As a follow-up to their 2001/2002 study on printing services in academic libraries, the authors explore how the provision of print- ing services has changed over the last twelve years. This article explores how libraries are choosing to fund printing services as well as how technology, such as scanning and mobile devices, has changed the way printing services are provided. The results of the 2013 survey find a greater percentage of libraries are using a fee-based system for printing, and, while some technology is providing greater data and control for printing services, other technological advances are having unintended consequences for libraries’printing infrastructure.

The development of green building rating systems (GBRS) and sustainability metrics for buildings, including building products, is reviewed from a North American perspective. The Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) system and the Living Building Challenge (LBC) are highlighted as primary examples of different levels of GBRS. Life cycle assessment (LCA) is introduced as a preferred method of quantifying sustainability, and its integration into current GBRS is examined a prominent building example. Two example applications of LCA to building products associated with GBRS – carpet and roof membranes – are provided. In the first example, conventional carpet was compared with carpet meeting the standards of the LBC’s materials exclusion criteria (Red List, via the Declare product labeling system). In the second example, LCA was applied to both the manufacture and use phases of roof membrane alternatives for a building retrofit project, one of which would have aided in achieving LEED certification. The Declare-listed products did not perform better in every LCA impact category, and the GBRS-preferred roof system performed more poorly in all LCA impact categories, while suggesting the need for additional LCA categories. Both examples help to illustrate the complexity and tradeoffs encountered while integrating the quantitative perspective of LCA and the qualitative perspective of GBRS.

The development of green building rating systems (GBRS) and sustainability metrics for buildings, including building products, is reviewed from a North American perspective. The Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) system and the Living Building Challenge (LBC) are highlighted as primary examples of different levels of GBRS. Life cycle assessment (LCA) is introduced as a preferred method of quantifying sustainability, and its integration into current GBRS is examined a prominent building example. Two example applications of LCA to building products associated with GBRS – carpet and roof membranes – are provided. In the first example, conventional carpet was compared with carpet meeting the standards of the LBC’s materials exclusion criteria (Red List, via the Declare product labeling system). In the second example, LCA was applied to both the manufacture and use phases of roof membrane alternatives for a building retrofit project, one of which would have aided in achieving LEED certification. The Declare-listed products did not perform better in every LCA impact category, and the GBRS-preferred roof system performed more poorly in all LCA impact categories, while suggesting the need for additional LCA categories. Both examples help to illustrate the complexity and tradeoffs encountered while integrating the quantitative perspective of LCA and the qualitative perspective of GBRS.

Green buildings are designed to have low environmental impacts and improved occupant health and well-being. Improvements to the built environment including ventilation, lighting, and materials have resulted in improved indoor environmental quality (IEQ) in green buildings, but the evidence around occupant health is currently centered around environmental perceptions and self-reported health. To investigate the objective impact of green buildings on health, we tracked IEQ, self-reported health, and heart rate in 30 participants from green and conventional buildings for two weeks. 24 participants were then selected to be relocated to the Syracuse Center of Excellence, a LEED platinum building, for six workdays. While they were there, ventilation, CO₂, and volatile organic compound (VOC) levels were changed on different days to match the IEQ of conventional, green, and green+ (green with increased ventilation) buildings. Participants reported improved air quality, odors, thermal comfort, ergonomics, noise and lighting and fewer health symptoms in green buildings prior to relocation. After relocation, participants consistently reported fewer symptoms during the green building conditions compared to the conventional one, yet symptom counts were more closely associated with environmental perceptions than with measured IEQ. On average, participants had 4.7 times the odds of reporting a lack of air movement, 43% more symptoms (p-value = 0.019) and a 2 bpm higher heart rate (p-value < 0.001) for a 1000 ppm increase in indoor CO₂ concentration. These findings suggest that occupant health in green and conventional buildings is driven by both environmental perceptions and physiological pathways.

Information leads to knowledge and knowledge leads to wisdom. Every human activity requiresknowledge to
accomplish their daily task. Theformat for creation/storage of information has changed with the emergence of e-publishing.
The information available in digital form should be preserved for future and for this the digital library has to be sustainable.
The growth of digital libraries, rapidly changing technological and networking infrastructure threatens the sustainability of
digital knowledge. This paperhighlightsdesigning of a sustainable digital library by providing methods to preserve the
subscribed/purchased digital information, digitally created/converted information and library databases.
The technological options to sustain the digital knowledge are discussed. “Green libraries” are the future libraries and
preserving the knowledge contained by them by making the resource sustainable is the new goal of the modern libraries.
KEYWORDS: Digital Library, Institutional Repositories, Cloud Computing, Parallel Computing, Grid Computing,
Maintenance Fees, Back- Up

The article reports on the collaboration between the Gerstein Science Information Centre, or Gerstein Library, at the University of Toronto and its Sustainability Office (SO) to reduce paper waste on campus. By changing the settings of library printers to double-sided, the author states a large amount of waste was avoided. Also included is information on the SO advertising this campaign and its use in other libraries.

