A global approach to digital library evaluation towards quality interoperability

This paper describes some of the key research works related to my PhD thesis. The goal is the development of a global approach to digital library (DL) evaluation towards quality interoperability. DL evaluation has a vital role to play in building DLs, and in understanding and enhancing their role in society. Responding to two parallel research needs, the project is grouped around two tracks. Track one covers the theoretical approach, and provides an integrated evaluation model which overcomes the fragmentation of quality assessments; track two covers the experimental side, which has been undertaken through a comparative analysis of different DL evaluation methodologies, relating them to the conceptual framework. After presenting the problem dentition, current background and related work, this paper enumerates a set of research questions and hypotheses that I would like to address, and outlines the research methodology, focusing on a proposed evaluation framework and on the lessons learned from the case studies

The LIRG/SCONUL Impact Initiative: assessing the impact of HE libraries on learning, teaching, and research

The LIRG/SCONUL Impact Initiative took place between July 2003 and December 2005. Twenty-two higher education institutions in the UK attempted to measure the impact of their services on learning, teaching, and research. Within the context of the programme, each institution investigated the impact of a new innovation. This paper provides a final overview of the two phases of the Impact Initiative and highlights some of the findings. Measuring impact is not easy but there are significant benefits for the profile and development of academic libraries in trying to do so. It provides guidance for libraries on assessing impact drawing upon the experience of the Impact Initiative

Introduction : user studies for digital library development

Introductory chapter to the edited collection on user studies in digital library development. Contains a general introduction to the topic and biographical sketches of the contributors.peer-reviewe

The Impact of Web-Scale Discovery on the Use of Electronic Resources

In 2015, the University of California, Berkeley, launched EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS), a web-scale discovery tool, with a goal of improving visibility and usage of collections. This study applies linear regression analysis to usage data for ebooks, ejournals, and abstracts and indexing (A&I) databases before and after implementation of EDS in order to identify correlations between the discovery layer and usage of library electronic resources across platforms. Our findings diverge from conclusions drawn in the previous literature that indicate that resource use generally increases after a discovery tool is implemented. We examine data from a longer period of time than the previous literature had, looking for statistically significant changes in resource use. The discovery layer at UC Berkeley did not lead to equal increases across platforms, but rather to a complex array of increases and decreases in use according to a variety of factors.

(E-book) Patron Driven Acquisitions (PDA): An Annotated Bibliography

Patron Driven Acquisitions (PDA), also known as Demand Driven Acquisitions (DDA) and Purchase on Demand (POD), has been used by libraries since the early 1990’s. PDA allows libraries to acquire items based on the immediate needs of their patrons, often without library intervention. With the arrival of e-books in the late 1990’s, libraries soon began including them in their PDA workflows. PDA is controversial for several reasons, and PDA of E-books adds further issues to the debate. This bibliography covers PDA and the issues academic libraries face when devising a PDA program. Articles outline the benefits and problems of print and E-book PDA and the debate they elicit. They also document the response of libraries to address these problems. Only peer-reviewed articles that express current thought on the subject (as of this writing) have been used

(E-book) Patron Driven Acquisitions (PDA): An Annotated Bibliography

Patron Driven Acquisitions (PDA), also known as Demand Driven Acquisitions (DDA) and Purchase on Demand (POD), has been used by libraries since the early 1990’s. PDA allows libraries to acquire items based on the immediate needs of their patrons, often without library intervention. With the arrival of e-books in the late 1990’s, libraries soon began including them in their PDA workflows. PDA is controversial for several reasons, and PDA of E-books adds further issues to the debate. This bibliography covers PDA and the issues academic libraries face when devising a PDA program. Articles outline the benefits and problems of print and E-book PDA and the debate they elicit. They also document the response of libraries to address these problems. Only peer-reviewed articles that express current thought on the subject (as of this writing) have been used

Managing suppliers for collection development: the UK higher education perspective

This chapter follows the adoption of the new procurement discipline by academic libraries since the demise of the NBA. It first examines the standard procurement cycle, with particular reference to libraries and book supply. It then discusses library purchasing consortia and their contribution to managing and developing the library market place for books, identifying three phases of operation. It closes with some reflections on the future prospects of collection development. Traditional collection development is seen as being turned on its head – we no longer seek to collect the huge range of works of scholars of all other institutions in order to make them available to the (relatively) small number of our own scholars; instead we collect the works of our own and make them available to all

Greening information management: final report

As the recent JISC report on ‘the ‘greening’ of ICT in education [1] highlights, the increasing reliance on ICT to underpin the business functions of higher education institutions has a heavy environmental impact, due mainly to the consumption of electricity to run computers and to cool data centres. While work is already under way to investigate how more energy efficient ICT can be introduced, to date there has been much less focus on the potential environmental benefits to be accrued from reducing the demand ‘at source’ through better data and information management. JISC thus commissioned the University of Strathclyde to undertake a study to gather evidence that establishes the efficacy of using information management options as components of Green ICT strategies within UK Higher Education environments, and to highlight existing practices which have the potential for wider replication

Towards better measures: evaluation of estimated resource description quality for distributed IR

An open problem for Distributed Information Retrieval systems (DIR) is how to represent large document repositories, also known as resources, both accurately and efficiently. Obtaining resource description estimates is an important phase in DIR, especially in non-cooperative environments. Measuring the quality of an estimated resource description is a contentious issue as current measures do not provide an adequate indication of quality. In this paper, we provide an overview of these currently applied measures of resource description quality, before proposing the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence as an alternative. Through experimentation we illustrate the shortcomings of these past measures, whilst providing evidence that KL is a more appropriate measure of quality. When applying KL to compare different QBS algorithms, our experiments provide strong evidence in favour of a previously unsupported hypothesis originally posited in the initial Query-Based Sampling work