Library Research Service

Note: This study will be presented on October 12, 2017, 3:15-4:15, at the Colorado Association of Libraries (CAL) Annual Conference (“Transfer Connection: Academic Library Services for Transfer Students“). Transfer students are a unique population in academic libraries because their experiences vary widely: some are familiar with their community college library and then transfer to a four-year setting while others transfer between two and four-year institutions of different sizes. A team of librarian-researchers from University of Colorado-Boulder and Colorado Community Colleges Online (CCCOnline) are working together to learn more about serving this type of student. “I would discover that there were transfer...

Just in time for Banned Books Week, LRS’s latest Fast Facts report summarizes the results of our annual investigation into the materials that are challenged in public libraries across Colorado. This Fast Facts details the number, type, and reasons for the challenges reported in the 2016 Public Library Annual Report. The information that public libraries provided to us about these challenges help determine the attitude toward intellectual freedom in Colorado now and over time. After hovering at just under 30 challenges from 2013-2015, the number of challenges dropped to 22. This continues a consistent downward trend in the number of reported...

A recent Pew survey shows that 40% of U.S. adults trust information from a local public library or librarians “a lot.” Thirty-eight percent of respondents said they trust libraries/librarians “some.” Totaling the percentage of respondents who trust a resource “a lot” or “some,” 83% trust health care providers, 82% trust family or friends, and 78% trust libraries/librarians. Libraries have the largest percentage of the strongest feelings of trust. The survey divided participants into five groups based on their attitudes about information and learning, summarized below.  “Interest” refers to how many different topics respondents expressed interest in.  Groups with high interest expressed...

Library Jobline, LRS’s website for library job postings and resources, posted a record number of jobs in 2016 and saw a continued increase in the number of people using the website to post and search for jobs. Data collected from the Library Jobline website are highlighted in the most recent Fast Facts report. In 2016, 673 library jobs were posted to Library Jobline, with May being the busiest month for job postings (73 posts). More than two-thirds (69%) of jobs posted were located in Colorado, and over half (53%) were full-time positions. A majority of jobs posted were in public libraries...

As libraries increasingly focus on digital information resources, librarians are left wondering what the interior of the library will look like in the future if most of their materials can be found online rather than on bookshelves. The Utrecht University Library (UUL) attempted to answer this question in a recent study undertaken to predict what the role of library bookshelves will be by 2025. Librarians at UUL looked at their acquisition data to determine the changing ratio of paper and digital books and journals in the library’s collection. They found that since 2014, 90% of UUL’s acquisitions budget was spent on...

The American Libraries Association (ALA) recently published a report exploring the ways that rural public libraries meet the needs of their communities, especially by providing digital literacy training and free access to the internet. This report used data collected by the Public Libraries Survey and the Digital Inclusion Survey. Rural libraries tend to fall into a role of internet provider for rural communities since affordable, high-capacity home broadband internet can be difficult to obtain outside of more populous areas. More than 4 in 5 (85%) rural libraries surveyed reported subscribing to internet download speeds of at least 1.5 Megabits per second...