A Brief Look at Automation Activities in Turkish University Libraries

Turkey, one of the cradles of civilisation, is a republic founded by Kemal Ataturk in 1923 after the collapse of the 600-year-old Ottoman Empire. Its location in two continents (Europe and Asia) has been a central factor in its history, culture and politics; Turkey has often been called a bridge between East and West. Turkey, Islamic in tradition, is a newly industrialised democratic nation of 55 million people. In Turkey, there are 29 universities (28 state and one private). They are governed by a common law, namely the Higher Education Act. The majority of universities have decentralised libraries, which is largely due to the fact that there has been no legislation or by-laws that specifically govern the establishment and organisation of libraries within a university. The importance of computers for library and information centres has long been recognised in Turkey. The history of computer use goes back to the early 1970s when university libraries started to use computers mainly for 'batch' jobs, such as the production of a union catalogue of serials, acquisition lists and the like. In a recent survey it was shown that almost all university libraries have a strong interest in automation1. Some have been planning to computerise their operations, whilst others are considering this option seriously. The existing computer use in university libraries is heavily centred in the following operations: union lists of serials and books, circulation control, acquisition, cataloguing and current awareness

Analysis of the spatial dynamics of intra- v.s. inter- research collaborations across countries

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the evolutionary pattern of international research collaborations. Using publication data from 1997 to 2012, this study decomposes international collaborations into two complementary types, intra-collaboration (within the same geographical area) and inter-collaboration (across different geographical areas). Our results show that the geographical concentration of international research collaborations is reducing. The formation of new network structure of international research collaborations is driven by the increase of inter-research collaborations of countries across different geographical areas rather than intracollaborations of countries within the same geographical area

A longitudinal analysis of search engine index size

One of the determining factors of the quality of Web search engines is the size and quality of their index. In addition to its influence on search result quality, the size of the indexed Web can also tell us something about which parts of the WWW are directly accessible to the everyday user. We propose a novel method of estimating the size of a Web search engine's index by extrapolating from document frequencies of words observed in a large static corpus of Web pages. In addition, we provide a unique longitudinal perspective on the size of Google and Bing's indexes over more than eight years, from March 2006 until January 2015. We find that index size estimates of these two search engines tend to vary dramatically over time, with Google generally possessing a larger index than Bing. This result raises doubts about the reliability of previous one-off estimates of the size of the indexable Web. We find that much of this variability can be explained by changes in the indexing and ranking infrastructure of Google and Bing, as well as the distributed nature of Web search engines. This casts further doubt on whether Web search engines can be used reliably for cross-sectional Webometric studies