Public Administration and the Library of Jean-Baptiste Colbert

Jean-Baptiste Colbert was a minister to Louis XIV from 1661 to 1683 and was one of the principal architects of royal absolutism in seventeenth-century France. His personal library served him as one of the major sources of information for the administration of government and the augmentation of the rights of the monarchy. Many of the archival sources available to the royal administration had been dispersed since the late Middle Ages. The two librarians working under Colbert, Pierre Carcavi and Etienne Baluze, assembled many of the necessary documents in the Colbertine and functioned as reference librarians to provide Colbert and his associates with memoirs and documents for government decision making. As such the Colbertine was a national archive and library until ministerial archives were created at the end of the century

Nicolas Mesnager: Trade Negotiator

The war of the Spanish Succession was as much about trade in the Spanish colonies as it was about the succession to the Spanish throne. Nicolas Mesnager negotiated for France the trade issues that had to be settled in order to end the war of the Spanish Succession

Meeting Academic Needs for Information: A Customer Service Approach

Should academic libraries seek to improve general satisfaction with their services, or are some services more important than others? This article asserts that faculty and students mainly want information resources. The research analyzes LibQual+TM data to determine which other library resources contribute to information satisfaction among users. The conclusion is that access mechanisms are very important predictors of information resource satisfaction, but library facilities and library staff are negligible predictors. This is true across different groups of users

Louis XIV: Patron of Science and Technology

Louis XIV during the fifty-five years of his personal reign (1661-1715) created the institutional foundations for the science and technology of France. These institutions were outwardly an attempt both to meet the needs of the French state for technical advice and to provide professional scientists with the necessary support for pure scientific research. In a less obvious sense, the origin and evolution of these institutions represented an attempt on the part of the monarchy to disentangle the pursuit of knowledge from the prevailing system of political patronage and from the political and religious speculation that fed the social conflicts of the period. By the end of the seventeenth century, Louis XIV and his ministers had attained these goals and set French science and technology on the high road of success for the duration of the eighteenth century

Niger Applied Agricultural Research Project. Contract AID 683-0256-c-00-8024-00. Consultancy Report.

Evaluation and recommendations for the documentation centers of the Institut National de Recherche Agronomique du Niger carried out in 1990

Library Development in Francophone Africa

Traces the history and development of libraries in Francophone Africa. Covers public, academic, government, and scientific libraries; also covers library education and the library profession

E-Book Reading Practices in Different Subject Areas: An Exploratory Log Analysis

Print books pose inherent difficulties for researchers who want to observe users’ natural in-book reading patterns. With e-books and logs of their use it is now possible to track several aspects of users’ interactions inside e-books, including the number and duration of their sessions with an e-book and the order in which pages are viewed. This chapter reports on a study of one-year of EBL user log data from Purdue University to identify different reading patterns or ways in which users navigate within different types of e-books—authored monographs vs. edited collections--and in e-books in different subject areas. The analysis of reading logs for e-books is still very much a new venture. From this perspective the results of this chapter are exploratory and descriptive, rather than conclusive, and as much about the evolution of workable methodologies as they are about the results of the analysis. Log analysis reveals nothing about users’ circumstances or intentions; however, in tandem with usability studies, and studies based on surveys, diaries, and interviews, it can contribute to a more objective understanding of users’ interactions with e-books

Mission-Focused Collections: Rebirth of the \u27Seminarbibliothek\u27 as an E-Book Collection

German universities built over the years highly specialized book collections for use by faculty and graduate students. The German term, “Seminarbibliothek,” is often applied to these types of collections, although examples can be found in universities across Europe. The purpose of this paper is to examine a similar type of collection using e-books in veterinary science and to compare this collection to the standard subject classified e-book collections. The study looks at how such a collection might be formed and defined and what possible effects this might have on the use of collections of this type

Decision Making and Uncertainty

In an article intitled, “Epistemological Dead End and Ergonomic Disaster? The North Amercian Collections Inventory Project,” Journal of Academic Librarianship 13 (September 1987): 209-213, David Henige charges that academic libraries are deceiving themselves when they assign a number to a subject collection and claim that this number represents the strength of the collection. Assigning numbers or levels to subject collections is the methodology used by the RLG Conspectus to rate academic collections. This article by Davis and Saunders offers a counter argument, based on subjective probabilities, to justify the RLG procedure