ALA: The State of America's Libraries, 2010

An excerpt from this report by the American Library Association:

"Academic libraries are experiencing increased use, both physical and virtual. The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) reported that during a typical week in fiscal 2008, U.S. academic libraries had more than 20.3 million visits (1.5 million more than in fiscal 2006), answered more than 1.1 million reference questions, and made more than 498,000 presentations to groups. Seventy-two percent of academic libraries reported providing library reference service by e-mail or the Web.
Almost 95 percent of students use their academic library's website at least once a week, according to a study on students and technology by the Educause Center for Applied Research, and the proportion of students who reported using the library's website daily increased from 7.1 percent in 2006 to 16.9 percent in 2009. Project Information Literacy found that nine out of 10 college students surveyed turned to libraries "for online scholarly research databases . . . for conducting course-related research, valuing the resources for credible content, in-depth information, and the ability to meet instructors' expectations."

Read the whole report here: The State of America's Libraries, 2010.

14 Tools to Teach about Creative Commons

Rodd Lucier at The Clever Sheep rounds up 14 Tools to Teach about Creative Commons. This brief post gathers toolkits, videos, slideshows, projects, and audio files to help educate students about how to license their works through the Creative Commons.


Rodd Lucier is an educator who assists teachers in leveraging Web 2.0 technologies for the classroom.