In this article I argue that the readersâ advisory service was a product of social forces operating in the context of early twentieth century capitalism. The work of French regulation theorists provides a framework for analyzing these forces using the concepts of regime of accumulation and mode of regulation. It suggests that American capitalism during this time was engaged in a process of defining a new mode of regulation capable of ensuring labor discipline and forging a market for consumer products among the public. The readersâ advisory service, in its efforts to develop a professional expertise for librarians, can be shown to be an experiment in contributing to the fulfillment of the needs imposed by the new mode of regulation. This experiment was conducted through the development of processes involving the legitimization of new ways of living, the â humanizationâ of books, the association of free time with the consumption of commodities, and the voluntary imposition of a system of discipline on patrons who availed themselves of the service.

This article is an expansion of another research of the author that was published one year ago in Library Quarterly. It explores new statistical methods to predict whether or not a school would be ranked. By "ranking", the author refers to having a top-quality master's program or having faculty who contribute significantly to the advancement of the professional.

The emerging trends in digital(ized) collection development from 1997 are examined using a sample of projects accessible through web-based registries of the Association of Research Libraries and Digital Library Federation. The analysis focuses on thematic repertoire, narrative structuring, underlying historiographic principles, presentation, and the context of institutionalization combining empirical and interpretive approaches, to understand how digital libraries are involved in the production of knowledge and how memory institutions are currently shaping this record in the digital environment. Digital collections are presently showcasing material so far restricted to scholarly uses, making it available for broader educational purposes. Nevertheless, they resemble the sixteenth- and the seventeenth-century cabinets of curiosities in their limited ability to support scholarship or address information needs of defined communities of users. Programmatic statements for developers in conclusion of the study suggest ways for improving the usability of these emerging textual environments, while recognizing new uses for the collections.

Archeologists have used material artifacts found in a physical space to gain an understanding about the people who occupied that space. Likewise, as users wander through a digital library, they leave behind data-based artifacts of their activity in the virtual space. Digital library archeologists can gather these artifacts and employ inductive techniques, such as bibliomining, to create generalizations. These generalizations are the basis for hypotheses, which are tested to gain understanding about library services and users. In this article, the development of traditional archeological methods is presented and used to create a conceptual framework for the artifact-based evaluation in digital libraries.

This article describes a Delphi study conducted to determine factors that affect the process of routing and assigning reference questions received electronically by digital reference services, both to experts within the service and between services. Fifteen factors were determined, by expert consensus, to be important at the conclusion of this study. These fifteen factors are divided into three groups: 1) general factors, 2) factors in routing the question to an individual, and 3) factors when routing the question to another service. These factors were ranked in order of importance and grouped according to the recipient of the question. These fifteen factors need to be taken into account when automating the triage process. This article has laid out a methodology for investigating other digital reference processes so that those processes amenable to automation may be automated, and expertsâ talents and time may be best used.

The purpose of the present study is to determine, by building a model that predicts a judgment of perceived quality, what the profession means by "perceived quality of schools of library and information science." The study examines quantifiable characteristics of two groups of library schools: those ranked in both of Herbert S. White's perception studies and those not ranked in both. Multiple regression and discriminant analysis were used to build a model that showed clear differences between the two groups of schools. On the basis of several variables that define aspects of a program's size, finances, age, leadership, and rigor, the analysis showed that ranked and unranked schools form two mutually exclusive groups whose membership can be predicted with better than 98 percent accuracy. It also showed the perceived quality of a school's master's degree (M.L.S.) program is associated with the following variables, listed in decreasing order of importance: the half-life of the school's doctoral graduates, its budget and outside income, its age, its faculty's productivity, and the number of its students.