Trends and Models in the Consumption of Electronic Contents. An Analysis of the Journals Most Widely Used in Spanish Universities

P. 42-59The study is focused on the changes in the consumption of electronic information by the academic communities of five Spanish universities through the contents distributed by four widely used suppliers, from the very first subscription to them down to 2010. Similarly, the preferences of these institutions for titles distributed by the suppliers under consideration and their links to various different academic fields were investigated. From 24% to 30% of the overall total of downloads came from the top 25 favourite titles of the respective academic communities. This fact points to a need to go beyond the Big Deal model and strive for greater flexibility in subscriptions to resources, so as to have made-tomeasure suppliesS

Use of Bioinformatics Resources and Tools by Users of Bioinformatics Centers in India

Information plays a vital role in Bioinformatics to achieve the existing Bioinformatics information technologies. Librarians have to identify the information needs, uses and problems faced to meet the needs and requirements of the Bioinformatics users. The paper analyses the response of 315 Bioinformatics users of 15 Bioinformatics centers in India. The papers analyze the data with respect to use of different Bioinformatics databases and tools used by scholars and scientists, areas of major research in Bioinformatics, Major research project, thrust areas of research and use of different resources by the user. The study identifies the various Bioinformatics services and resources used by the Bioinformatics researchers

TERMS: Techniques for electronic resources management

Librarians and information specialists have been finding ways to manage electronic resources for over a decade now. However, much of this work has been an ad hoc and learn-as-you-go process. The literature on electronic resource management shows this work as being segmented into many different areas of traditional librarian roles within the library. In addition, the literature show how management of these resources has driven the development of various management tools in the market as well as serve as the greatest need in the development of next generation library systems. TERMS is an attempt to create a series of on-going and continually developing set of management best practices for electronic resource management in libraries

Information gathering behaviour among academic researchers in different disciplines: ancient historians and research chemists

Since the mid-1990s the use of electronic resources has transformed information gathering for academic research, but has affected subjects in different ways and to different degrees. Where previously finding information in all subjects was based around libraries, researchers in many subjects do not now physically go to libraries, but have convenient access to vast amounts of information from their desktops. In other subjects electronic resources have been embraced, but visits to libraries are as important as ever and continue to form the basis of research projects with researchers regularly travelling abroad to use particular collections. For this study in depth investigations were conducted in two substantially dissimilar subjects, chemistry and ancient history, so that differences between them could be highlighted and light shed on developments in academia generally. Surveys were conducted with groups of six researchers from each subject, using detailed semi-structured interviews. All interviewees were asked the same set of questions and were encouraged to give their opinions on relevant issues so as to yield qualitative information about their behaviour and attitudes. The investigation found that the information gathering behaviour of chemists and ancient historians has become more different, rather than more similar, with the explosion of the use of electronic resources. Reasons for this include different methodologies, finances, the composition of research groups, working patterns and cultures within each subject. Searching techniques are significant because without them electronic information would not be retrievable and because they illustrate differences in information needs. There are important continuities in information behaviour, such as the importance of personal contacts

AWARENESS AND USE OF ELECTRONIC JOURNALS BY ACADEMIC STAFF OF SELECTED PRIVATE UNIVERSITIES IN NIGERIA

The developments in Information Communication Technology (ICT) have altered the methods through which information for academic enquiry are processed, stored, distributed, retrieved and circulated. This study expounds the outcomes of an investigation on the awareness and use of electronic journal (e-journals) among the teaching staff of 5 selected private universities in South West zone of Nigeria, The study employed a descriptive analysis and the use of questionnaires as the key instruments to obtain information from the respondents. The prime finding of the study discovered that there is a clear-cut correlation linking awareness and use of e-journal among the academic staff of the selected universities, but not statistically important (p\u3e0.05). The study advocates for an increase in the awareness of e-journals among the academic members via regular workshops, use of bulletins, news-sheets, flyers and brochures. The study additionally recommends that the university authorities should expand and maintain a subscription to print journal as well

A review of the research literature relating to ICT and attainment

Summary of the main report, which examined current research and evidence for the impact of ICT on pupil attainment and learning in school settings and the strengths and limitations of the methodologies used in the research literature

Chemical information matters: an e-Research perspective on information and data sharing in the chemical sciences

Recently, a number of organisations have called for open access to scientific information and especially to the data obtained from publicly funded research, among which the Royal Society report and the European Commission press release are particularly notable. It has long been accepted that building research on the foundations laid by other scientists is both effective and efficient. Regrettably, some disciplines, chemistry being one, have been slow to recognise the value of sharing and have thus been reluctant to curate their data and information in preparation for exchanging it. The very significant increases in both the volume and the complexity of the datasets produced has encouraged the expansion of e-Research, and stimulated the development of methodologies for managing, organising, and analysing "big data". We review the evolution of cheminformatics, the amalgam of chemistry, computer science, and information technology, and assess the wider e-Science and e-Research perspective. Chemical information does matter, as do matters of communicating data and collaborating with data. For chemistry, unique identifiers, structure representations, and property descriptors are essential to the activities of sharing and exchange. Open science entails the sharing of more than mere facts: for example, the publication of negative outcomes can facilitate better understanding of which synthetic routes to choose, an aspiration of the Dial-a-Molecule Grand Challenge. The protagonists of open notebook science go even further and exchange their thoughts and plans. We consider the concepts of preservation, curation, provenance, discovery, and access in the context of the research lifecycle, and then focus on the role of metadata, particularly the ontologies on which the emerging chemical Semantic Web will depend. Among our conclusions, we present our choice of the "grand challenges" for the preservation and sharing of chemical information