National Leadership Grant A few years ago there was a lot of speculation about the virtual library. Some visionaries imagined that soon there would be no need for buildings or for books, that electronic texts and hyperlinked resources would replace the library as we know it. Though the virtual library hasn't quite emerged, our library has a whole dimension of electronic resources as well as our still-valuable print ones and researchers now have to cope with a dizzying array of options. On the other hand, the critical skills needed to conduct research are the same, whether using print or electronic resources, and learning those skills is not simple. 

Recognizing this as an issue that concerns the faculty, the library received a National Leadership Grant from the Institute for Museum and Library Services to develop a model collaboration with faculty to enhance student learning of developmental research skills in this complex, hybrid print/electronic environment. The two-year project, which grew out of the library's strategic plan and which was shaped by student and faculty focus group discussions, has three components: summer institutes for liberal arts college librarians in area to focus on teaching and assessment, two summer workshop programs for faculty to design or redesign a course to develop students' research skills, and an assessment and 

Improved Databases There is a trend in libraries to migrate more and more of its indexes and bibliographies into electronic databases, and the venue of choice now is through World Wide Web interfaces. The ATLA Religion Database and America: History and Life are two databases that have recently migrated to web access. Not only are we constantly adding new electronic resources, they change constantly. Lexis/Nexis has added indexes to congressional publications and to statistics found in government documents to their database collection, and have redesigned the interface. The interface for PsychInfo is changing to allow for more sophisticated searching. FirstSearch and Ideal are also making significant changes to their interfaces. Using a library's web collections is a little like visiting a library where the floor plan is constantly changing: it takes time to figure out where everything is, but each time it gets a little easier to figure it out. Meanwhile, the catalog now has URLs added to it for those journals received in electronic format. When searching the catalog through WebPals, simply clicking on the link leads to the journal in full text.