The unseen and unacceptable face of digital libraries

The social and organizational aspects of digital libraries are often overlooked but this paper reviews how they can affect users' awareness and acceptance of digital libraries. An analysis of research conducted within two contrasting domains (Clinical and Academic) is presented which highlights issues of user interactions, work practices and the organizational social structures. The combined study comprises an analysis of 98 in-depth interviews and focus groups with lecturers, librarians and hospital clinicians. The importance of current and past roles of the library, and how users interacted with it, are revealed. Web-based digital libraries, while alleviating most library resource and interaction problems, require a change in librarians' and DL designers' roles and interaction patterns if they are to be implemented acceptably and effectively. Without this role change, users will at best be unaware of these digital resources and at worst feel threatened by them. The findings of this paper highlight the importance on DL design and implementation of the social context and supporting user communication (i.e. collaboration and consultation) in their information search and usage activities

Identification of plastic constitutive parameters at large deformations from three dimensional displacement fields

The aim of this paper is to provide a general procedure to extract the constitutive parameters of a plasticity model starting from displacement measurements and using the Virtual Fields Method. This is a classical inverse problem which has been already investigated in the literature, however several new features are developed here. First of all the procedure applies to a general three-dimensional displacement field which leads to large plastic deformations, no assumptions are made such as plane stress or plane strain although only pressure-independent plasticity is considered. Moreover the equilibrium equation is written in terms of the deviatoric stress tensor that can be directly computed from the strain field without iterations. Thanks to this, the identification routine is much faster compared to other inverse methods such as finite element updating. The proposed method can be a valid tool to study complex phenomena which involve severe plastic deformation and where the state of stress is completely triaxial, e.g. strain localization or necking occurrence. The procedure has been validated using a three dimensional displacement field obtained from a simulated experiment. The main potentialities as well as a first sensitivity study on the influence of measurement errors are illustrated

Information (and library) science at City University London; 50 years of educational development

The development of education for information and library science at City University London over a 50-year period is described in this article. The development of the Masters course in Information Science, and the later equivalent courses in Library Science and in Information Management in the Cultural Sector are described in detail, together with shorter-lived Masters courses in pharmaceutical and health information. The rationale for changes to the courses, and the influence of the professional and educational contexts, are analysed. Issues emerging from this analysis are discussed in seven themes: the nature of the discipline; the library/information spectrum; the student group; the academic/professional balance; curriculum design; local and global issues; and teaching methods. The discussions of the courses are set in the wider context of changes in library/information education over the period in the UK and worldwide