A Generic Alerting Service for Digital Libraries

Users of modern digital libraries (DLs) can keep themselves up-to-date by searching and browsing their favorite collections, or more conveniently by resorting to an alerting service. The alerting service notifies its clients about new or changed documents. Proprietary and mediating alerting services fail to fluidly integrate information from differing collections. This paper analyses the conceptual requirements of this much-sought after service for digital libraries. We demonstrate that the differing concepts of digital libraries and its underlying technical design has extensive influence (a) the expectations, needs and interests of users regarding an alerting service, and (b) on the technical possibilities of the implementation of the service. Our findings will show that the range of issues surrounding alerting services for digital libraries, their design and use is greater than one may anticipate. We also show that, conversely, the requirements for an alerting service have considerable impact on the concepts of DL design. Our findings should be of interest for librarians as well as system designers. We highlight and discuss the far-reaching implications for the design of, and interaction with, libraries. This paper discusses the lessons learned from building such a distributed alerting service. We present our prototype implementation as a proof-of-concept for an alerting service for open DL software

Issues in usability studies for alerting in digital libraries

Alerting Services inform users of Digital Libraries about new or changed content of their favorite Digital Library collection, or about new documents discussing a topic they are interested in. The users define their interest in form of subscriptions; the alerting service filters new or changed documents against all user subscriptions and notifies the users about matches found. To define their subscriptions, users may, e.g., select a journal from a list, or a topic from a classification. Few services support the definition of IR type queries, or advanced combinations of queries and metadata selections

HDLalert – a healthcare DL alerting system: from user needs to implementation

In the health domain, there are many circumstances where clinicians (i.e. doctors, nurses, allied health professionals) and patients wish to track changes in medical knowledge. However, existing 'news' or 'alert' services provide relatively limited means for selecting which information to receive. The result is that clinicians and patients often receive information that is inappropriate, irrelevant or simply too much. In this paper, we detail alert-relevant findings from several international user studies (e.g. UK, Germany and New Zealand) incorporating both clinical staff (across several hospitals) and patients' perceptions. These findings demonstrate the importance of context, in terms of both the user's task and immediate environment. We introduce a novel alerting architecture that can provide a finely tailored stream of alerts to the user, and provides further support to assist the interpretation of received material

Scholarly Journals on the Net: A Reader's Assessment

published or submitted for publicatio

Flexible futures: the academic librarian

Australian academic libraries are highly adaptive to the changing needs of learning and teaching and research and the demands of the changing information environment. Liaison Librarians are absolutely central to the academic library's ability to manage change and anticipate and prepare for the future. However little is shared in conference papers and journal publications about how Liaison is organised, developed and supported by academic libraries. Queensland University of Technology (QUT) and University of Tasmania (UTAS) Libraries have explicit, well established and long-running Liaison programs. UTAS recently embarked on a change process to move from an individual, school-focussed model to a faculty-focused, team approach to Liaison organisation. The process led to the organisation of teams, with team-member leadership roles in collection development, learning and teaching, and research support. The new organisation also established a learning environment in which librarians continue to change in a rapidly changing environment. At QUT Library the Workforce Plan has set the framework for the re-examination of the highly Faculty-integrated Liaison model to improve support for the University's research agenda, to respond to the changes in scholarly communication and to work collaboratively with the University's Teaching and Learning Support (TALSS) to embed information and academic literacies into the University's curriculum. This paper examines recent literature on Liaison, discusses two case studies of Liaison organisation at QUT and UTAS Libraries and how these changing models prepare libraries and librarians for the future of university learning and teaching and research and the changing information environment

Gender-Inclusive Library Workgroup Report

The Gender-Inclusive Workgroup explored how VCU Libraries can better serve trans and gender-nonconforming users and staff. The group’s recommendations cover library spaces, staff, systems, services, and culture. Key recommendations include highlighting existing all-gender restrooms; building more gender-inclusive restrooms; expanding availability of menstrual products and disposal bins; continuing support for name-of-use changes in library systems; minimizing display of legal name in library systems; offering ongoing staff training in gender-inclusive language and customer service; and encouraging staff to share pronouns. The workgroup also recommends pursuing a culture of shared learning and inclusive thinking, with a reminder that gender identity is one facet of multiple intersecting identities for people in the VCU community

Fedora Preservation Services - a Working Group Report

A major objective of the Fedora Preservation Services Working Group (WG) is to facilitate the creation of trusted digital repositories. To accomplish this end, the Working Group is specifying the requirements and architecture for services and technologies that can be readily integrated into the Fedora Framework. In the specification process, the WG is focused on the underlying capabilities to support digital object persistence, life cycle management, multidisciplinary collections, and management of the repository environment (e.g. storage, memory, operating system, etc). This presentation will provide a WG progress report with special emphasis on the concept architecture, key features such as event management, and an early view of the development plan. The discussion will also cover how Fedora preservation services relate to PREMIS and the audit checklist for Trusted Digital Repositories

Mapping the Bid Behavior of Conference Referees

The peer-review process, in its present form, has been repeatedly criticized. Of the many critiques ranging from publication delays to referee bias, this paper will focus specifically on the issue of how submitted manuscripts are distributed to qualified referees. Unqualified referees, without the proper knowledge of a manuscript's domain, may reject a perfectly valid study or potentially more damaging, unknowingly accept a faulty or fraudulent result. In this paper, referee competence is analyzed with respect to referee bid data collected from the 2005 Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL). The analysis of the referee bid behavior provides a validation of the intuition that referees are bidding on conference submissions with regards to the subject domain of the submission. Unfortunately, this relationship is not strong and therefore suggests that there exists other factors beyond subject domain that may be influencing referees to bid for particular submissions

A View from Elsewhere

This report provides an overview of activities carried out during Michaelmas Term, Autumn 2009, as part of a Cambridge University Library Arcadia Project Fellowship on "Rapid Innovation in the Library". The approach taken during the project was to look for opportunities for "quick wins" in the current library setting that could be used to illustrate potential (and tangible) benefits from engaging with current and emerging technologies and changing trends in user behaviour. Where possible, the work built on work undertaken as part of the previous Arcadia projects.The Arcadia Programme has been funded by a generous grant from the Arcadia Fund. http://www.arcadiafund.org.uk