Architecture and Business Potential of Mediating Electronic Product Catalogs

The Internet has the inherent potential of enabling a global marketplace. However, so far electronic shopping systems have had relatively limited success in supplanting or augmenting traditional physical and catalog shopping. The biggest impediment at the stage of product identification is the necessity to manually evaluate and integrate product information. This issue can be alleviated by modeling product information on a semantic level, which enables vocabularies of heterogeneous electronic product catalogs to be integrated. Adopting a mediator architecture for the construction of distributed federated product catalogs preserves each participating vendor\u27s autonomy. Besides creating added value for customers this enables a variety of new business models for emerging intermediarie

Evaluation and analysis of Open Access electronic resources in higher education libraries in Portugal

In this work, it is given public knowledge of a model that was built along the research carried out, with a view to evaluate the information resources in Open Access (OA) and present the results obtained by its application on a comparative study at the level of Higher Education Libraries (universities and polytechnics, public and private) in Portugal, more exactly concerning the Online Public Access Catalogs (OPAC) and Institutional Repositories (IR). For the construction of this model and its application to the Higher Education Libraries in Portugal, 3 dimensions with 9 indicators each were designed, in a total of 27, adapted to the experience made explicit by authors who have tackled the topic of evaluating the Internet resources. However, this construction was especially based on personal experience with the benefits and difficulties detected in practical use of these platforms, in terms of personal, professional and academic level. Using this model, the comparison and analysis of the positive and negative elements found, aim to suggest operating characteristics which could make the OPAC and IR platforms more reliable, simple and friendly, providing a quality and accessible service, empowering their users with effective results, and reversing the current trend of arbitrary use of existing information resources on the Internet. At the same time, the model aims to give clues that can protect the image and credibility of the institutions, giving them the visibility required in a world of increasingly competitive Information. The results obtained have provided an update regarding the OPAC and IR of the Higher Education Libraries in Portugal, obtaining conclusions through quantitative and qualitative data, retreating still further information according to each type of Institution. The research was generated during the author’s Doctoral Thesis defended in Universidad de Alcalá, in Spain, December 2019

Knowledge organization

Since Svenonius analyzed the research base in bibliographic control in 1990, the intervening years have seen major shifts in the focus of information organization in academic libraries. New technologies continue to reshape the nature and content of catalogs, stretch the boundaries of classification research, and provide new alternatives for the organization of information. Research studies have rigorously analyzed the structure of the Anglo- American Cataloguing Rules using entity-relationship modeling and expanded on the bibliographic and authority relationship research to develop new data models (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records [FRBR] and Functional Requirements and Numbering of Authority Records [FRANAR]). Applied research into the information organization process has led to the development of cataloguing tools and harvesting ap- plications for bibliographic data collection and automatic record creation. A growing international perspective focused research on multilingual subject access, transliteration problems in surrogate records, and user studies to improve Online Public Access Catalog (OPAC) displays for large retrieval sets resulting from federated searches. The need to organize local and remote electronic resources led to metadata research that developed general and domain-specific metadata schemes. Ongoing research in this area focuses on record structures and architectural models to enable interoperability among the various schemes and differing application platforms. Research in the area of subject access and classification is strong, covering areas such as vocabulary mapping, automatic facet construction and deconstruction for Web resources, development of expert systems for automatic classifica- tion, dynamically altered classificatory structures linked to domain-specific thesauri, crosscultural conceptual structures in classification, identification of semantic relationships for vocabulary mapped to classification systems, and the expanded use of traditional classification systems as switching languages in the global Web environment. Finally, descriptive research into library and information science (LIS) education and curricula for knowl- edge organization continues. All of this research is applicable to knowledge organization in academic and research libraries. This chapter examines this body of research in depth, describes the research methodologies employed, and identifies areas of lacunae in need of further research

