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In today's digital and distributed information environment, engaging with users is imperative for the success of liaison librarianship in the academy's learning and research environment. Such associations require the liaison's personal approach for connecting and building relationships with clients. This paper addresses the main factors for sustaining or improving ties with users as well as the prospects for individualized working relationships by liaison librarians. It examines the validity of and rationale for adopting a more personal type of engagement to improve and extend client connections in the long term. This article also looks at how such an approach by liaisons is reflected in best practices, guidelines, and articles in the library literature. In addition, it traces literature that helps establish grounds for personal or individualized engagement in the workplace. The paper concludes with some important practical considerations and calls for more in-depth research into the liaison librarian's personal approach as an essential step for understanding and assessing the quality of liaison librarianship.

This paper discusses a joint project of the American Library Association and the American Sociological Association. The goal of this collaboration is to guarantee that students of sociology, particularly sociology majors, develop strong information literacy skills during their undergraduate experience. The article talks about national standards for information literacy and how they relate to the sociology major. It presents examples for applying the sociology information literacy standards to course assignments and the sociology curriculum. We also provide suggestions for building linkages between sociology faculty members and social science librarians, as well as ways in which information literacy outcomes might be assessed in the sociology curriculum. (Contains 3 footnotes.)

As libraries experience changes in their environment, communicating to stakeholders about the changes as well as the library's mission, strategies, and responses to the changes is critical. Such communication serves well to inform how the change management integrates with the mission of the library so that stakeholders have a shared understanding of the changes taking place, as well as to build and develop their support and confidence in the organization. This study discusses findings of an exploratory analysis in which 111 Association of Research Libraries (ARL) Web sites were surveyed to gain insights into the academic library's current practices of communicating the library mission.