Libraries and the library system of Slovenia

This paper provides a brief introduction to the Republic of Slovenia and presents a history of its library system. Although the first “public” library opened in 1569 and the first “public” research library in 1701, the current library system originated in the twentieth century, after World War I. The library system of Slovenia today is an organized network consisting of publicly funded libraries of all types, which have been in continuous development since the end of World War II. Several academic and research libraries started using informationretrieval systems in the early 1970s, while other Slovenian libraries started using automated services during the late 1980s. Slovenian libraries have recently reached a relatively high level of development and are now focused on providing digital resources and other new services to their users. While digital libraries are active these days and several acquisition consortia are currently providing user access to numerous resources after a long period of stable and significant growth, the recent global financial crisis provoked austerity measures that are threatening the continued development of the country’s library system.published or submitted for publicatio

Evaluation of an Internet Document Delivery Service

An Internet-based Document Delivery Service (DDS) has been developed within the framework of the CNR ( the Italian Research National Council) Project BiblioMIME, in order to take advantage of new Internet technologies and promote cooperation among CNR and Italian university libraries. Adopting such technologies changes the traditional organisation of DDS and may drastically reduce costs and delivery times. An information system managing DDS requests and monitoring the temporal evolution of the service has been implemented, running on the local-area network of a test-site library. It aims to track number and types of documents requested and received, user distribution, delivery times and types (surface mail, fax, Internet), to automate repetitive manual procedures and to deal with the various accounting methods used by other libraries. Transmission of documents is carried out by means of an e-mail/Web gateway system supporting document exchange via Internet, which assists receiving libraries in retrieving requested documents. This paper describes the architecture and main design features of the e-mail/Web gateway server (the BiblioMime server). This approach permits librarians to continue using e-mail service to send large documents, while resolving problems that users may encounter when downloading large size files with e-mail agents. The library operator sends the document as an attachment to the destination address; on fly the e-mail server extracts and saves the attachments in a web-server disk file and substitutes them with a new message part that includes an URL pointing to the saved document. The receiver can download these large objects by means of a user-friendly browser. We further discuss the data gathered during the triennium 1998-2000; this consists of about 5,000 DDS transactions per annum with 300 other Italian scientific and bio-medical libraries and commercial document suppliers. Use of the instruments described above allowed us to evaluate the performance of service “before” and “after” the use of Internet Document Delivery and to extract some critical data regarding DDS. Those include: a) libraries with which we have greater numbers of exchanges and their turnaround times; b) extraordinary reduction in costs and delivery times; c) the most frequently requested serial titles (allowing cost-effective decisions on new subscriptions); d) impact on DDS of library participation in consortia which allow user access to greater numbers of online serials

The world OA iniciative for scientific communication in civil engineering and institutional repository as its answer – the case study of Slovenia. Poster presentation at 79th IFLA Congress.

Scientific communication in technics consists primarily of articles in peer-reviewed scholarly journals. In our research of 2026 articles, published in JCR journals in the field of civil engineering in 2007, we found out that 21% of them are published as open accessed articles, most of them as articles archived in institutional repositories. They reached 29% of all citations in the analysed period. In accordance with these findings, in 2011 the repository at the University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Civil and Geodetic Engineering was built in open source tool ePrints. 1400 theses as well as 200 research articles have been archived in it till January 2013. The library was one of the most important stakeholders in its building as it is still today. Each of the repository unit is linked into Slovenian bibliographical information system COBISS and its cataloguing part COBIB as well as the part of high valuated research works of Slovenian researchers SICRIS. The statistics (150.000 visits from all over the world in one year) is a motivation for us to develop it further. In the near future the connection to the Slovenian Digital Library (dLib.si) shall be established, which will ensure the preservation of metadata

Does the Open Access Business Model Have a Significant Impact on the Citation of Publications? Case Study in the Field of Civil Engineering

One of the possible benefits of open access (OA) might be the better visibility of articles,which is usually measured by the number of citations of the article. In order to\ud realistically estimate the effect of OA on citation, it is not enough to compare OA and non-OA ISI journals. Thus, as Harnad and Brody (2004) suggested, the numbers of citations\ud of OA and non-OA articles from the same journals were compared. Therefore, we have chosen to analyze the publications in three international journals in the field\ud of civil engineering. All of them have an ISI impact factor in the Civil engineering subject category in the ISI/Web of science database (WOS). The articles were classified\ud into two groups − the OA publications and the non-OA publications. We analyzed all the articles published in the same year and the number of their citations until the end of February 2012, seeking to find out if these two groups differ from each other

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

The technical efficiency of Public Libraries in the Czech Republic

The purpose of this article is to define and evaluate the development of the aggregated technical efficiency of public libraries in the Czech Republic from 1993 to 2014. To simulate technical efficiency, the Data Envelopment Analysis Model (The BCC model) was chosen. To evaluate the production units (the unit of the Czech Republic from 1993 to 2014 and its production is given by the sum of real homogenous units, i.e. the public libraries operating in a given area and in a given time), two input variables (the recalculated number of employees and the library collection) and two output variables (the number of registered readers and the number of loans) were analysed. Two basic models were simulated – the M1 model oriented to inputs and the M2 model oriented to outputs. Correlation between the input and output variables was researched using Pearson’s coefficient. Within the range of the M1 and M2 basic models, partial models were simulated. All of the basic and partial models identically showed eight efficient periods of public libraries in the Czech Republic (1995, 1997, 1999–2000, 2002–2005). Public libraries were, according to the chosen variables, inefficient in the remaining 16 observed years