The Avian Archives of Iowa Online (avIAn) is a web portal for Iowa ornithological primary sources dating from 1895-2012. The portal’s eight archival collections provide robust documentation of over one hundred years of bird study in Iowa and encompass some of the Midwest’s most influential conservationists. This presentation and database demonstration will share documents and photographs from the Frederic Leopold collection. We will learn about Leopold’s life-long study of Wood Duck populations in Iowa while simultaneously exploring the content and functionality of this new and publicly accessible digital resource. In addition, we will present background information on the project’s inception and development.

New features added to Quick Search (Primo), besides the new interface, include a choice to search Partner Libraries (TRAC consortium) and a search scope choice of Library Collections + Articles; Library Collections; ISU Digital Collections; and Special Collections.

Tasks in the interview scripts were written to explore volunteers’ usual methods of searching for articles and/or books, and to see if they are aware of and use features such as Advanced Search; facets; scope dropdown inside the search box; options to save results such as email, Favorites (pin icon), citation or Endnote; Partner Libraries search; My Library Card; and if they can find items from ISU Digital Collections or Special Collections. If they are not already aware of these features, can they find them?

The Iowa State University Library is active in national and international efforts to transform scholarly communications and, in the process, to advance our own land-grant mission to share the knowledge Iowa State creates with Iowa and the rest of the world. Our library is recognized for its work around transformative open access agreements that enable our researchers’ articles to be published openly. We have invested heavily in green open access as well as in staffing and infrastructure to support the sharing of research data. And we work closely with our campus partners to ensure Iowa State faculty have access to the tools and support services they need to produce and disseminate research of the highest quality and with the highest impact...

The Iowa State University Library Assessment Plan was developed over the course of 2017, and adopted in October of 2017. The plan provides a framework for efforts related to the creation, assembly, and analysis of library data and information. The assessment plan and supporting information related to it can be found on the Iowa State Library Assessment Website.

The assessment plan is aligned with the library’s five-year strategic plan (2015-2020) and is intended to support strategic decision-making in the library. The assessment plan’s guiding principles are:

• Data-driven: Strive to stay objective, impartial, and grounded in research and analysis.
• Impactful: Focus on the usefulness and impact of library services on users and recommend library process changes based on expertise and findings.
• Productive: Produce and promote innovative, creative, user-friendly, trustworthy, and timely products.
• Efficient: Re-purpose assessment data to support the ongoing review of library operations and tell the Library's story.
• Integrated: Help all ISUL units tell their stories and promote their services. Find and present relevant data in the most valid and effective ways.
• Open: Advance library communication and evidence-based librarianship by sharing and promoting work with the ISUL community.


At the heart of the Iowa State University Library Assessment Plan is a strategy map (Figure 1). A strategy map is a diagram that is used to document the primary strategic objectives being pursued by an organization. The strategy map provides a logic model for the strategy of the organization.

A well-designed strategy map provides a condensed (one side of one piece of paper) view of an organization’s strategic objectives. By providing a simple visual representation of the organization’s most important strategic objectives, the strategy map is useful as a tool to enable discussions within the library related to those objectives, and consideration of measured progress towards those objectives.

A new home page design for the ISU Library website was implemented in August 2017. This redesign was influenced by an X’s and O’s study conducted to find out which elements of the home page were deemed important and not important by study volunteers. Recommendations were to make “Floor and tier maps,” “Reserve a Library Space,” and “Hours” (display today’s hours) more visually noticeable. Although Research & Course Guides were one of the most circled items in the study, three commenters asked for a section listing information by major, so while it seems to be desired, it may not be recognizable.

Purpose – Multiple disciplines such as finance, management and economics have contributed to governance research over time. However, the full intellectual structure of the governance “field” including the exchange of knowledge across disciplines and the large variety of governance topics remains to be uncovered. To appreciate the breadth of corporate governance research, it is necessary to understand the disciplinary sources from which the research stems. This manuscript focuses on the interdisciplinary underpinnings of corporate governance research.

Design/methodology/approach – This paper employs bibliometric analysis to trace the evolution of corporate governance using articles included in the ISI Web of Science database between 1990 and 2015. Journals included in these categories encompass a full range of business disciplines and provide evidence of the multi-disciplinary nature of corporate governance. It also uncovers the topics treated by disciplines under the governance umbrella using a machine learning method called latent Dirichtlet allocation (LDA).

Findings – Corporate governance research deals with a number of strategy-related topics. Unlike strategy topics that reside in a single discipline, corporate governance crosses disciplinary boundaries and includes contributions from accounting, finance, economics, law and management. Our analysis shows that over 80% of corporate governance articles come from outside the field of management. Our LDA solution indicates that the major topics in governance research include corporate governance theory, control of family firms, executive compensation and audit committees.

Originality/value – The results illustrate that corporate governance is far more interdisciplinary than previously thought. This is an important insight for corporate governance academics and may lead to collaborative research. More importantly, this research illustrates the usefulness of LDA for investigating interdisciplinary fields. This method is easily transferable to other interdisciplinary fields and it provides a powerful alternative to existing bibliometric methods. We suggest a number of topic areas within library and information science where this method may be applied, including collection development, support for interdisciplinary faculty and basic research into emerging interdisciplinary areas.

Critical leadership studies (CLS) is a recent branch of leadership studies that examines assumptions and issues with mainstream approaches to leadership development and research. This paper reviews three areas of criticism from CLS. First, leadership is a poorly defined and ambiguous concept. Second, mainstream approaches to leadership can be harmful to followers. And third, there is little evidence demonstrating that leadership development is effective. Next, a recent attempt at library leadership development, the Nexus Project, is examined against the three CLS leadership criticisms. And finally, suggestions from the CLS literature are offered on how to pursue organizational improvements outside the context and shadow of leadership.

In June 2017, the Article Indexes & Databases (AID) link on the library website was changed from the AID pages developed in-house to the Libguides A-Z list. Also in June 2017 and also affecting article searches, Quick Search was switched to the new Primo interface. In August 2017, a new home page design was implemented.

Tasks in the interview script were written to explore volunteers’ usual methods of searching for articles, which could include using Quick Search, Google Scholar, going directly to a specific database, or using the AID page to get to a known database. Only one participant reported used the AID page to search for a new database as part of their usual routine.

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.

Celine and Julie Go Boating has enough material packed into its four hours to fuel any number of critical monographs and probably a few dissertations as well.* It’s part of the movie’s charm, though, and a self-referential nod to its own exploration of the qualities of magic, that it never feels heavy, stuffed, dense, or impenetrable. For almost 40 years the movie has remained open-armed, lighthearted, and glad to have you watch it. It’s even saved a seat for you on the sofa (literally).