The article looks at the problems facing the Yellowhead Regional Library (YRL) in Alberta, Canada as it attempted to make the interlibrary loan system more “green,” or efficient. Studies showed the number of library materials being shipped resulted in capacity issues at sorting stations. The process by which the YRL reduced travel and shipping necessities as well as paper use is outlined.

Environmental degradation has become a serious source of concern for contemporary society, giving rise to efforts in the way of advocacies, conferences and awareness campaigns at different levels. While information professionals in developing economies are positioned to contribute to environmental sustainability; they need to apply creativity and innovation to overcome issues like low literacy levels, poor infrastructures, political apathy of environmental information to achieve the intended goal of environmental literacy. New roles are evolving beyond mere provision of information; these include information professionals as change agents, educators, electronic experts and partners to other change agents. The paper argues that information professionals could be more relevant to the needs of sustainable environment by repositioning themselves in terms of their roles in their various communities. Some recommendations made in the paper include revitalizing public libraries, training in Information and Communication Technology skills and collaboration with interest groups.

Keywords environmental literacy, environmental sustainability, information professionals, developing economies

Nowadays we use information retrieval systems and services as part of our many day-to-day activities ranging from a web and database search to searching for various digital libraries, audio and video collections/services, and so on. However, IR systems and services make extensive use of ICT (information and communication technologies) and increasing use of ICT can significantly increase greenhouse gas (GHG, a term used to denote emission of harmful gases in the atmosphere) emissions. Sustainable development, and more importantly environmental sustainability, has become a major area of concern of various national and international bodies and as a result various initiatives and measures are being proposed for reducing the environmental impact of industries, businesses, governments and institutions. Research also shows that appropriate use of ICT can reduce the overall GHG emissions of a business, product or service. Green IT and cloud computing can play a key role in reducing the environmental impact of ICT. This paper proposes the concept of Green IR systems and services that can play a key role in reducing the overall environmental impact of various ICT-based services in education and research, business, government, etc., that are increasingly being reliant on access and use of digital information. However, to date there has not been any systematic research towards building Green IR systems and services. This paper points out the major challenges in building Green IR systems and services, and two different methods are proposed for estimating the energy consumption, and the corresponding GHG emissions, of an IR system or service. This paper also proposes the four key enablers of a Green IR viz. Standardize, Share, Reuse and Green behavior. Further research required to achieve these for building Green IR systems and services are also mentioned.

Sustainable building construction is the major issue facing the architectural profession in the United States and around the world. Consider the implications of ignoring it: Today, 300 million people living in the United States represent approximately 4.3% of the world’s population, which is now nearing 7 billion. All 300 million of us use 21% of the world’s energy resources every year. Of that 21%, approximately 43% is used to heat, cool, and construct buildings in this country. To continue with the math, the United States annually uses slightly more than 9% of the world’s energy for buildings.

As a nation and as architects, we are constantly developing ways to reduce energy consumption in the new buildings we design and construct. In fact, we are looking for ways to create new buildings that will be energy neutral—that is, they will produce as much energy as they consume. However, if we focus only on new buildings, we will not reduce our consumption; we will only increase it at a slower rate. Thus, the critical problem is to address the sustainable improvements we can make to existing buildings. (Sustainable buildings are designed to take maximum advantage of the natural setting and climate while causing the least possible damage to the environment. As a result, they are efficient in their consumption of energy.) We can reduce energy consumption in the building sector only by dramatically reducing the amount of energy consumed by all the buildings that currently exist.

