A catalogue quality audit tool

The current need for performance measurement and quality targets for services to users requires suitable performance indicators for libraries to use. This paper looks at the self-assessment audit tool for catalogue quality developed by UKOLN in collaboration with Essex libraries. For the tool a checklist of errors was drawn up, which can then be used to assess the quality of records within a catalogue using a sample of library stock. The tool can be used to assess the quality of catalogue records for monographs and non-book materials (but not serials), for complete collections or parts of collections and for records created at different periods. This paper describes the tool and the process of making the assessment and reports on the results of the pilot study carried out at the University of Bath Library in 2000

Special Libraries, October 1955

Volume 46, Issue 8https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_sl_1955/1007/thumbnail.jp

Queries with Guarded Negation (full version)

A well-established and fundamental insight in database theory is that negation (also known as complementation) tends to make queries difficult to process and difficult to reason about. Many basic problems are decidable and admit practical algorithms in the case of unions of conjunctive queries, but become difficult or even undecidable when queries are allowed to contain negation. Inspired by recent results in finite model theory, we consider a restricted form of negation, guarded negation. We introduce a fragment of SQL, called GN-SQL, as well as a fragment of Datalog with stratified negation, called GN-Datalog, that allow only guarded negation, and we show that these query languages are computationally well behaved, in terms of testing query containment, query evaluation, open-world query answering, and boundedness. GN-SQL and GN-Datalog subsume a number of well known query languages and constraint languages, such as unions of conjunctive queries, monadic Datalog, and frontier-guarded tgds. In addition, an analysis of standard benchmark workloads shows that most usage of negation in SQL in practice is guarded negation

Questionnaire surveys to discover academic staff and library staff perceptions of a National Union catalogue

During the feasibility study into a National Union catalogue for the UK (UKNUC), a questionnaire survey was undertaken of the needs of both academic staff in higher education and library staff. A response rate of 40-50 per cent was achieved, 846 questionnaires being returned for academics and 724 for librarians. The analysis suggests that a UKNUC would be highly valued and heavily used by all categories. Academics felt it would have a positive effect on their information searching, and wished to include the holdings of the British Library, and libraries of both the major research universities and the ``traditional’’ universities. They wanted it to be comprehensive and easy to use, to include locations of both books and journals, and to facilitate subject collection searching. Library staff have similar priorities to academics, although there are more variations by sector and a recognition of a UKNUC’s value as a potential source of bibliographic records

Information scraps: how and why information eludes our personal information management tools

In this paper we describe information scraps -- a class of personal information whose content is scribbled on Post-it notes, scrawled on corners of random sheets of paper, buried inside the bodies of e-mail messages sent to ourselves, or typed haphazardly into text files. Information scraps hold our great ideas, sketches, notes, reminders, driving directions, and even our poetry. We define information scraps to be the body of personal information that is held outside of its natural or We have much still to learn about these loose forms of information capture. Why are they so often held outside of our traditional PIM locations and instead on Post-its or in text files? Why must we sometimes go around our traditional PIM applications to hold on to our scraps, such as by e-mailing ourselves? What are information scraps' role in the larger space of personal information management, and what do they uniquely offer that we find so appealing? If these unorganized bits truly indicate the failure of our PIM tools, how might we begin to build better tools? We have pursued these questions by undertaking a study of 27 knowledge workers. In our findings we describe information scraps from several angles: their content, their location, and the factors that lead to their use, which we identify as ease of capture, flexibility of content and organization, and avilability at the time of need. We also consider the personal emotive responses around scrap management. We present a set of design considerations that we have derived from the analysis of our study results. We present our work on an application platform, jourknow, to test some of these design and usability findings