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A survey of 170 part‐time librarians reveals a variety of employment issues: rates of pay, benefits, professional development, commitment to parent institutions, education, geographical factors, motivation, career plans, and peer and administration perceptions.

The purpose of this paper is to examine advertisements for part-time professional library jobs in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. The goal is to gain a better understanding of what skills and experience levels are being required of part-time librarians, as well as what their expected salary and hours might be.

Advertisements for part-time professional library positions were collected from online sources over the course of one year.

Part-time librarian positions tend to be public services positions in either public or academic libraries. Advertisements for these position indicate a need for flexibility and often do not contain information about salary or hours. Many are suitable for entry-level librarians with no experience.

Job advertisement studies are limited in that they can only examine the information contained in the advertisements themselves and therefore may not reflect the actual person hired.

This paper will provide useful information for librarians seeking part-time positions, as well as for library and information science educators and library managers who wish to mentor or hire new librarians.

This paper corrects an identified lack of research into part-time library employment.

Academia’s overwhelming reliance on non-tenure track, or contingent, faculty is a well-known fact. While the status and working conditions of contingent classroom faculty have been well studied and documented, the corresponding trend in academic libraries has not been explored as deeply. As this paper reviews the limited LIS literature on the subject, the purpose of this paper is to provide administrators and managers with a deeper understanding of the benefits and drawbacks of contingent appointments. It also offers strategies for fostering a workplace culture that recognizes contingent librarians’ contributions and promotes their professional growth.

An overview of scholarly and professional literature on contingent librarianship, this paper is based on published research studies and academic articles; given the prominence of anecdotal and personal writing on the subject, columns and first-person essays from trade publications, as well as library-related blogs and job search sites, are also included.

Contingent librarians have been a steady presence in academic libraries for the last few decades. The trend is continuing. There are specific practices that can be applied to effectively manage contingent librarians.

The paper offers academic library administrators and managers a concise yet comprehensive overview of the issues related to contingent appointments.

THE RECENT DECLINE in issues has been noticed fairly generally over the country; many librarians have been considerably concerned about it, and your April comments in ‘Off the cuff’ are relevant. I have not felt concerned to a great degree, though previously I had enjoyed seeing constantly increased use of the city libraries service in my 20 years in Cambridge. The final figures for 1972/73 together with comparisons for the previous year are as follows:

The primary aim of this study is to determine the uses and prevalence of temporary librarians in libraries at four‐year universities during the current economic downturn. The paper also seeks to determine the temporary librarians' conditions of employment.

These objectives were achieved by surveying a representative sample of four‐year institutions in both the authors' state and nationwide.

The study found that, as in several previous surveys, temporary librarians are still being used sparingly. They are used to fill vacancies due to open positions or faculty leaves of absence, special projects, grant‐funded projects, fellowships and sometimes to offer spouses of teaching faculty an employment opportunity. They are employed in both technical and public services roles, but not in managerial positions. They are expected to have the same education as full‐time librarians, are compensated similarly and sometimes also receive benefits. Conditions for contract renewal included employee performance, availability of funding and perceived need for the continuation of their duties.

The study was limited by a small pool, so results may not be generalizable to a larger population. Because of many of the participants being in the same state, there may be unintentional consistency in the responses.

This study may provide guidance to administrators in making decisions on the future use of temporary librarians, both in how many to hire and in what ways to employ them.

The value in this study lies in the fact that it updates previous studies by generating current data on the topic.

This paper aims to understand how a special library helped firefighters in Illinois navigate the digital revolution by evidencing the elements and forms of work that made its innovative services possible.

The authors examine the history of a special library through a community informatics lens, drawing from sociomaterial perspectives to highlight forms of work often invisible in digital innovation. Data was collected through documentary revision, oral histories and semi-structured interviews. Deductive-inductive coding and constant comparative analysis was used in the analysis.

A historical narrative of the library between 1990 and 2021 highlights three sociotechnical innovations that assisted firefighters through the digital revolution: the facilitated collection, the co-created collection and the inside-out library. To develop these innovations the library drew from institutional relations, personal relations, grants, labor, knowledge of firefighters and technology. Various forms of articulation work brought these elements together to create innovative services.

The role of special libraries in addressing the digital divide has not been sufficiently detailed so far; this paper is a contribution in that direction. It also has practical value for professionals working in specialized libraries and information centers.

The purpose of this study is to examine shifts in the volume and complexity of reference questions received at a small liberal arts college following the implementation of a Web-scale discovery service.

Researchers used the Warner model of reference classification to review and classify reference questions from the academic year prior to the implementation of EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS) and the academic year following EDS implementation to evaluate the change in volume of questions and complexity.

Research findings are significant as they document a 34 per cent decline in overall volume of reference activity following the integration of a Web-scale discovery service into the research process. Notably, the question category rated as the highest level of reference complexity (level IV) registered an 18.5 per cent increase in volume, post-EDS implementation. Question levels I-III all saw declines in volume ranging from 45 to 14 per cent.

Limitations of the study relate to multiple librarians having recorded questions as they were received by reference services and, as a result, some variation in transaction description should be expected. The concurrent deployment of a Web-scale discovery service and an integrated link resolver made delineation of the respective impact of each tool difficult.

Libraries contemplating the integration of a Web-scale discovery service into the research process will be able to use the research analysis to contemplate service redesign in advance of discovery implementation. The research results support additional training of reference personnel to service higher levels of in-depth inquiries. A redesign of reference services incorporating a tiered reference model using proactive chat with referrals to library faculty for in-depth research consultations is recommended.

After a literature review of relevant research, the researchers discovered few similar studies. As a result, this analysis will be of significant value to the library profession.

The proliferation of electronic sources in reference departments has made them increasingly important in providing reference service to library patrons. These sources include the online public access catalog, electronic databases (both indexes and full‐text databases), and the Internet. Much has been written on evaluation of reference librarians in the traditional areas of reference desk service, the use of print sources, and bibliographic instruction. Discusses the establishment of guidelines for assessment of reference librarians’ effectiveness in providing service to patrons using electronic sources and methods of assessing individual effectiveness.

Academic librarians are being bombarded with an accelerating stream of news: new services, new public relations, new information formats, new technologies and new catalogs have been introduced during the past 10 to 15 years. Innovations are not always successfully assimilated by large academic libraries and dislocations associated with change in one department often affect the entire library. Coping strategies have been envisioned and even implemented, but usually are grafted onto existing, traditional organizational structures. Therefore, collection development and management in academic libraries is most sensibly addressed in terms of the larger library organization.

The purpose of this study is go better understand website usability by community college students. The usability study team sought data that would help to guide in a website redesign.

Librarians led students through sessions that followed the usability testing approach defined by Nielsen (2012) which emphasizes the ease of use of the Web interface. This study compared the results from the existing library website and a prototype website.

The study’s findings emphasized the need for balance between the variety of services and content that the website provides. This is especially true given that so many community college students are underprepared for college-level courses.

The study was limited by available time and the clinical nature of the usability session.

The study results underscore the significant challenge facing library website designers. The various online services exist in pockets that are only partially integrated and, therefore, require students to make decisions and predictive judgments as they navigate the site.

Overall, this study emphasized the need for balance between the variety of services and content that the website provides.