Diversity and inclusion initiatives are expanding on campuses across the United States. These initiatives can take many forms, such as the hiring and retention of diverse faculty, student recruitment, and a thoughtful examination of pedagogy and course curriculum. As a librarian, you may be aware of these efforts, but perhaps not as directly involved as disciplinary faculty, particularly in regards to course curriculum development and redesign. How librarians can participate and support this work on our campuses is not always clear; however, we found fertile opportunities for librarian involvement and leadership.

The authors surveyed college and university faculty members in the field of professional education to gauge their perceptions pertaining to the impact of library services on their research. The purpose was to illuminate faculty perceptions in a postsecondary education environment that emphasizes research productivity and requires libraries to provide ever more compelling evidence of their institutional value. Survey results showed that faculty members continue to rely on traditional discovery and collections-based library services, but that additional support for grant activity, data management, intellectual property management, and bibliometric analysis is needed. Implications for transforming library research support are discussed, and areas for further study are proposed.

Introduction to the special section of vol. 9, mo. 2 entitled "First Thoughts on the Framework."

This study was conducted to investigate levels of familiarity that librarians have with critical theory, to determine the extent to which it informs professional practices, and to examine how the social justice issues related to critical theory inform the practices of librarians who are unfamiliar with it. A survey found that librarians were versed not only in the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, but also in poststructuralism, feminism, queer theory, critical race theory, and postcolonialism. Many librarians, lacking familiarity with critical theory, were also shown to be concerned with social justice and these issues significantly affect these librarians’ professional practices. Based on these results, the authors propose the plausibility of incorporating more critical theory into library and information science programs.

Photo by Flickr user Paulio Geordio (CC BY 2.0) In Brief: This article is the second and final installment of my research exploring critical and Indigenous research methods and their relation to LIS. What is the context of these twentieth century methods and what might they mean to a librarian in the twenty-first century? Read along […]

The editors of CIL comment on the recent news that the editor and the editorial board of another library science journal have resigned in protest over their publisher's policies on authors' rights. The CIL editors put forth this event as an important demonstration of leadership in the open access movement, and they challenge the CIL readership to follow suit by adopting additional professional practices in support of open access.

Librarians join many professional associations and work on a great number of professional committees over the course of their careers. Working on a committee as a member can be a challenge, and the challenges can be even greater if you are chairing the committee. The authors summarize some of the key points for planning and executing effective and enjoyable meetings. Get tips as well on how to follow through to get results and how to improve future meetings.

The modeling of cascade processes in multi-agent systems in the form of complex networks has in recent years become an important topic of study due to its many applications: the adoption of commercial products, spread of disease, the diffusion of an idea, etc. In this paper, we begin by identifying a desiderata of seven properties that a framework for modeling such processes should satisfy: the ability to represent attributes of both nodes and edges, an explicit representation of time, the ability to represent non-Markovian temporal relationships, representation of uncertain information, the ability to represent competing cascades, allowance of non-monotonic diffusion, and computational tractability. We then present the MANCaLog language, a formalism based on logic programming that satisfies all these desiderata, and focus on algorithms for finding minimal models (from which the outcome of cascades can be obtained) as well as how this formalism can be applied in real world scenarios. We are not aware of any other formalism in the literature that meets all of the above requirements.

Introduction to this special issue, Reflecting on the Standards.

While information literacy in higher education has long been focused on cognitive learning outcomes, attention must be paid to students' affective, emotional needs throughout the research process. This article identifies models for embedding affective learning outcomes within information literacy instruction, and provides strategies to help librarians discover, articulate, and address students' self-efficacy, motivation, emotions and attitudes. Worksheets to assist in creating affective learning outcomes are included to bring structure to an area of learning that is often challenging to articulate and measure. Also included in the article are the results of a recent survey of instruction librarians' familiarity and inclusion of affective learning outcomes within teaching and learning initiatives.

Real world projects for senior level software engineering courses offer many advantages for students and others involved. Because of the nature of the projects and the people involved, however, many problems can arise during the design and implementation of such projects. This paper discusses in depth the issues that computer science students sometimes face when they take on one of these real world projects.

Higher education information literacy standards have readily addressed cognitive skills, although affective competencies—the emotional abilities that students must acquire in order to successfully navigate the research process—have not yet been incorporated into standards. This paper presents examples of current information literacy standards, integrating affective competencies or dispositions, including the American Association of School Librarians (AASL) 21st Century Learning Standards , and proposes a model for affective-focused higher education information literacy standards. The role of affect in library learning, the importance of affective competencies, and the centrality of affective learning to student mastery of research skills are discussed. Viewing information literacy as an integrated literacy, encompassing affective learning, technological literacy, and critical thinking, can provide avenues for greater collaboration with faculty in support of effective student research assignments.