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This chapter highlights the creation of a STEM Center of Excellence for Active Learning (SCEAL) at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University. The overarching goal of the STEM Center is to transform pedagogy and institutional teaching and learning in order to significantly increase the production of high-achieving students who will pursue careers and increase diversity in the STEM workforce. Some of the STEM Center’s efforts to reach its goals included supporting active learning classroom and course redesign efforts along with providing professional development workshops and opportunities to garner funding to cultivate student success projects through the development of an Innovation Ventures Fund. Outcomes from this Center have led to several publications and external grant funding awards to continue implementation, assessment, and refinement of active learning innovations and interventions for STEM student success for years to come.

Before 2011, student performance rates in college algebra and trigonometry at North Carolina A&T State University (NCA&TSU) were consistently below 50%. To remedy this situation, the Mathematics Department implemented the math emporium model (MEM) instructional method. The underlying principle behind MEM is that students learn math by doing math (Twigg, 2011). The MEM requires students to work on math problems and spend more time on material that they do not understand while allowing them to spend less time on material that they do understand. Also, students receive immediate feedback on problems from teaching assistants as they work through their online assignments. After implementing the MEM, student pass rates improved for both the MEM and traditional sections. Data to date also show that female students outperform male students in both instructional models. Further study is needed to determine the factors that have caused improvement in pass rates in addition to the implementation of the MEM. Some important lessons learned by the NCA&TSU math faculty from implementing the MEM into the college algebra and trigonometry courses are that successful implementation requires a long-term commitment, internal and external collaborations, and the collective ability to determine what works for the local setting.

To share information about the American Society for Engineering Education Engineering (ASEE) Engineering Libraries Division (ELD) Annual Conference on instruction, training and support for engineering education. A conference report that touches on disciplines of engineering, technology education and engineering librarianship.

Conference report.

The paper provided a review of programs and technology presentations by engineering librarians of interest to libraries and information professionals.

The paper's aim is to provide insights into issues encountered in maintaining library technologies and electronic collections on a limited budget and with limited personnel.

The paper uses real‐world experiences and evidence from the body of literature to provide commentary on the importance of clearly defined missions and goals in an era of shrinking budgets and changing user expectations.

Having a clearly defined library mission statement with underlying goals and outcomes is vital in this time of accountability and assessment in higher education. Librarians must be mindful of the need to connect the goals and outcomes to the overall institutional goals in order to provide measurable and meaningful value.

The paper examines one library's struggle to establish an identity in an era where traditional methods of determining value are no longer suitable. The article uses dialogue from departmental meetings coupled with evidence from the library literature to state the importance of finding and communicating value in an era of accountability.

Considerable overlap exists between the disciplines of library and information science and museum studies. Exploiting the overlap and examining those areas were library/museum instruction courses diverge may provide valuable insights for how to improve the quality of these courses and better prepare students for instructional roles in both disciplines.

Word frequency and thematic analysis of the instructional course descriptions for all 52 American Library Association-accredited Master of Library and Information Science programs in the USA and 49 museum studies and affiliated (e.g. MA in anthropology with museum studies concentration) programs is performed.

Each discipline has some specific language to describe tasks specific to itself (e.g. museums), but these comprise a small percentage of the total language usage. Among other terms and themes, overlap occurs at a rate of about 50%. The remaining 35-45% of terms and themes reveal areas that are emphasized in only one discipline, but could be beneficial to incorporate in the curriculum/content in both disciplines.

This research builds on a growing corpus of work demonstrating relations between museum studies and library and information science, and their status within a metadiscipline of information; this research presents a comparison of course content that may inform future curriculum/content development.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, no study of this type has been performed with museum studies courses, nor has a comparison between the two disciplines been investigated at this level.