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Conference report of the 12th Off‐Campus Library Services meeting. As distance education evolves into an even more mature state, and remote library services and access are more central to the programs, this conference entertains more themes focusing on technology and different applications in a range of library settings. Explores the latest developments of off‐campus library services for improved distance teaching and learning.Design/methodology/approach – A variety of presentations are shared, with different studies supplying the practical and supporting theoretical understanding of what role libraries have in contributing to distance learning and multiple site campuses.

Technology is the way we transfer information, make things available and support archives of information. New information products are introduced to contribute to library orientation and instruction.

As off‐campus services thrive, there is a need to evaluate information about the program and services and this conference explores ways to conduct this kind of research.

As more institutions debut off‐campus programs and opportunities for learning, support services including access to online resources, instructional support, and other fundamental campus services become critical. This conference confirms the issues, methods for offering and delivering appropriate services and then evaluating the contributions in this form of higher education.

An additional venue to explore library services with serious concentration on distance education issues, student learning and outcomes.

This paper seeks to determine common and unique activities, promotional methods, time management strategies, and best practices of academic librarians embedded in online courses at six institutions.

This is a mixed methods study using both interviews and quantitative data to study the activities and experiences of embedded librarians at six institutions.

The librarians and faculty involved in the embedded services reported unexpected benefits to the service. However, experiences with managing the time required for embedding along with regular reference duties varied, and scaling up the service from a few courses to a regular library service caused staffing issues for a few institutions.

This study was exploratory by nature and thus its scope was limited. Because only six institutions were studied, it is difficult to determine the true state of embedded librarianship in the USA. Future research should build on the foundation to determine outcomes for which embedded service is best suited and perform cost‐benefit analyses.

Because embedded services can become popular quickly, individual librarians should work with library administrators to determine whether staffing a full‐scale service will be possible and plan accordingly. If a full‐scale service is not feasible, the service scope may need to be limited (for instance, to core courses or to specific academic departments).

Past research on embedded librarianship has been limited to single institutions or to purposes and outcomes of the service. This paper provides a comparative study of embedded librarians at six institutions, and concentrates on the librarian's experience at each.

This study aims to analyze the productivity patterns of authors in Nigeria using publications indexed in Medline from 2008 to 2012 based on Lotka’s Law. Lotka’s Law of scientific productivity provides a platform for studying inequality in authors’ productivity patterns in a given field and over a specified period.

This study covers all the journal articles on HIV/AIDS pandemic in Nigeria over a period of five years (2008-2012) in Medline, of which 512 articles were reported to have been published during this period. In this paper, 306 articles that had HIV/AIDS in the title, published in 20 journals, and articles that had HIV/AIDS as author keywords were analyzed. Because no local database that indexed biomedical literature from Nigeria was available, Medline was used, which is not only a robust and flexible database that includes articles from Nigeria but is also the largest medical database that indexes over six-and-a-half million articles from 3,400 biomedical journals.

While HIV/AIDS can be considered a global pandemic, Nigeria has the second highest number of new infections reported each year, and an estimated 3.7 per cent of the population is living with the dreaded disease. This study presents a general picture of the distribution of papers as single-author papers, multiple-author papers and the measures of co-authorship. The findings of the study reveal that in the productivity distribution for authors on the subject of HIV/AIDS, only co-authors and non-collaborative authors’ categories fit in the Lotka’s Law, whereas all-authors and first-author categories differ from the distribution of Lotka’s inverse square law.

The empirical evidence used in this paper was based on only articles of HIV/AIDS pandemic in Nigeria that had HIV/AIDS the title. Therefore, the findings of this study might not be the generalized to other biomedical research studies.

The originality of this paper lies in the fact that the productivity pattern of each of the different author categories on the subject of HIV/AIDS is a first of its kind in the Nigerian context.