Why do academic librarians do what they do? This article explores the sources of passion that make academic librarianship a rewarding profession. A framework is introduced that examines the relationships within and outside the academy that contribute to the academic librarian's professional passion. The challenge of sustaining professional passion is addressed.

While faculty often express dismay at their students' ability to locate and evaluate secondary sources, they may also be ambivalent about how to (and who should) teach the skills required to carry out quality undergraduate research. This project sought to assess the impact of programmatic changes and librarian course integration on students' information literacy (IL) skills. Using an IL rubric to score student papers (n = 337) over three consecutive first-year student cohorts, our study shows that when faculty collaborate with librarians to foster IL competencies, the result is a statistically significant improvement in students' demonstrated research skills. Our study also reveals a collaboration “sweet spot”: the greatest gains accrue when librarians provide moderate input into syllabus and assignment design, followed by one or two strategically placed hands-on library sessions. Successful collaboration thus need not entail completely overhauling content courses so as to make library instruction the centerpiece. Quite the opposite, librarians can help reduce the potential burden on faculty by supporting discipline- and course-specific research goals, as well as by sharing resources and best practices in IL pedagogy.

The Association of College & Research Libraries’ (ACRL) Academic/Research Librarian of the Year awardees constitute a “hall of fame” for ACRL. This article reports research analyzing 30 years of awardees between 1978 and 2007. Studying the demographics and accomplishments of the awardees contributes to knowledge of how academic librarianship has evolved as a profession and how its values have shifted. As the profession begins to explore and better comprehend the outcomes of its award processes, it may choose to evaluate and redesign them. This study offers several recommendations for change to the Academic/Research Librarian of the Year Award.

Virtual reality (VR) shows great promise for enhancing the learning experience of students in higher education and academic libraries are at the forefront of efforts to bring VR into the curriculum as an innovative learning tool. This paper reviews some of the growing applications and benefits of VR technologies for supporting pedagogy in academic libraries and outlines the challenges of making VR accessible for disabled students. It defines existing regulations and guidelines for designing accessible digital technologies and offers two case studies drawn from each of the authors’ own academic libraries, at Temple University and at the University of Oklahoma, in order to provide insight into the challenges and benefits of making VR more accessible for students. The paper argues that to continue to serve their mission of equitable access to information for the entire student population, academic libraries that implement VR programs need to balance innovation with inclusion by allocating sufficient staff time and technical resources and bringing accessibility thinking into VR projects from the beginning. To accomplish this, libraries will need the assistance of software developers and accessibility experts, and librarians will need to act as strong advocates for better support from commercial software and hardware vendors and to promote change in their institutions.

In Libraries & Gardens: Growing Together, Carrie Scott Banks and Cindy Mediavilla bring librarianship into conversation with gardening. While the histories of gardens and libraries are intertwined, there has not been much written about library gardens. Banks and Mediavilla’s book encourages us to look at how library gardens “extend and enhance the library’s role as an information center and community space” (x). Writing from public library backgrounds, Banks and Mediavilla focus on how library gardens can contribute to the inclusiveness and accessibility of libraries. The book gives a tour of various kinds of library gardens, including many academic and research library gardens. In discussing library gardens, Libraries & Gardens: Growing Together contributes to a broader conversation about libraries as multisensory, experiential places.

Textbook affordability is a critical issue in higher education. Academic librarians have responded by creating programs to encourage faculty to become aware of the cost of textbooks and using open educational resources as an alternative. Another, less obvious reason to start a campus textbook affordability initiative is to establish a culture of openness for all types of open material. Faculty are often much more willing to confront textbook costs than they are costly, pay-walled journals. The author describes how he instituted a project to create more awareness of open content on his campus.