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The purpose of this paper is to chronicle the Lamar Soutter Library's effort to build an educational image database, and how the project developed into an institutional repository.

The paper is divided into three phases and highlights the organizational, political, technological and resource issues that are unique to a specialized library with a medium‐sized staff, lacking the resources of a traditional university campus. The case concludes with a list of barriers and facilitators to success and a summary of lessons learned.

The paper finds that a library with limited staff, funding, and systems development resources can initiate and support an institutional repository. Facilitators of success include clear lines of authority, a strong champion, and the appropriate technology for the project.

This paper serves as an example to libraries that are in the beginning phases of developing an institutional repository by discussing the barriers to and facilitators of success.

The chapter seeks to address a current gap in the literature: envisioning and justifying community outreach projects and turning such insights into best practices for managing such projects. Drawing heavily on informational interviews, the article highlights the importance of defining shared missions and strategic plans, identifying partners, researching needs and expectations, building trust and partnerships, setting and fulfilling communication expectations, offering tangible benefits to the partner, and evaluating outcomes. While focused on health sciences librarians and their community partners, these practices are broadly applicable to many library outreach programs and can enhance credibility, approaches, and impact, while increasing funding opportunities and users while creating sustainable collaborations.

The purpose of this paper is to identify best practices of employee onboarding, the process by which a new employee is introduced to an organization and its vision, mission, and values.

Researchers requested that members of the Personnel Administrators and Staff Development Officers Discussion Group of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) share documents related to employee onboarding and three researchers independently reviewed the documents. The collected documents were compared to the socialization model proposed by Raymond Noe, including the detailed aspects of the organizational phase and the key components identified in the best practices literature.

In total, 17 institutions submitted documentation for review. All institutions discussed at least one or more of the key areas identified in the socialization process. Every institution in the study included a discussion of job expectations and evaluation criteria (100 percent); ten (59 percent) discuss mission, vision, and values; however, topics such as culture (five or 29 percent) and politics (one or 6 percent) were infrequently covered. Onboarding programs varied in length (one week to more than six months). Check lists were the most common tool used to manage the onboarding process. Other notable topics covered include dealing with change, understanding the team‐based environment, diversity, library awards and library fundraising.

Because of the limited number of documents examined in this study, the research results may lack generalisability. Therefore, researchers are encouraged to test the proposed propositions further.

Moving from a traditional new employee orientation model to a best‐practices onboarding model will require HR professionals to conduct an internal assessment of the current program.

Due to the high cost associated with recruiting new employees, the need for new employees to be fully functional and engaged as soon as possible, and the need to communicate performance indicators, the need to share best practices is important.

The purpose of this paper is to examine recent thinking about reference services and library use of virtual reference (VR) software, in order to put into context the value of advanced social networking technologies such as Second Life to libraries and their users.

A brief review of the main developments in the recent history of VR, combined with a comparison of the relevant features in common between generic VR packages and Second Life.

That the key weaknesses of established VR services are also found in Second Life, but that these weaknesses should be readily overcome as technical advances are made and librarians clarify to software providers the type of functionality they require from their services.

The need for a higher level of complex authentication functionality, as necessitated when combining digital library subscription services with interactive virtual library environments, is outlined and defined. This is a fertile area for service provider research and development.

The practical benefits of VR and Second Life services to libraries will be limited until the authentication issues summarised in this paper are addressed.

The paper attempts to enlarge the literature on Second Life by discussing this recent innovation in terms of the broader historical context against which such digital library services have evolved. In particular, it points out the ironic similarity between digital reference environments and declining traditional reference services, which both are disadvantaged by their “distance” from core, authenticated digital library content.

Implementing and maintaining Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) program at a national level encounters numerous difficulties in particular from technical, legal, business, and financial perspective. Business model (BM) is a tool to help to address business-driven challenges, such as business feasibility and viability, as one of the important aspects. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the BM practiced by different national Electronic Theses and Dissertations (NETDs) cases.

BM of seven NETDs programs have been studied through an online questionnaire; besides, programs’ websites were observed and related documents were examined. Business model canvas (BMC) was used to describe the business rationale behind the selected cases.

Most of the NETDs programs lack a documented BM. The main value of these programs is sharing ETDs which is offered to academics through online channels; skillful staff and proper hardware/software are their main resources to do so. Furthermore, their key activities are developing hardware/software and negotiating with ETDs owners as their key partners. All these activities required huge cost which is generally covered by public funding.

This study pioneers in applying BM concept into field of NETDs. Therefore, the major contribution of this study is to provide an analysis of NETDs programs’ BM through BMC. Furthermore, the paper provides recommendations on how ETDs could be implemented in a cost effective, sustainable, and viable way.

This study aims to examine the library/information issues affecting graduate students, both those on taught courses and those undertaking research. It seeks to focus specifically on their perceptions of the value to them of physical and digital resources and spaces, and how well their needs were being met.

An online questionnaire survey of students was complemented by a series of face‐to‐face interviews with library staff.

This group of students are different from undergraduates, whose information behaviour has more often been studied. They require silent study space, are enthusiastic book borrowers, and have limited interest in social media in the library. They have a strong requirement for digital resources and IT support, and are not inclined to ask for assistance from librarians.

The study is limited to three English universities, although they are sufficiently varied in nature to make the results more widely applicable.

The survey provides evidence for librarians in universities and colleges serving graduate students as to the best form of provision, and for any library seeking to make best use of its space as resources become increasingly digital.

This is one of the few studies to examine the information behaviour and needs of advanced students. It contributes to the debate on the future of the library as place in a digital age.