apr14_a.indd


April 2014 165 C&RL News

In the

Welcome to the April 2014 issue of C&RL News. 
In 2013, ALA launched a partnership with the 
Harwood Institute to help libraries “turn outward” 
and engage their communities through conversa-
tion to better align with community expectations. 
Nancy Kranich, Megan Lotts, and Gene Springs 
describe the Rutgers University Library’s experi-
ences with the Harwood approach in their article 
“The promise of academic libraries.”

Meeting community needs and expecta-
tions can be done in a variety of ways. Heather  
McCullough of the University of North Carolina-
Charlotte shares her library’s efforts at “Developing 
digital scholarship services on a shoestring” to address 
their campus’ need for additional services in this area. 

This month’s issue also features articles on 
two approaches to meeting community needs by 
providing chat reference services. Jodi Shepherd 
and Irene Kobler of California State University-
Chico detail their implementation of a LibAnswers 
knowledge bank in their article “How do I search 
for a book?”  

Librarians at John Carroll University looked to 
the business community for inspiration to provide 

“Proactive chat reference” by implementing a 
trigger-initiated customer service system on their 
library website.

In this month’s ACRL Tech Connect article, 
Jewelry Yep and Jason Shulman detail a method 
of assessing social media and examine the concept 
of nodes and links in “Analyzing the library’s Twit-
ter network.”

In preparation for ACRL’s 75th anniversary, our 
sister publication College & Research Libraries is 
asking for your input in identifiying seven seminal 
articles from that publication’s history for a special 
issue to be published next year. Visit this issue’s 
C&RL Spotlight department for more information.

Make sure to check out the other features and 
departments this month, including a Scholarly 
Communication column examining the San Fran-
cisco Declaration on Research Assessment by Marta 
Bladek, Internet Resources on “Street art and graf-
fiti” by Michael DeNotto, a The Way I See It essay  
detailing “Lessons learned at the general education 
table” by Emily A.B. Swanson, and the final round 
of profiles of 2014 ACRL award winners. 

—David Free, editor-in-chief, dfree@ala.org

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