The researcher’s view: Context is critical

What are the most important things a 21st-century library should do with its space? Our ideas about future models of the physical library focus on the needs of researchers. Our thinking is informed by our own experiences as both users and directors of library and information services in research institutions, and by debates on future roles for library and information professionals in the network world – a world where automation, digitization and socialization of data, information and knowledge, and disintermediation, are transforming the scholarly landscape. We begin with three reasons why library support for research is a critical issue, and then reflect on the current situation and environmental forces shaping provision for researchers, before setting out our thoughts about future services and spaces for research

Online Catalog Development at the University of Guelph

published or submitted for publicatio

Development and construction of China

Libraries in China's higher education institutions have been developing in keeping pace with the flourishing development of China's higher education. This article aims to make an introduction to the construction of China's higher education libraries, especially the recent three decades' achievements since China's reform and opening-up in 1978. In this article, the authors draw a general picture of the development of libraries in China's higher education institutions, covering such eight aspects as management, types and positioning, organizational structure and personnel, expenditure and buildings, reader service, building and sharing of resources as well as automation system.</p

The New Technology and Competencies for "The Most Typical of the Activities of Libraries": Technical Services

At a library conference in 1940, William M. Randall called technical services the "most typical of the activities of libraries" "they are..." he said, "the things which librarians do that no one else does the secrets of the craft." 1 In those intervening forty-three years much has been written and uttered in defense and derision of these "secrets of the craft." These most typical of library activities have changed the name Randall used, technical processes, to technical services. They have moved from being sneeringly derided as "backroom," "basement" or other dreary location activities to being enthusiastically hailed today as "where the action is." They are, fortunately, no longer the "secrets" that they were in Randall's day. They have been moved into, moved around within and even moved out of the organizational charts. Regardless of all these attitudes and activities, the functions of acquiring, organizing and preserving library materials persist and the competencies necessary to carry out these three functions will be the focus of this paper. In the paper, reference will frequently be made to the "technical services librarian" meaning any librarian who works in that aspect of librarianship. The emphasis is on no particular type of library. The term library will be used as meaning also information center.published or submitted for publicatio

Scholarly communication 1971 to 2013. A Brindley snapshot.

This chapter attempts a snapshot of the dramatic changes impacting on scholarly information access and delivery in the last forty years through the prism of Lynne Brindley’s career. This was a period in which historical practices of information and access delivery have been dramatically overturned. In some respects, however, the models of scholarly publishing practice and economics have not changed significantly, arguably because of the dominance of multinational publishers in scholarly publishing, exemplified in the ‘Big Deals’ with libraries and consortia, and the scholarly conservatism imposed to date by research evaluation exercises and tenure and promotion practices. The recent global debates on open access to publicly funded knowledge, have, however, brought scholarly communication to the forefront of attention of governments and university administrations .The potential exists for scholarly research to be more widely available within new digital economic models, but only if the academic community regains ownership of the knowledge its creates. Librarians can and should play a leading role in shaping ‘knowledge creation, knowledge ordering and dissemination, and knowledge interaction’

In Search of a New Model: Library Resource Sharing in China - A Comparative Study

This paper reviews the framework of library resource sharing (LRS) in China and examines, from a comparative perspective, cases of recent development, particularly in the 1990s and early 2000s. Highlights include: (1) historical review of LRS in the U.S. and China, particularly in the areas of print union catalogs and union lists, online bibliographic utilities, and interlibrary loan; (2) literature review of Chinese publications, and LRS issues and challenges in China; (3) Analysis of three LRS models to provide a contextual grasp of a paradigm shift taking place in China; and (4) comparative analysis of LRS objectives, structure, and governance, etc., in the U.S. and China. The study also underscores the imperative for building a national digital library system in China to gain a competitive edge in resource sharing and to support the country’s rapid social and economic growth. At this stage of development, the success of China Academic Library & Information System provides a convincing argument for a national digital library system with its methods of governing, financing, and development

The Technological Education Institutes (TEI) in Greece and their libraries

The legal framework for the foundation of the Technological Education Institutes (TEI) in Greece is presented. A short history of the education of the librarians in Greece and some general information about all the Institutes and their libraries is given. Data for the organisation, automation and personnel of the libraries are presented

Evaluating XMPP Communication in IEC 61499-based Distributed Energy Applications

The IEC 61499 reference model provides an international standard developed specifically for supporting the creation of distributed event-based automation systems. Functionality is abstracted into function blocks which can be coded graphically as well as via a text-based method. As one of the design goals was the ability to support distributed control applications, communication plays a central role in the IEC 61499 specification. In order to enable the deployment of functionality to distributed platforms, these platforms need to exchange data in a variety of protocols. IEC 61499 realizes the support of these protocols via "Service Interface Function Blocks" (SIFBs). In the context of smart grids and energy applications, IEC 61499 could play an important role, as these applications require coordinating several distributed control logics. Yet, the support of grid-related protocols is a pre-condition for a wide-spread utilization of IEC 61499. The eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) on the other hand is a well-established protocol for messaging, which has recently been adopted for smart grid communication. Thus, SIFBs for XMPP facilitate distributed control applications, which use XMPP for exchanging all control relevant data, being realized with the help of IEC 61499. This paper introduces the idea of integrating XMPP into SIFBs, demonstrates the prototypical implementation in an open source IEC 61499 platform and provides an evaluation of the feasibility of the result.Comment: 2016 IEEE 21st International Conference on Emerging Technologies and Factory Automation (ETFA