Leveraging the Legacy of Conventional Libraries for Organizing Digital Libraries

Περιέχει το πλήρες κείμενοWith the significant growth in the number of available electronic documents on the Internet, intranets, and digital libraries, the need for developing effective methods and systems to index and organize E-documents is felt more than ever. In this paper we introduce a new method for automatic text classification for categorizing E-documents by utilizing classification metadata of books, journals and other library holdings, that already exists in online catalogues of libraries. The method is based on identifying all references cited in a given document and, using the classification metadata of these references as catalogued in a physical library, devising an appropriate class for the document itself according to a standard library classification scheme with the help of a weighting mechanism. We have demonstrated the application of the proposed method and assessed its performance by developing a prototype classification system for classifying electronic syllabus documents archived in the Irish National Syllabus Repository according to the well-known Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) scheme

Stewardship of the evolving scholarly record: from the invisible hand to conscious coordination

The scholarly record is increasingly digital and networked, while at the same time expanding in both the volume and diversity of the material it contains. The long-term future of the scholarly record cannot be effectively secured with traditional stewardship models developed for print materials. This report describes the key features of future stewardship models adapted to the characteristics of a digital, networked scholarly record, and discusses some practical implications of implementing these models. Key highlights include: As the scholarly record continues to evolve, conscious coordination will become an important organizing principle for stewardship models. Past stewardship models were built on an "invisible hand" approach that relied on the uncoordinated, institution-scale efforts of individual academic libraries acting autonomously to maintain local collections. Future stewardship of the evolving scholarly record requires conscious coordination of context, commitments, specialization, and reciprocity. With conscious coordination, local stewardship efforts leverage scale by collecting more of less. Keys to conscious coordination include right-scaling consolidation, cooperation, and community mix. Reducing transaction costs and building trust facilitate conscious coordination. Incentives to participate in cooperative stewardship activities should be linked to broader institutional priorities. The long-term future of the scholarly record in its fullest expression cannot be effectively secured with stewardship strategies designed for print materials. The features of the evolving scholarly record suggest that traditional stewardship strategies, built on an “invisible hand” approach that relies on the uncoordinated, institution-scale efforts of individual academic libraries acting autonomously to maintain local collections, is no longer suitable for collecting, organizing, making available, and preserving the outputs of scholarly inquiry. As the scholarly record continues to evolve, conscious coordination will become an important organizing principle for stewardship models. Conscious coordination calls for stewardship strategies that incorporate a broader awareness of the system-wide stewardship context; declarations of explicit commitments around portions of the local collection; formal divisions of labor within cooperative arrangements; and robust networks for reciprocal access. Stewardship strategies based on conscious coordination involve an acceleration of an already perceptible transition away from relatively autonomous local collections to ones built on networks of cooperation across many organizations, within and outside the traditional cultural heritage community

Exploring classification as conversation

Conversations are proposed as a useful lens through which to consider knowledge-organizing behaviors. Human conversations are sites of knowledge creation, where participants communicate to establish meaning that is contextual and shared. The conversations generated in collaborative online environments offer new opportunities to observe, not only how knowledge is created, but also how users participate in various knowledge-organizing activities. In a Web environment pervaded by conversational forms – social classification systems, blogs, and wikis – participatory knowledge organization is an emerging phenomenon that warrants further exploration. Other areas for research are suggested, including the potential promise to leverage participatory knowledge organization into future applications and developments of Web functionality

Personal Touches, Public Legacies: An Ethnography of LGBT Libraries and Archives

Personal touches, Public legacies: An ethnography of LGBT libraries and archives examines lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) information organizations in Vancouver, Canada and surrounding areas. In order to develop a deeper understanding of the diversity in, changes to and challenges for LGBT information organizations, a multi-sited ethnography was conducted between June and September 2014. Organizations featured in the study include: two autonomous LGBT information organizations (the BC Lesbian and Gay Archives and Out on the Shelves Library), two LGBT information organizations founded within universities (the Archives of Lesbian Oral Testimony at Simon Fraser University, the Transgender Archives at the University of Victoria), an LGBT-focused collection within Vancouvers public municipal cultural milieu (the Ken Brock collection at the City of Vancouver Archives and the Museum of Vancouver) and, a temporary, autonomous home library with a queer mandate (the STAG Library). This study puts feminist, LGBT and queer studies in dialogue with archival studies and library and information studies (LIS). The chapters are organized by overarching themes associated with information organizations and address specific theoretical discussions that accompany those themes: location (Chapter 2), collection development (Chapter 3), organization and dissemination (Chapter 4) and mandate(Chapter 5). The findings not only explore how LGBT information collections and organizations interrogate and reimagine the definitional boundaries of what constitutes an information collection and information organizations more broadly but also examine how concepts of gender, sexuality and queerness are understood in the realm of the information organizations under study. The divide between normative and non-normative information collection and organizational practice is not simple or stable, but, like the concept of queer, is ever shifting. The findings demonstrate that queer information organizing persists in LGBT information organizational contexts, but not in ways necessarily anticipated by existing literature on the topic. This study also highlights how the relationship between the LGBT communities and the public is in great flux as some LGBT communities become increasingly considered a part of the mainstream public. It is precisely this oscillation and tension between concepts of the personal and the public that define LGBT information organizing activities in this current moment

NMC Horizon Report: 2017 Library Edition

What is on the five-year horizon for academic and research libraries? Which trends and technology developments will drive transformation? What are the critical challenges and how can we strategize solutions? These questions regarding technology adoption and educational change steered the discussions of 77 experts to produce the NMC Horizon Report: 2017 Library Edition, in partnership with the University of Applied Sciences (HTW) Chur, Technische Informationsbibliothek (TIB), ETH Library, and the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL). Six key trends, six significant challenges, and six developments in technology profiled in this report are poised to impact library strategies, operations, and services with regards to learning, creative inquiry, research, and information management. The three sections of this report constitute a reference and technology planning guide for librarians, library leaders, library staff, policymakers, and technologists

University Libraries Annual Report 2022-2023

The 2022-2023 annual report offers a review of the events, programming, and services provided by faculty and staff in University Libraries. The document also highlights the accomplishments and success of our faculty and staff through the fiscal year.https://aquila.usm.edu/ulannualreport/1008/thumbnail.jp

Service Design in HCI Research: The Extended Value Co-creation Model

In this paper, we discuss what it means to practice service design in an academic research setting. For a long time, the primary focal point of design research has been the users—of their experiences, needs, desires, and values. By contrast, designers have been relatively anonymous and unlocatable. In shift to the service-centric design paradigm, we argue that it is important to recognize design researchers as distinct stakeholders, who actively interact with systems and services with a goal to fulfill their own values and achieve desired outcomes. In practice, typically the role of designer is that of a design consultant working for (or rather on behalf of) the client. By contrast, in academic research settings, the role of designer is that of a design researcher working with their own research agenda.We provide a case study of a service design research project aimed at developing new digital services for public libraries. We encountered a series of issues with a complex set of values at play, in which design researchers emerged as distinct stakeholders with specific sets of research questions, goals, and visions. The main contribution of this paper is a model that (a) clarifies the position of design researchers within the sociocultural context in which they practice design, and (b) visualize how their positions impact the value co-creation, and in turn, the design outcome