Digital libraries and users : an Italian experience. Changes in academic users' attitudes, perceptions and usage of study and research tools in a hybrid context

The goal of this study is to measure the changes in scholarly journals usage in the Italian academic context. In order to meet our goals a survey was conducted based on a on-line questionnaire (1,305 respondents). The final results of this study clearly show the existence of four different categories of users (midway innovators, midway traditionalists, full innovators and full traditionalists), each category represents a different approach to digital library service

Digital libraries and users : an Italian experience. Changes in academic users' attitudes, perceptions and usage of study and research tools in a hybrid context

The goal of this study is to measure the changes in scholarly journals usage in the Italian academic context. In order to meet our goals a survey was conducted based on a on-line questionnaire (1,305 respondents). The final results of this study clearly show the existence of four different categories of users (midway innovators, midway traditionalists, full innovators and full traditionalists), each category represents a different approach to digital library service

Dieci anni di Emeroteca Virtuale. Una panoramica sul servizio di Digital Library del coordinamento CIBER

This paper illustrates what has been done by CASPUR in the past ten years for its Emeroteca Virtuale service. CIBER (Comitato Interuniversitario Basi dati ed Editoria in Rete) Digital Library, known as "Emeroteca Virtuale" (EV), provides access to more than 5300 scholarly e-journals, mostly on STM disciplines, to authorized users (students, researchers and professors from 26 universities of CIBER consortium). On occasion of its tenth anniversary, we want to show what changes EV has undergone, focusing on various elements (users, usage data, access types, hardware) which characterize the service on the whole, in order to have a view as global as possible of it. Future developments of the server will be also presented at the end of this article, showing how they have been suggested by users' legitimate needs and expectations

Un portale di accesso a riviste elettroniche multidisciplinari per l'Università e la Ricerca scientifica e tecnologica: l'esperienza del consorzio CASPUR con il suo servizio di Emeroteca Virtuale

In this paper the experience by CASPUR with its 'Virtual newspaper and periodical library' is presented, a service that for about four years is been offering access to electronic multidisciplinary titles for a set of users that includes about thirty universities and research centres. In particular the following topics are illustrated: the main characteristics of the infrastructure that is used and was recently revisited with the aim of improving its quality towards end users; the innovative infrastructural solution that was implemented for the servers making the user interface; the parameters that are used for evaluating the quality of the newspaper and periodical library web interface, on the base of the average answer times to end users by the portal. The article ends with a review of ongoing activities that will involve CASPUR, alone or together with academic/scholarly partners in the field of this project

Il progetto PLEIADI: stato dell'arte

PLEIADI project (Portale per la Letteratura scientifica Elettronica Italiana su Archivi aperti e Depositi Istituzionali), which has moved its first steps during 2004, was born as a collaboration of CILEA and CASPUR interuniversity consortium; recently a portal for centralized access to scientific literature on Italian open archives was released. This report shows main characteristics of PLEIADI prototype, after its official announcement to Italian librarians community during the recent event which was held last November in Messina (Italy) on “Open Access” issues

A user-centred portal for search and retrieval of open-access Italian scholarly literature: the PLEIADI project

The PLEIADI Project (acronym for “Portale per la Letteratura scientifica Elettronica Italiana su Archivi aperti e Depositi Istituzionali”, a portal for Italian scholarly e-literature in open archives and institutional repositories) was born within the framework of a collaboration between two major Italian university consortia, CASPUR and CILEA, as part of a project called AEPIC (http://www.aepic.it). PLEIADI’s goal is to promote national awareness in the Open Access scenario and provide centralized access for scholarly literature archived in Italian institutional repositories (or “data providers” in the OAI - Open Archives Initiative architecture). PLEIADI also aims at providing end users (mainly the academic and research community) with a personalized environment, user profiling, an area to save searches and articles, e-mail alerts. The portal enhances users’ awareness on Open Access issues through several information services (news, RSS, forum), and promotes self-archiving of scholarly articles in institutional repositories. The service, available at the URL http://www.openarchives.it/pleiadi/, was launched in November 2004, during a national event held in Messina, which marked the “official starting point” for the Open Access movement in the Italian academic community

The impact of digital library service on scientific production of a media sized university : the University of Messina's experience

The university of Messina has been part of an inter-university consortium (the CIBER consortium: http://www.uniciber.it/fileadmin/user_upload/CIBER_presentazioneEN_apr2006.pdf) since 2000. The consortium was set up in order to reduce the impact on university budgets of high costs of scholarly e-journals and A&I databases by sharing subscriptions between a number of institutions and by signing collective contracts with publishers. Right from the outset, Messina U. has accessed the "Emeroteca Virtuale" digital library (E.V.), which distributes e-journal titles from a dozen commercial publishers, half of these available in full-text format locally. In the past year the "Centro di Ateneo delle Biblioteche" (CAB) of Messina U. has been working, together with CASPUR and the 'Istituto Superiore di Sanità', in the E.V. users statistics team, which aims to define a new environment for statistical data concerning E.V. usage of CIBER consortium users (mainly professors, researchers, and students belonging to those universities). The result of this joint activity is a new web site showing the usage statistics for all the members of the CIBER consortium (34); the format for usage data is fully compliant with recent COUNTER project specifications (http://www.projectcounter.org/). Moreover, through this web site it is possible to obtain a detailed view of E.V. usage data, including TOP style reports, analytical reports, subject categories classification and so on. A new study has recently begun in order to analyze the possible impact of E.V. usage on the scientific production of professors and researchers. For the purposes of this study we intend to work on usage data from Messina U. The main idea is to identify a relatively long time period (the last two years) and a sample of the university population (from a single scientific discipline). From this starting point, we intend to analyze the usage data for journals belonging to that area, and to correlate those numbers with the number of articles published from scholars of that discipline in order to validate the hypothesis of a direct correlation between digital library usage and scientific production. This presentation will illustrate the main features of the new E.V. usage statistics portal for the CIBER consortium and the approach we decided to adopt in order to carry out this specific study

Strategie di analisi quantitativa in biblioteca: la soluzione SiMonLib™@CASPUR

Frequent data collection, library performance analysis and service quality evaluation are critical issues for librarians and managers. Use of specialized ICT tools as key element of measurement campaigns are an efficient and optimized way to face with typical problems this kind of activities arises. SiMonLib™ software from XSystems, an innovative platform created for library service quality management, is perfectly suited to meet these issues. CASPUR consortium and XSystems have signed an agreement to offer SiMonLib services to Italian library community. They provide a scalable, virtual server based, SaaS (software as a service) solution, called SiMonLib@CASPUR, which represents a highly available, low cost, full featured ICT tool for library performance measurement and service quality management

Strumenti di indagine conoscitiva sulle classi di utenza di una biblioteca digitale basati sull'analisi quantitativa delle informazioni di accesso

This presentation is focussed on a statistical analysis of WEB log files produced by users accessing CASPUR digital library called “Emeroteca Virtuale” and made available for CIBER universities consortium. Quantitative analysis results obtained for a particular publisher e-journals sub-set are presented and correlated with subscription choices of specific universities, in order to outline their possible outcomes on economic and service levels for the whole consortium