Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to carry out a survey in order to better understand the nature of handheld mobile computing use by academic library users and to determine whether there is a significant demand for using the library services with these small screen devices. Design/methodology/approach -A survey is created to measure whether people want to access an OPAC with a small screen. Additionally, through open-ended questions, the survey attempts to gain a broader understanding of handheld mobile computing's impact on, and implications for, the services provided by academic libraries. Findings -A total of 58.4 percent of respondents who own a web-enabled handheld device indicate that they would use small screen devices, such as PDAs or web-enabled cell phones to search a library OPAC. Originality/value -The increasing prevalence of handheld mobile computing devices such as PDAs and web-enabled cell phones warrants investigation as to its impact on libraries. This study examines an academic library user population and the potential demand for using the library's catalog with handheld mobile computing devices

This study examines the use of chat in an academic library's user population and where virtual reference services might fit within the spectrum of public services offered by academic libraries. Using questionnaires, this research demonstrates that many within the academic community are open to the idea of chat-based reference or using chat for some loosely defined "research purposes," but this openness does not necessarily result in high levels of use. The primary purpose of this study was to determine whether the lack of virtual reference use could, in part, be explained by students' preference for competing methods and technologies for obtaining reference assistance. This study demonstrates a pattern that suggests chat-based reference does not compete well with other methods of providing reference service.

# Ebooks and Interlibrary Loan: Licensed to Fill? Increasingly, libraries of all types and sizes are now adding electronic book (ebook) titles to their collections. A survey was used to explore the implications of ebook licensing and interlibrary loan use. Among academic libraries in the United States a widespread preference for handling print books was found along with a need for more information about ebook interlibrary loan rights at one's own institution and a means to identify format type available from potential lending libraries.

PurposeThe aim of this paper is to conduct a study regarding the indexing of open access journals in three large, commercially available full‐text aggregation databases and using Journal Citation Reports Metrics File to further explore the journals that were being indexed.Design/methodology/approachUsing publicly available database title lists produced by the full‐text aggregation database publishers, titles and title metadata were analyzed and compared to data from the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and Journal Citation Reports (JCR) metrics file in order to investigate the availability of open access (OA) scholarly journals. Subject Category Impact Factor Ranking Quartiles and Percentiles (SCIFRQs and SCIFRPs) were used as part of this investigation as indicators of the research significance of these OA journals.FindingsResults showed that very small percentages of open access journals were indexed in each of the full‐text aggregators studied. A total of 7.9 percent of titles included in journal citation reports were OA journals. This study also reports the averaged SCIFRPs of OA journals for all subject areas with more than five journals included in JCR. The average SCIFRP for OA journals included in JCR was 34.49 percent and the averaged SCIFRP for all OA journals indexed by full‐text aggregation databases being studied is 41.2 percent. This study points to large differences in the rate of indexing OA journals by different databases.Originality/valueUnlike past studies into the indexing of OA journals, this is not limited to selected subject areas and shows indications of the research prominence of OA journals with JCR derived data.

SFX is an XML based product designed to inter-link electronic resources with other resources in context-sensitive manner. SFX was first developed at the University of Ghent by Herbert Von de Sompel and has been released as a commercial product by Ex Libris. Use statistics garnered from SFX's statistics module since the implementation July of 2001 are discussed in the context of an academic research library environment. The results from usability testing conducted at Washington State University are reported. These usage statistics demonstrated a pattern of increasing use and exceptional use from FirstSearch databases. INTRODUCTION:SFX creates dynamically generated sets of links to library resources and other electronic documents based on the metadata in electronic documents. While the initial focus of the development of this standard was on bibliographic metadata, metadata from any type of document could conceivably be used, as suggested by SFX's initial creator Herbert Van de Sompel (Sompel and Beit-Arie, 2001a). SFX and its competitors work by transferring context sensitive metadata from a source database via NISO's proposed OpenURL metadata standard (OpenURL, 2002) into a Link Resolver. In this case, the Link Resolver is on an SFX server.It creates a set of links to a variety of resources based upon an established set of rules and locally established thresholds to generate a set of options in the form of hypertext links. These links are known as extended services and are loaded into an SFX services menu. These extended services direct the users to electronic documents known as targets based upon the initial document's metadata and thresholds set on the library's SFX server. Thresholds control the appearance of particular types of extended services on the generated SFX services menu. Thresholds are series of parameters for specific targets to control which services appear using factors such as year ranges, volumes or issues (see figure 1). This is a process referred to as context sensitive linking. Context sensitive linking allows the institution to control the library users' interaction and guarantee that they receive access to all of the potential resources.