Technical Processing of University Library: A Theoretical Study

Technical services operations comprise of ordering, claiming and receipt of materials, cataloging and classification of materials; and serials control. Beside these, other technical services operations contain circulation, documents, foreign language and special collections, and bibliographic instruction in technical services areas. This leads me to believe that the distinction between technical services and public or reader services in individual libraries is based on custom and tradition arising out of incidental circumstances, rather than on fundamental principle. In this article, I tried to provide some basic aspect regarding technical processing which help in maintaining the library bitterly. In this article, I include basic aspect of acquisition, classification, cataloguing and information retrieval. Beside this I tried to focus on library management software which is most important for technical processing now a day

A brief report on the New Classification Scheme for Chinese Libraries

The report takes a brief look into Lai Yung-Hsiang's New Classification Scheme for Chinese Libraries. I will start by giving a short account of its histories and context followed by its current status and use, as well as a description of its basic principles. In particular, I would like to compare it with Liu Guojun's classification for Chinese libraries, which it is updated from, and the Dewey Decimal Classification scheme, which they have both been based on. This report will conclude with a brief analysis of its strengths, weaknesses and challenges for its future

Checking Out or Checking Into Reading? The Borrowing Habits of Elementary School Children In Relation to Gender, Age, and Reading Ability

Research regarding the reading preferences of children often focuses on the differences between boys and girls, but rarely looks at reading ability as a factor. The purpose of this study is to address the connection between children's reading preferences and reading ability. By looking at the school library circulation records of 2nd, 3rd, and 4th grade students, this study examines relationships between gender, age, reading ability, and the reading preference of elementary school children. Quantitative data was collected from circulation records in order to find trends related to Fiction or Non-Fiction reading choice based on a student's reading ability, age, and gender. Fiction and Non-Fiction are determined based on call numbers of books checked-out; specifically, those titles that are picture or chapter books are considered Fiction, whereas those labeled with Dewey Decimal coding are considered Non- Fiction. Reading ability--in terms of reading level scores (II, III, or IV)--is determined by the North Carolina End-of-Grade Test in Reading. The hope is that the results of this study may contribute to further research and discussion addressing the relatively poor literacy performance of boys compared to girls both in school and on standardized achievement tests

Usefulness of social tagging in organizing and providing access to the web: An analysis of indexing consistency and quality

This dissertation research points out major challenging problems with current Knowledge Organization (KO) systems, such as subject gateways or web directories: (1) the current systems use traditional knowledge organization systems based on controlled vocabulary which is not very well suited to web resources, and (2) information is organized by professionals not by users, which means it does not reflect intuitively and instantaneously expressed users’ current needs. In order to explore users’ needs, I examined social tags which are user-generated uncontrolled vocabulary. As investment in professionally-developed subject gateways and web directories diminishes (support for both BUBL and Intute, examined in this study, is being discontinued), understanding characteristics of social tagging becomes even more critical. Several researchers have discussed social tagging behavior and its usefulness for classification or retrieval; however, further research is needed to qualitatively and quantitatively investigate social tagging in order to verify its quality and benefit. This research particularly examined the indexing consistency of social tagging in comparison to professional indexing to examine the quality and efficacy of tagging. The data analysis was divided into three phases: analysis of indexing consistency, analysis of tagging effectiveness, and analysis of tag attributes. Most indexing consistency studies have been conducted with a small number of professional indexers, and they tended to exclude users. Furthermore, the studies mainly have focused on physical library collections. This dissertation research bridged these gaps by (1) extending the scope of resources to various web documents indexed by users and (2) employing the Information Retrieval (IR) Vector Space Model (VSM) - based indexing consistency method since it is suitable for dealing with a large number of indexers. As a second phase, an analysis of tagging effectiveness with tagging exhaustivity and tag specificity was conducted to ameliorate the drawbacks of consistency analysis based on only the quantitative measures of vocabulary matching. Finally, to investigate tagging pattern and behaviors, a content analysis on tag attributes was conducted based on the FRBR model. The findings revealed that there was greater consistency over all subjects among taggers compared to that for two groups of professionals. The analysis of tagging exhaustivity and tag specificity in relation to tagging effectiveness was conducted to ameliorate difficulties associated with limitations in the analysis of indexing consistency based on only the quantitative measures of vocabulary matching. Examination of exhaustivity and specificity of social tags provided insights into particular characteristics of tagging behavior and its variation across subjects. To further investigate the quality of tags, a Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) was conducted to determine to what extent tags are conceptually related to professionals’ keywords and it was found that tags of higher specificity tended to have a higher semantic relatedness to professionals’ keywords. This leads to the conclusion that the term’s power as a differentiator is related to its semantic relatedness to documents. The findings on tag attributes identified the important bibliographic attributes of tags beyond describing subjects or topics of a document. The findings also showed that tags have essential attributes matching those defined in FRBR. Furthermore, in terms of specific subject areas, the findings originally identified that taggers exhibited different tagging behaviors representing distinctive features and tendencies on web documents characterizing digital heterogeneous media resources. These results have led to the conclusion that there should be an increased awareness of diverse user needs by subject in order to improve metadata in practical applications. This dissertation research is the first necessary step to utilize social tagging in digital information organization by verifying the quality and efficacy of social tagging. This dissertation research combined both quantitative (statistics) and qualitative (content analysis using FRBR) approaches to vocabulary analysis of tags which provided a more complete examination of the quality of tags. Through the detailed analysis of tag properties undertaken in this dissertation, we have a clearer understanding of the extent to which social tagging can be used to replace (and in some cases to improve upon) professional indexing

Toward a Model of Intercultural Warrant: A Case of the Korean Decimal Classification\u27s Cross-cultural Adaptation of the Dewey Decimal Classification

I examined the Korean Decimal Classification (KDC)\u27s adaptation of the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) by comparing the two systems. This case manifests the sociocultural influences on KOSs in a cross-cultural context. I focused my analysis on the changes resulting from the meeting of the two cultures, answering the main research question: “How does KDC adapt DDC in terms of underlying sociocultural perspectives in a classificatory form?” I took a comparative approach and address the main research question in two phases. In Phase 1, quantities of class numbers were analyzed by edition and discipline. The main class with the most consistently high number of class numbers in DDC was the social sciences, while the main class with the most consistently high number of class numbers in KDC was technology. The two main classes are expected to differ in semantic contents or specificities. In Phase 2, patterns of adaptations were analyzed by examining the class numbers, captions, and hierarchical relations within the developed adaptation taxonomy. Implementing the taxonomy as a coding scheme brings two comparative features of classifications: 1) semantic contents determined by captions and quantity of subordinate numbers; and 2) structural arrangement determined by ranks, the broader category, presence and the order of subordinate numbers. Surveying proper forms of adaptation resulted in the development of an adaptation taxonomy that will serve as a framework to account for the conflicts between and harmonization of multiple social and cultural influences in knowledge structures. This study has ramifications in theoretical and empirical foundations for the development of “intercultural warrant” in KOSs

Do Circulation Records Reflect What Children Prefer to Read? A Case Study of a Wake County, North Carolina Elementary School.

The purpose of this study was to examine whether research regarding children€™s literature preferences matched what children were actually selecting based on eight weeks of circulation records at a Wake County, North Carolina elementary school. Results showed that older literature discrediting series books, magazines, and graphic novels as poor choices for children€™s literature go against circulation records that show what children are actually checking out of their school media center