Role of Librarians’ Information Literacy Skills to Enhance Research Culture: A Case Study of University of Agriculture Faisalabad

This study has investigated the role of librarians’ Information Literacy (IL) skills to enhance the research productivity of Faculty Members of the University of Agriculture Faisalabad, Punjab, Pakistan. The population of the study was the faculty members of the University of Agriculture and five library professionals of the university’s Central Library. A quantitative approach followed by a survey research design was adopted to meet the objectives of the study. Data were gathered through the instrument of the questionnaire. Quantitatively driven data was analyzed by SPSS Software. Results showed that Library professionals played a vital role in the promotion of research culture on the whole. IL instruction programs were of great value for the output of research productivity. Library professionals faced several barriers including lack of information literacy training, Unreliable power supply, the ineffective role of library organizations, lack of funding from institutions, lack of proficiency to use the internet, personal health issues, and official issues like leaves, permissions, work burden, etc. The most preferred suggestions to improve IL skills of LIS professionals and faculty members are; provision of funds or scholarships, revision of LIS curriculum, the active role of Pakistan Library Association (PLA), National IL skills training program for LIS professionals and faculty members, and instructional programs for the improvement of IL skills of faculty members and librarians

A Computational Redundancy Reduction Approach for High performaice and Low Power DSP Algorithm Implementation

In this paper, we present a general approach which specifically targets reduction of redundant computation in common d\u27igital signal processing (DSP) tasks such as filtering and matrix multiplication. The main idea presented in this work is to show that such tasks can be expressed as multiplication of vectors by scalars and fast multiplication can be achieved by sharing computation in such operations. The multiplication schemes considerably reduce redundant computation by decomposing the vectors in a manner which results in maximal computation sharing, thereby, resulting in a faster and potentially low-power implementation. Two decomposition approaches are presented, one based on a greedy decomposition and the other based on fixed-size lookup rule which lead to two multiplication architectures for scaling of vectors. Analysis of the proposed implementations shows a speed-up by a factor of up to 3 over a carry save array multiplier. Analog simulation of an example 8-bit multiplier shows a speed advantage by a factor of 1.85 and a power disadvantage of 1.9 over a conventional carry save array multiplier. Using voltage scaling, the power consumption of the example multiplier can be reduced to 56% of the carry save array multiplier

Impact of Information Literacy Skills of Librarians on Research Productivity of Faculty Members of University of Agriculture, Faisalabad

This study has investigated the impact of Information Literacy Skills of Librarians to enhance the research productivity of Faculty Members of the University of Agriculture Faisalabad, Punjab, Pakistan. The main goal of the study was to measure the levels of Information Literacy of faculty members and professional librarians of the university, to investigate the programs offered by library staff of the university, and to explore the role of Librarians’ Information Literacy skills for research productivity of faculty members in the university. To achieve the objectives of the study, the Sequential Explanatory design of Mix method approach was employed and questionnaire was distributed to every participant of the population of faculty members, and interviews were taken from the professional librarians by researchers to get an in-depth understanding related to the study. There are 07 major faculties in the university and 39 departments working under the umbrella of these 07 faculties and 579 teaching faculty members are working in these departments with various designations of Lecturers, Assistant Professors, Associate Professors, and Professors in the university, and there are 05 professional LIS degree holders staff in the main library of the university working there. The required sample size was 231 and all questionnaires were received from the faculty members. The response rate is 100%. Data were analyzed through SPSS 20 version. Findings of the study revealed that LIS professionals and faculty members have moderate levels of Information Literacy skills and they can improve their competencies in Information Literacy by adopting some training courses and seminars. The library staff conducts orientation sessions at the start of every year and the library has sufficient resources for faculty members and library staff is cooperative with the faculty members but the library staff does not conduct any trainings and workshops to improve the IL skills of faculty members

Optimization of depth-based routing for underwater wireless sensor networks through intelligent assignment of initial energy

Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSNs) are extensively used to explore the diverse marine environment. Energy efficiency is one of the main concerns regarding performance of UWSNs. In a cooperative wireless sensor network, nodes with no energy are known as coverage holes. These coverage holes are created due to non-uniform energy utilization by the sensor nodes in the network. These coverage holes degrade the performance and reduce the lifetime of UWSNs. In this paper, we present an Intelligent Depth Based Routing (IDBR) scheme which addresses this issue and contributes towards maximization of network lifetime. In our proposed scheme, we allocate initial energy to the sensor nodes according to their usage requirements. This idea is helpful to balance energy consumption amongst the nodes and keep the network functional for a longer time as evidenced by the results provided