Search Engines Giving You Garbage? Put A Corc In It, Implementing The Cooperative Online Resource Catalog

This paper presents an implementation strategy for adding Internet resources to a library online catalog using OCLC\u27s Cooperative Online Resource Catalog (CORC). Areas of consideration include deciding which electronic resources to include in the online catalog and how to select them. The value and importance of pathfinders in creating electronic bibliographies and the role of library staff in updating them is introduced. Using an electronic suggestion form as a means of Internet resource collection development is another innovative method of enriching library collections. Education and training for cataloging staff on Dublin Core elements is also needed. Attention should be paid to the needs of distance learners in providing access to Internet resources. The significance of evaluating the appropriateness of Internet resources for library collections is emphasized

Impact of Digital Technology on Library Resource Sharing: Revisiting LABELNET in the Digital Age

The digital environment has facilitated resource sharing by breaking the time and distance barriers to efficient document delivery. However, for the librarians, this phenomenon has brought more challenging technical and technological issues demanding addition of more knowledge and skills to learn and new standards to develop. The overwhelming speed and growing volume of digital information is now becoming unable to acquire and manage by single libraries. Resource sharing, which used to be a side business in the librarianship trade, is now becoming the flagship operation in the library projects

Digital information support for concept design

This paper outlines the issues in effective utilisation of digital resources in conceptual design. Access to appropriate information acts as stimuli and can lead to better substantiated concepts. This paper addresses the issues of presenting such information in a digital form for effective use, exploring digital libraries and groupware as relevant literature areas, and argues that improved integration of these two technologies is necessary to better support the concept generation task. The development of the LauLima learning environment and digital library is consequently outlined. Despite its attempts to integrate the designers' working space and digital resources, continuing issues in library utilisation and migration of information to design concepts are highlighted through a class study. In light of this, new models of interaction to increase information use are explored

Web Portal Design Guidelines as Identified by Children through the Processes of Design and Evaluation

The Web is an important source of information for school projects, but young users do not always find it easy to locate relevant material. A critical factor in success is the portal through which they search or browse web content. Traditionally web portals have been designed by adults with young users in mind, but there is very little evidence that the latter make use of them. In this paper design guidelines are elaborated for such portals that are based upon focus group and operational evaluations by elementary school students of two prototype web portals designed by two intergenerational teams, each comprising elementary school students and adult designers. The evaluations offer strong support for involving children throughout the design process for portals that both in presentation and functionality reflect the cognitive and affective needs of young users rather than adults

Synchronous collaborative information retrieval with relevance feedback

Collaboration has been identified as an important aspect in information seeking. People meet to discuss and share ideas and through this interaction an information need is quite often identified. However the process of resolving this information need, through interacting with a search engine and performing a search task, is still an individual activity. We propose an environment which allows users to collaborate to satisfy a shared information need. We discuss ways to divide the search task amongst collaborators and propose the use of relevance feedback, a common information retrieval process, to enable the transfer of knowledge across collaborators during a search session. We describe the process by which co-searchers can collaborate effectively with little redundancy and how we can combine relevance judgements from multiple searchers into a coherent model for synchronous collaborative information retrieva

Exploring library anxiety among Sudanese university students

Library anxiety is one of the psychological barriers that encounter students when they are performing a library task. This study explores library anxiety among 51 Sudanese university students using diary method for data collection. The finding indicates that library anxiety among Sudanese university students are manifested into five dimensions, namely; (a) Negative perceptions towards library environment, (b) Negative perceptions towards peer students, (c) Negative perceptions towards library staff, (d) Negative perceptions towards library services, and (e) Psychological barriers. Details of statements under the dimensions highlight the issues that are unique and not covered by previous studies in library anxiety