Index to Library Trends Volume 38

published or submitted for publicatio

Creating digital library collections with Greenstone

The Greenstone digital library software is a comprehensive system for building and distributing digital library collections. It provides a way of organizing information based on metadata and publishing ti on the Internet. This paper introduces Greenstone and explains how librarians use it to create and customize digital library collections. Through an end-user interface, they add documents and metadata to collections, create new collections whose structure mirrors existing ones, and build collections and put them in place for users to view. More advanced users can design and customize new collection structures

Designing Course Reserves using Koha and VuFind for Library Users

Purpose Course reserve module in ILS OPAC and web-scale library discovery services are interconnected to data management and educational resource management systems. Every department and course instructor are designed the course based on the user\u27s requirements. The goal of this article is to analyze the instructional reserves component integrating open source tools Koha and VuFind in order to provide advanced level CMS and LCMS services that satisfy users. . It is also feasible with metadata searching from other repositories, e.g., OCLC WorldCat and Amazon, to increase the web-scale discovery services among the users and library professionals. Methodology Popular level software has been selected based on course reserve requirements such as Koha and VuFind. It needs proper installation and configuration with the help of multiple files and scripts. Design the template and layout based on Koha and VuFind for course-specific reserve and add the barcode to display the items and link in Koha library OPAC easily. This course module will be integrated with the VuFind to provide web-enabled discovery services based on departments, instructors, and course URLs. Findings The whole integrated domain-specific interface is beneficial to the users because they could easily access the course reserve materials developed by different subject experts. As a consequence, both Koha and VuFind just provide capability of delivering the appropriate course module to the correct participants at the perfect time.Library users have access and download their course from this integrated interface to continue their online learning process. This framework will fully enable web-based services for CMS and LCMS regarding the fulfillment of tags clouds, metadata searching, and OCLC WorldCat Local searching. Originality This innovative integrated framework is providing full-text resources using MARC21 tags for the users. The librarians at any academic institution will benefit much from these instructions, stages, and methods. VuFind, which uses a single-window search technique, can also get a course reservation for library users. It is one of the advanced-level web-scale library discovery services for students and instructors to continue their educational activities during the COVID-19 pandemic using the course reserve module of Koha and VuFind

Knowledge Representation with Ontologies: The Present and Future

Recently, we have seen an explosion of interest in ontologies as artifacts to represent human knowledge and as critical components in knowledge management, the semantic Web, business-to-business applications, and several other application areas. Various research communities commonly assume that ontologies are the appropriate modeling structure for representing knowledge. However, little discussion has occurred regarding the actual range of knowledge an ontology can successfully represent

Academic Libraries in Poland University of Warsaw Library as an Example of Library Transformation in Post-Communist Poland

This article examines the complex changes that have occurred in Polish academic libraries, especially the University of Warsaw Library (UWL), after the fall of communism in 1989.Shortly afterwards, thanks to grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, an accelerated transformation in all library practices began. In preparation for automation, the authority file was created, introducing the process of applying international standards in bibliographic description in a new climate of interlibrary cooperation. The Library of Congress classification and access to open stacks were introduced for the first time in Poland in a newly constructed UWL building. A crowning achievement of the transformation is the first Polish union catalog, Narodowy Uniwersalny Katalog Centralny [National Union Catalog], NUKAT, launched in 2002

Union Catalogs for Poets

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the National Library of Estonia organized a Conference on Union Catalogs which took place in Tallinn, in the National Library of Estonia on October 17–19, 2002. The Conference presented and discussed analytical papers dealing with various aspects of designing and implementing union catalogs and shared cataloging systems as revealed through the experiences of Eastern European, Baltic and South African research libraries. Here you can find the texts of the conference papers and the list of contributors and participants.The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the National Library of Estonia organized a Conference on Union Catalogs which took place in Tallinn, in the National Library of Estonia on October 17–19, 2002. The Conference presented and discussed analytical papers dealing with various aspects of designing and implementing union catalogs and shared cataloging systems as revealed through the experiences of Eastern European, Baltic and South African research libraries. Here you can find the texts of the conference papers and the list of contributors and participants