Collaboration analysis of World National Library websites via webometric methods

This article aimed to study National Library Websites (NLW) using webometric methods. The in-links and co-links to national library websites were analyzed to study: firstly, the visibility of these National libraries on the web. Secondly, the collaboration on national and international level amongst the studied national libraries websites. This study found that according to the in-link count of 38 national library websites, 3 were extremely popular and we can call them the most visible national library websites as they come below: 1. United States of America (http://www.loc.gov); 2. Australia (http://www.nla.gov.au); 3. United Kingdom (http://www.bl.uk). The results of the study also showed that, there were 5 clusters (2 cross continental and 3 international) in the studied national library websites. On the other hand, the multidimensional scaling map showed 4 major collaboration clusters: 2 cross national (both European) and 2 international (European, Asian, American, Australian). African national library websites were not seen in these clusters. It means that, African national libraries have a little collaboration with others through their websites. However, due to the problems of search engines which are used for data collection in webometric studies, this method needs to be used with cautio

Collaboration analysis of World National Library websites via webometric methods

This article aimed to study National Library Websites (NLW) using webometric methods. The in-links and co-links to national library websites were analyzed to study: firstly, the visibility of these National libraries on the web. Secondly, the collaboration on national and international level amongst the studied national libraries websites. This study found that according to the in-link count of 38 national library websites, 3 were extremely popular and we can call them the most visible national library websites as they come below: 1. United States of America (http://www.loc.gov); 2. Australia (http://www.nla.gov.au); 3. United Kingdom (http://www.bl.uk). The results of the study also showed that, there were 5 clusters (2 cross continental and 3 international) in the studied national library websites. On the other hand, the multidimensional scaling map showed 4 major collaboration clusters: 2 cross national (both European) and 2 international (European, Asian, American, Australian). African national library websites were not seen in these clusters. It means that, African national libraries have a little collaboration with others through their websites. However, due to the problems of search engines which are used for data collection in webometric studies, this method needs to be used with cautio

We Could, but Should We? Ethical Considerations for Providing Access to GeoCities and Other Historical Digital Collections

We live in an era in which the ways that we can make sense of our past are evolving as more artifacts from that past become digital. At the same time, the responsibilities of traditional gatekeepers who have negotiated the ethics of historical data collection and use, such as librarians and archivists, are increasingly being sidelined by the system builders who decide whether and how to provide access to historical digital collections, often without sufficient reflection on the ethical issues at hand. It is our aim to better prepare system builders to grapple with these issues. This paper focuses discussions around one such digital collection from the dawn of the web, asking what sorts of analyses can and should be conducted on archival copies of the GeoCities web hosting platform that dates to 1994.This research was supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the US National Science Foundation (grants 1618695 and 1704369), the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Start Smart Labs, and Compute Canada

The Use of Intimate Partner Violence Websites: Website Awareness, Visibility, Information Quality, Perceived Usefulness, and Frequency of Use

This study aimed to determine the information needs of the intimate partner violence (IPV) survivors, as well as the awareness, visibility, information quality, perceived usefulness, and frequency of use of the IPV websites in Canada. The data in this study were collected in four stages. Firstly, a group of 139 Canadian IPV websites were identified and categorized into 36 groups. Secondly, the visibility of the websites was measured based on the average value of three factors: (1) the inlink counts; (2) the search engine rankings; and (3) the number of social media mentions of the websites. Thirdly, the quality of the websites was evaluated based on the average value of five quality indicators: (1) Accessibility; (2) Relevance ; (3) Readability; (4) Interactivity; and (5) Privacy and Data Protection. Fourthly, a group of 20 IPV websites was selected from the 139 websites for survey purpose. A total of 87 IPV survivors were recruited to provide insights into their information needs, website awareness, perceived usefulness and frequency of use of the 20 IPV websites through an online survey. This study found that the higher the visibility or quality, the higher the usage. Both perceived usefulness and frequency of use of the known websites were statistically significantly higher than those of the unknown websites. Furthermore, the findings of this study revealed evidence of minimal use of the IPV websites, which may be explained by the low awareness and low perceived usefulness of the IPV websites. Based on the findings, this study recommended that online social media marketing campaigns and outreach activities should be carried out by website owners to promote website awareness. Various strategies should also be employed to improve the visibility and quality of the websites. Given that the most desired type of information was legal resources, libraries should dedicate resources to satisfy the information needs of IPV survivors. The findings make academic contributions by producing an empirically supported evidence and benchmark for future studies

