.

While previous studies tend to focus on the early career outcomes of science and engineering students, this study contributes to the literature by focusing on the long-term career outcomes of engineering doctorates. Research findings provide engineering PhD students and PhDs with more information regarding potential post-PhD career trajectories, highlighting the multitude of career options and transitions that occur over time. Research findings also provide higher education administrators and doctoral program stakeholders with foundational information toward designing and revitalizing professional development programs to help PhD students prepare for the workforce. The findings have the potential to be applied toward helping increase diversity by shaping policies and programs to encourage multiple alternative career pathways to the professoriate.

This paper advances the idea that there is a crisis in library education, varying in severity from country to country and calls for a new (or resuscitated) model of library education that will meet the demands of libraries and librarianship in the years to come. Among the problems seen are that library schools have become hosts to information science and information studies faculty and curricula. These disciplines are, at best, peripheral to professional library work and, at worst, inimical to it. There is a growing gender divide in Library and Information Science (LIS) schools between “information science”‐oriented male teachers and library course‐oriented female teachers. Many of the topics regarded as central to a library education by would‐be employers are no longer central to, or even required by, today's LIS curricula. Modern communications technology has led many library educators to concentrate on that technology and dismiss anything about libraries that is not amenable to a technological solution. The gap between what is taught in many LIS schools and what is being practiced in libraries is wide and widening. This paper calls for a national core curriculum that would apply to all schools in a country.

Scholars have wandered the earth seeking community and resources for practising their art. It has only been for the last 500 years that universities have provided such a cloistered environment. A confluence of circumstances has broken this intellectual hegemony, threatening the sinecure, and forcing the institutions and the academics, themselves, to confront a past that never was while building towards a future that never will be.

The purpose of this paper is to study employee engagement in higher education by examining full-time non-tenure track faculty members’ perceptions at a North East US state public university.

The authors used semi-structured face-to-face personal interviews with 11 non-tenure track full-time university faculty. Using a phenomenological approach, thematic analysis was conducted for employee interview data. The data was further refined through first and second cycle coding. The primary eight coded clusters were further reduced to three data clusters, each representing an evolving unit of meaning.

The analysis revealed three themes relating to how full-time non-tenure track faculty experience and understand engagement: required institutional engagement, perceived necessary engagement and relational collegial engagement.

The study adds to the limited research available on non-tenure track faculty members within higher education organization and their perceptions of engagement.

In the spring of 2016, the University of Kansas Libraries piloted Research Sprints: One Week, One Project, a program aimed at cultivating relationships with faculty through deep project-based engagement.

Three faculty members, matched with a team of library experts, worked intensively to complete a research or pedagogic project for one week in May. Critical to the program’s success was the use of project management methodologies and tools. These tools were essential to identifying task dependencies, developing workflows, and documenting work processes.

The overall success of the Sprints demonstrated to faculty that library staff can be more than one-shot consultants; faculty collaborators learned first hand that the library can be a true partner throughout the scholarly process. As an approach to user engagement, Sprints pose some considerations for library management, including the need for robust staff training in project management and teambuilding, internal resistance to utilizing project management tools, difficulty finding staff time and resources to commit for a short but high-concentrated period, and the need to align projects with staff expertise and availability.

This chapter provides an assessment of the Sprints pilot, addressing some of the implications, potential benefits, and challenges of adopting and adapting Research Sprints to support library work. It will be of interest to project managers and library staff who are considering integrating project management methods into their outreach and services, and provides examples of how project management can inform library efforts to more deeply collaborate in advancing the scholarly work of local research and teaching communities.

Washburn is a Carnegie Master’s University I with an enrollment of only 6,200 students. Unlike most of the 43 participating libraries in LibQUAL+™ 2001, Washburn University’s Mabee Library is not a large, academic research library. The paper describes Washburn’s experience with the 2001 LibQUAL+™ pilot project. The application of the survey at a small institution and the global nature of trends shown by the responses will be discussed. LibQUAL+™’s place within the strategic planning and assessment program at Washburn’s Mabee Library is also reviewed.

Managing educational innovation in higher education institutions is a complex process that requires specific strategies based on research and proven frameworks. The aim of this paper was to examine how Bolman and Deal’s (2003) theoretical framework can be used to analyse organisational change processes and to evaluate the progress and outcomes of an educational innovation initiative at a university in the Gulf. This educational innovation involved the use of iPads in curricular practices to enhance pedagogical strategies and student learning outcomes.

An ethnographic case study methodology was used to make an empirical inquiry that investigated data obtained from direct observations, informal interviews, holistic field notes and documents to better understand a contemporary phenomenon within its real-life context.

A critical analysis of this iPad initiative suggested that the main areas of leading and managing this innovation, through Bolman and Deal’s framework, were effectively centred around the human resources, structural and political frames but were less affected by the symbolic frame.

The authors provide suggestions, based on their experiences as faculty members and academic administrators, on how such innovations can be effectively led and managed. In addition, a new cross-cultural model is proposed for managing future educational innovations in higher education, particularly in the Gulf region. This new model could also be used to effectively evaluate the implementation and management of other educational changes such as those precipitated by the COVID-19 pandemic.