School of Information Management & Systems. Spring 2004.
285   Design of Library Services. Michael Buckland.

Assignment 6:   Literature Reviews.   Due Feb 20.

Reviewing and summarizing the literature on any particular topic can be a LOT of hard work. Fortunately other people are sometimes willing to write and publish specialized literature reviews from which the rest of us can benefit.

One genre of publication is known generically as "Annual Reviews" or "The Year's work in...".

There are several relevant to the design of library services. Three important ones are:

Advances in Librarianship, published irregularly, approx. once a year. MAIN stacks Z674 .A3514
Annual Review of Information Science and Technology an annual, MAIN stacks Z699.A1.A65 where there is a complete set followed by an incomplete set (vols 1-25 only); and
Library Trends, published in topical quarterly issues. MAIN stacks Z671.L739 have bound volumes; recent unbound issues are in the current periodicals room. Articles in recent issues can be found by searching for "Library Trends" in http://www.umi.com/pqdauto. (Tip: In Advanced Search, use "library trends" as PUBLICATION TITLE to qualify your search. But please examine the paper version in MAIN.

The first two are published more or less annually and each volume contains about eight chapters, each of which reviews the recent literature on a particular topic. Library Trends is issued quarterly. Each quarterly issue is on a different topic and contains several reviews of subtopics by specialists.

Task: Go find and examine each of these three. Pick any review in any volume of any one that is of interest. Read it. Hand in a half-page summary, with any evaluative comments. Note a topically-related chapter in each of the other two titles.