Citizen Science (CS) projects depend on volunteers for data collection, and are often associated with universities and research organizations. Common CS projects include bird sightings, water quality efforts, and astronomy. We hypothesized that academic libraries (ALs) of land-grant universities would have more support for CS than non-land grant universities because of their inherent mission of public education rooted in science and engineering. We first searched the library guides of all Carnegie-designated R1 universities to see if there was a dedicated research guide on the topic, and we also noted if there was a “shout-out” to CS projects on guides that were not entirely dedicated to CS. Of the 116 R1 universities in the United States, 7% had a dedicated guide. Of the land-grant universities, 11% had dedicated research guides, whereas only 5% of the non-land grant universities had research guides on CS. Taking shout-outs of CS projects into account as well as dedicated research guides, 26% of land-grant universities met this criteria, compared to 16% of non-land grant R1’s. Additionally, public R1 universities in this study supported CS at a rate of 21%, compared to 14% of private R1 universities. Our poster not only explores this data visually, but will also share data and information on existing projects and organizations devoted to CS and will offer a brief analysis of the existing literature on starting and promoting CS projects. This poster will encourage more libraries to provide wider support for amateur STEM participation via CS projects.

Interlibrary Loan (ILL) is a service offered by libraries to supply patrons with materials which are not immediately available for lending. This could be for many reasons; the library might not own the item, the library may own a copy but it is already checked out to another patron, or the assignment of a required but expensive textbook spurs high demand for a particular title.

Analysis of historical ILL request data is a useful exercise to undertake as each request represents a patron with an information need which was not able to be immediately filled by the library’s collection. Each ILL request comes with a guaranteed circulation of at least one interested patron, and the request information is compiled in a dataset and preserved. Loans which are not able to be filled are still recorded and included in the dataset. Investigating trends and tendencies of a user base through this data can lead to more informed collection development practices, and understanding these data sets can reveal gaps in coverage or highlight areas where the user community may find the collection lacking.

This study is an analysis of five years worth of Iowa State University’s ILL requests of print books, spanning calendar years 2013-2017. 18,841 borrowing requests were analyzed, and monograph title data available for conducting this analysis include loan author, title, year, publisher, edition, and lender library. Patron information includes department affiliation and status; no further identifying information is recorded in the dataset used here.

This analysis focuses mostly on requests made by patrons from engineering departments, and it analyzes trends over time by constructing visualizations to look at:

• the most active academic departments and their request activity over time
• the most heavily requested titles
• requests by patron status (undergraduate, graduate, faculty, staff, unaffiliated)
• the total number of requests made over time
• what peer libraries are used to fill the requests

This work focuses on requests for print books only; the scope does not include electronically delivered PDF journal articles, book chapters, or conference proceedings.

The analysis is done in the statistical software JMP, and the procedure to automatically create the plots which appear in this paper has been coded, saved, and uploaded for others to use or adapt to their home institution’s ILL data sets at: https://github.com/eschares/ILL-analysis

This study is intended to illuminate the ILL request activity at a large, public, land-grant university in the United States, demonstrate the tendencies and trends of the campus community, and discover where users’ information needs are not immediately being met through the print collection. This work can inform future collection development activities not only at the local institution but also at other universities worldwide.

Writing a report, thesis, dissertation, journal article, or research proposal can be both intimidating and time consuming. We encourage all scientific writers to consider using a system called LATEX to create written documents because it can make large projects more manageable and increase your efficiency. With the advent on online services, using LATEX is easier than ever before. Online tools have made it possible for all scientists (regardless of computer savviness) to take advantage of its many features. In short, online LATEX could be a game-changer for you! In this article we explain what LATEX is and describe some of its many features that you can use to become a more productive writer

Interlibrary Loan (ILL) is a service offered by libraries to supply patrons with materials which are not immediately available for lending. This could be for many reasons; the library might not own the item, the library may own a copy but it is already checked out to another patron, or the assignment of a required but expensive textbook spurs high demand for a particular title.