An overview study of twitter in the UK local government

Copyright @ 2012 Brunel UniversityMicroblogging applications are becoming a momentous element of the public sector social media agenda. The potential of Twitter to update the public with frequent, concise and real-time content has motivated many pubic authorities to create their accounts, thus generating an interesting topic for research. This paper seeks to make an empirical and methodological contribution to this new body of knowledge by presenting an overview study of general Twitter accounts maintained by UK local government authorities. Over 296,000 tweets were collected from the 187officially listed local government accounts. The analysis was conducted in two stages: an examination of the Twitter networks developed by the accounts was followed by a structural analysis of the tweets. The combination of online research and social media analytics techniques enabled us to reach important conclusions about the use of Twitter by those authorities. The findings indicate high level of maturity of Twitter in the UK local government and point to several directions for further increasing the impact and visibility of those accounts within a social media strategy

Web citations in patents: Evidence of technological impact?

This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by Wiley Blackwell in Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology on 17/07/2017, available online: https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.23821 The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.Patents sometimes cite web pages either as general background to the problem being addressed or to identify prior publications that will limit the scope of the patent granted. Counts of the number of patents citing an organisation’s website may therefore provide an indicator of its technological capacity or relevance. This article introduces methods to extract URL citations from patents and evaluates the usefulness of counts of patent web citations as a technology indicator. An analysis of patents citing 200 US universities or 177 UK universities found computer science and engineering departments to be frequently cited, as well as research-related web pages, such as Wikipedia, YouTube or Internet Archive. Overall, however, patent URL citations seem to be frequent enough to be useful for ranking major US and the top few UK universities if popular hosted subdomains are filtered out, but the hit count estimates on the first search engine results page should not be relied upon for accuracy

Stronger Together: Increasing Connections Between Academic and Public Libraries

Much has been written about collaborations between public and academic libraries. These collaborations generally take the form of joint libraries, special programs or consortia. They are motivated by the desire to do public outreach or community building or to provide better facilities, services or library resources to users from both library systems or, in the case of consortia, by economics. Since the library website is now the most common entry point to an academic library, this paper explores the opportunities for building connections between an academic and public library’s resources by hyperlinking to public library resources. Deepening these connections supports the mission of both types of organizations, namely to foster lifelong learning. It also suggests how such virtual collaborations, namely hyperlinking, can be used to set the stage for future collaborations

Stronger Together: Increasing Connections Between Academic and Public Libraries

Much has been written about collaborations between public and academic libraries. These collaborations generally take the form of joint libraries, special programs or consortia. They are motivated by the desire to do public outreach or community building or to provide better facilities, services or library resources to users from both library systems or, in the case of consortia, by economics. Since the library website is now the most common entry point to an academic library, this paper explores the opportunities for building connections between an academic and public library’s resources by hyperlinking to public library resources. Deepening these connections supports the mission of both types of organizations, namely to foster lifelong learning. It also suggests how such virtual collaborations, namely hyperlinking, can be used to set the stage for future collaborations

Web indicators for research evaluation. Part 1: Citations and links to academic articles from the Web

The extensive use of the web by many sectors of society has created the potential for new wider impact indicators. This article reviews research about Google Scholar and Google Patents, both of which can be used as sources of impact indicators for academic articles. It also briefly reviews methods to extract types of links and citations from the web as a whole, although the indicators that these generate are now probably too broad and too dominated by automatically generated websites, such as library and publisher catalogues, to be useful in practice. More valuable web-based indicators can be derived from specific types of web pages that cite academic research, such as online presentations, course syllabi, and science blogs. These provide evidence that is easier to understand and use and less likely to be affected by unwanted types of automatically generated content, although they are susceptible to gaming

Weaving a Web of Precious Materials: Hyperlinks to, from and between Some Special Collections Libraries

This paper examines the hyperlinks to, from and between 111 special collections libraries whose parent (university) libraries belong to the Association of Research Libraries (ARL). I collected inlinks using the Alta Vista search engine, and outlinks by hand. The resulting data was examined to determine outlink targets, and to test correlations between link counts and quality rankings, geographic proximity, and collection strengths. Most outlinks from these libraries go to universities, government agencies and commercial sites, usually to institutional or divisional home pages. Top outlinkers connect users to important sites, like the Library of Congress and the National Archives and Records Administration. ARL ranking of parent library shows a slight positive correlation with number of inlinks, but does not correlate with number of outlinks. Some geographic regions interlink more than others. Finally, these libraries could be linking to each other much more based on shared collection strengths