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Library buildings are routinely reimagined, remodeled, or built new to meet the changing needs of their community. The move from collection-centric to user-centric service models has generated numerous writings about the library as place and space. The one concept lacking in the scholarly discourse is the changing roles of librarians to meet the needs of these new spaces and places. How do librarians fit in the new equation? When addressing the professional identity of librarians, which aspect of their work will need to evolve and which will need to be let go? A critical facet of sustaining services in new spaces is the need to develop the sustainable librarian – to remove the stigma of the librarian as “jack of all trades, master of none.” In order to realize this new mindset of mastering our domain we need to begin reimagining our work. Some ways, this can be accomplished by writing increased flexibility into position descriptions and creating organizational structures to better support librarians within the new spaces. With these new developments to our professional identities, librarians may learn to employ entrepreneurial skills in order to continuously anticipate services and develop skill sets to aid the library’s ability to fulfill its purpose. The authors provide a literature review to discuss the changing role of the academic librarian to meet the evolution of the library building and services. We will provide an example through findings and practices of Grand Valley State University and how it reimagined roles in the early 2000s and continues to reimagine roles in a new building and a renovated branch library. The change of spaces and places in academic libraries to accommodate user needs and perceptions has impacted how academic librarians work in these spaces and places. Library administrators need to rethink workflows, and organizational charts by examining flexible workloads, cross-training initiatives, professional development around new skills, and the letting go of obsolete practices.

Originality/value – in this chapter, the authors will discuss how library leaders are charged with translating the new roles of their librarians to meet the needs of their community in these new spaces and how library leaders may look beyond the literature of the profession for ways to facilitate change.

This article characterises the questioning behaviour in reference interviews preceding delegated online searches of bibliographic databases and relates it to questioning behaviour in other types of interviews/settings. With one exception, the unit of analysis is the question (N=610), not the interview. The author uses A.C. Graesser‘s typology of questions to analyse type of question and M.D. White’s typology of information categories to determine the question‘s content objective; this is the first application of Graesser’s typology to interview questions in any setting. Graesser‘s categories allow for a more subtle understanding of the kind of information need underlying a question. Comparisons are made between questions asked by the information specialist and those asked by the client. Findings show that the information specialist dominates the interview, about half the questions were verification questions and about 22% were judgemental questions or requests; all but four types of questions from Graesser’s categories appeared in the interviews, but no new question types were discovered. Clients often phrase questions as requests. In content, both clients and information specialists focus on the subject and service requested, but the clients ask also about search strategy and output features. Both parties ask predominantly short‐answer questions. Results are related to interface design for retrieval systems.

The following is an annotated list of materials dealing with information literacy including instruction in the use of information resources, research, and computer skills related to retrieving, using, and evaluating information. This review, the twenty‐second to be published in Reference Services Review, includes items in English published in 1995. After 21 years, the title of this review of the literature has been changed from “Library Orientation and Instruction” to “Library Instruction and Information Literacy,” to indicate the growing trend of moving to information skills instruction.

This paper aims to describe the development of one transactional access/pay‐per‐view model and its current and anticipated impact on ILL at one US university.

The services at Murray State University (MSU) are described and the impact of one year of PPV implementation assessed. Some general implications are explored.

It found that PPV has not yet had a correlative impact on ILL at MSU but this is likely to change as PPV expands.

The paper shows this to be one of a number of empirical studies which are valuable in assessing the impact of PPV as an alternative to the conventional ILL supply of articles.