One of the things that makes academic publishing such a pleasure is that we create new ways for people to get information from the world’s experts, and new ways for those experts to reach a wider audience. I myself became an expert on environmental living, and a “green” author with books published in many languages, because as a young mother in London I asked so many questions about my baby’s food, water, air, and future. Today, I continue to ask questions and have the privilege of working with hundreds of experts on all aspects of environmental sustainability. I’m dazzled by the range of analysis that’s being done. When it comes to understanding the impact of our everyday choices, however, we haven’t come far enough. There’s far more knowledge of specific issues than there was 20 years ago but not much more awareness of the big picture. We see the trees, but we still are not seeing the forest. That expression has a concrete application when it comes to libraries and publishers. The “Building Sustainable Libraries Survey” we ran recently (see preliminary details on p.16) shows much emphasis on reducing paper use but little awareness of the impact of digital technologies. We seem still to be, quite literally, seeing only the trees. I wrote about this issue in Against the Grain last January, as well as in the UKSG Serials journal, and now present a group of articles in this “Sustainability” issue that will help readers see the forest — the bigger picture. Our focus here is environmental sustainability, which means using resources and interacting with the natural world in ways that will not reduce what is available to future generations. Merilyn Burke, University of South Florida, provides a fine overview of collection development challenges, while Tony Horava, University of Ottawa, digs into how sustainability affects collection management. In “Getting There from Here,” environmental historian Michael Smith, Ithaca College, also looks at travel and professional conferences in terms of social welfare, an aspect of sustainable development. Maria Jankowska, UCLA, well-known for her work in the library community, contributes an overview on “Practicing Sustainable Environmental Solutions.”

The drive for energy efficiency arising from a growing awareness of the dangers of climate change is leading to new approaches to library design. The article explores the interaction between library architecture and sustainability by reviewing the many complex strategies employed for saving or recycling evermore scarce natural resources. Although the focus is upon energy consumption, the article also investigates how concepts of comfort and climate are changing under the impact of environmental sustainability. These topics are discussed mainly in the context of public and university libraries built over the past decade, with some reference to library designs still awaiting construction. The methodology is developed primarily through comparative case studies, exploring the approach to environmental sustainability under a number of headings drawn from widely employed environmental assessment methods such as BREEAM (Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method), commonly employed in the United Kingdom and much of Europe; and LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design), the assessment tool frequently used to anticipate the environmental credentials of projects still on the drawing board in the United States and Asia. In many ways the architectural approach to the twenty-first century library is returning to the roots of the modernist library found in Scandinavia with its emphasis upon high levels of daylight, natural materials, social harmony, and contact with nature.

Academic librarians have not fully approached the role they could play in embedding sustainability into information literacy: the process of critically accessing, evaluating and using information. This area is a rich opportunity for libraries to help train students to shift their thinking toward more sustainable models. Because libraries are central to students’ academic investigations, the work of librarians in embedding information literacy across the curriculum is an obvious place to transform the practices of knowledge inquiry. By adapting the national ACRL standards to the cultural, historical, ecological, economic and local environment at the University of Montana, students will be led to recognize the importance of the sustainability, place and impact of the information.

Environmental degradation has become a serious source of concern for contemporary society, giving rise to efforts in the way of advocacies, conferences and awareness campaigns at different levels. While information professionals in developing economies are positioned to contribute to environmental sustainability; they need to apply creativity and innovation to overcome issues like low literacy levels, poor infrastructures, political apathy of environmental information to achieve the intended goal of environmental literacy. New roles are evolving beyond mere provision of information; these include information professionals as change agents, educators, electronic experts and partners to other change agents. The paper argues that information professionals could be more relevant to the needs of sustainable environment by repositioning themselves in terms of their roles in their various communities. Some recommendations made in the paper include revitalizing public libraries, training in Information and Communication Technology skills and collaboration with interest groups.

This article is a compilation of staff ideas about possible items to weave into the Worthington, Ohio, Public Library’s 2010–2012 Strategic Plan. This “Trend Tracking” is accomplished in seven policy areas: (1) Early childhood literacy, (2) future role of libraries, (3) sustainability/green initiatives, (4) staff development, (5) fund-raising, (6) programming and outreach, and (7) other. Staffconsultedavarietyofperiodicals,Websites,andlibraryliterature to assess four elements of their suggested trend: (1) application to Worthington Libraries, (2) impact on patrons, (3) impact on staff, and (4) relevant Web site or bibliographic links that served as the source or enrichment of the suggestion. This article provides library professionals with a rare opportunity to observe the internal thinking of a library workgroup other than their own.
KEYWORDS institutional planning, strategic planning, planning, future visioning, visioning, staff involvement in planning, trends

San Francisco just “gets” sustainable thinking, and conversations that happen there about green design—from the bottom of geothermal wells to the top of living roofs—are richer than anywhere else. Green is in the air, perhaps because everyone is starting out with a big picture green plan informed by state and local initiatives as well as a long history of being right up against the scarcity of natural resources.