POPULATING INSTITUTIONAL REPOSITORY: FACULTY’S CONTRIBUTION AND ROLES OF LIBRARIANS

Institutional Repositories (IRs) are predicated on contributions by members of a university community, particularly faculty members. In fact, faculty contribution are crucial to the success of an IR even though several studies have found low rates of faculty submission. In order to address low submission rates and provide an (IR) that will preserve and disseminate research materials, a research-intensive university in Malaysia conducted a web-based survey to investigate faculty’s use of open access repositories, advocacy undertaken, and attitudes toward the contents of IR. Responses were received from 131 academics from 14 faculties, institutes and centers at the university. Research questions posed were, among others “Are faculty members aware of Institutional Repositories? What is their opinion about IRs? Are they willing to contribute in IR, if they are given a chance? One half of the respondents mentioned allowing, or even encouraging, the deposit of theses and dissertations. Findings indicated that, as users the academics wanted to find many more types of material in the repository and as authors, they were willing to deposit, particularly to disseminate their work and receive feedback, and also to support the principle of open access. The greatest deterrents to contributing were the risk of being unable to publish elsewhere later, the ownership of copyright, and plagiarism. However, the faculties in this study are poorly informed on institutional repositories, with almost two-thirds not knowing if their institution has one. This low level of awareness may be due to the university library managing its repository, using librarians to collect and deposit materials on behalf of faculty members. The implication is that the librarians has an important role to play with regard to the relationship with self-archiving authors, which is the key characteristic of IRs. The paper has identified the following roles for librarians in an IR environment: (a) Understanding the IR software used; (b) Publicity and advocacy of IR; (c) Establishing an institutional mandate; (d) Educating faculty regarding self-archiving issues; (e) Submission review for content and metadata; and (f) Training of authors. Based on methodical IR development informed by best practices in the Open Access community, the findings from this study have been used for repository design customizations and functionality enhancements that complement the needs, interests and concerns of the faculty. An outcome of the research is an institutional repository (IR) to support for a new pattern for scholarly communication, apart from servicing the university’s research output

Embedded Librarianship in Scholarly Communication: Perceived Roles of Academic Librarians in Malaysian Research Intensive Universities

When scholarly communication is placed at the forefront of Malaysian research universities, the need for a research arm to support and facilitate usage, publishing and dissemination of research output becomes crucial has and this has changed the academic libraries’ services landscape. This paper reports the results of a study that aims to understand the practices of embedded librarianship in Malaysian research universities. The paper explores the embedded librarian’s in the pre-publication and post-publication roles of the scholarly communication process. Data were collected through personal semi structured interviews with twelve respondents from five academic libraries. Findings show that the academic libraries are expected to take a greater responsibility for the usage and dissemination of publication output of research intensive universities, as the participants in general perceived that the survival of the professionalism requires the embedded librarianship practices

Do you Facebook? Usage and applications of Facebook page among academic libraries in Malaysia

This paper explores usage and application of Facebook among Malaysian academic libraries in order to provide academic libraries with ideas for best practices in using social networking sites to better profile themselves and communicate effectively with their users in this new milieu. The research questions guiding this study are as follows: (a) What are the extent and nature of institutional Facebook use by Malaysian academic libraries?(b) What information that Malaysian academic libraries deliver through Facebook page? This study employs content analysis to examine current uses of the library Facebook page. A checkpoint was developed to analyze the libraries’ usage and application of Facebook page. A total of 14 academic libraries in Malaysia are using Facebook page as part of their services to users. However only 3 libraries are fully utilizing their Facebook page and they have been identified as “Skaters” based on the 8-S Framework of Category Development for Facebook user. Most libraries are using their Facebook page for marketing and creating awareness of library services to their users

AN INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY (ICT) ENABLED KNOWLEDGE-BASED MALAY SOCIETY

ABSTRAC

Collaborative digital library of historical resources : Evaluation of first users

This paper describes the digital library of historical resources, a research project which involves building a testbed for the purpose of developing and testing new collaborative digital library functionality and presents an initial analysis of the digital library's public use on the web. The digital library is modeled to focus on serving secondary students information needs in conducting history projects. As such, in the implementation of the digital library, the use of online resources would be an integral part of history project based learning activities. Students should be enabled to access digital resources, create and publish their own documents in the digital library and share them with others. As a testbed system, the collaborative digital library known as CoreDev has demonstrated its capabilities in serving an educational community as has been reflected by the positive feedback on the functional requirements from 44 users. Over 75 of the respondents in the user survey considered themselves capable of using the digital library easily. The beta tester demographics (n = 105) indicate that the digital library is reaching its target communities

Co-authorship Network of Scientometrics Research Collaboration

This paper examines the co-authorship network in the field of scientometrics using social network analysis techniques with the aim of developing an understanding of research collaboration in this scientific community. Using co-authorship data from 3125 articles published in the journal Scientometrics with a time span of more than three decades (1980-2012), we construct an evolving co-authorship network and calculate three centrality measures (closeness, betweenness, and degree) for 3024 authors, 1207 institutions, 68 countries and 22 academic fields in this network. This paper also discusses the usability of centrality measures in author ranking, and suggests that centrality measures can be useful indicators for impact analysis. Findings revealed that scientometrics was not dominated by a couple of key researchers as quite a significant number of popular researchers were identified. The United States occupies the topmost position in all measures except for degree centrality. The most active, central and collaborative academic discipline in scientometrics is Information & Library Science