Discovering Topics from the Titles of the Indian LIS Theses

A lot of text data is being generated on the web in the form of scholarly articles, doctoral thesis, social media, library databases, and data archives. They are easy to use but complicated to process for research works. That is exactly why text mining is required and topic modeling is one of the most important techniques involved in text mining. In this paper, an attempt has been made to discover topics from the thesis titles (uploaded theses) in the field of Library and Information Science (LIS). For this work, the text data (n=2132) has been obtained from the Shodhganga. Then, topic modeling through Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) has been applied. After employing preliminary investigation, the findings show: State universities of India have the highest contribution of the thesis (78.06%); most theses (106) belong to Karnatak University, and 60.83% of thesis falls under the period 2011-2020. The main results of this paper are (a) The keyword “library” (0.204) has the highest score regarding 10 topics and “Library use” can be inferred as the major topic; (b) the keywords “information”, “technology”, “communication”, “survey”, “comparative”, “plant”, “scientist”, “city”, “support”, and “small” were discussed over 266 titles; and (c) “study”, “university libraries”, and “information-seeking behaviour’ are the most frequent n-grams appeared in the titles. This work can be taken towards future research for more improvement and new applications

UNDERSTANDING THE COMPETENCIES OF LIBRARY AND INFORMATION SCIENCE PROFESSIONALS: AN ANALYTICAL REVIEW

Knowledge plays a strategically important role to success and continuous growth of our life. In information exposition coupled with the electronic or virtual era has brought a great change to libraries and its working environment. In today’s working environment the role of libraries and librarians changed from storehouse of information caretaker to information manager and at the same time the forms and distribution of information also took a new shape in a new way. This is due to the advancement of ICT as well as contemporary societal need. Due to this change, library and information science professionals also need a number of special skills and competencies along with the basic skills and competencies. The present study is an attempt to explore the variety of discussions and ideas about the various aspects of skills and competencies, competencies of LIS professionals for various types of libraries and also focuses on the existing and required competencies of LIS professionals in the contemporary information system. The study is an analytical review of existing literature found in different scholarly journals, conference proceedings, books etc

N-grams Analysis of Digital Humanities Research During 2017-2021: A Study Based on Scopus Database

In the social sciences, Digital Humanities (DH) is gaining traction. An N-gram is a contiguous sequence of n words or tokens in a text document in computational linguistics and probability. In this study, authors have applied n-grams analysis to understand the context of the DH research from the abstract of 1348 articles (2017-2021). The data was collected from the Scopus database. The authors used Orage for n-grams extraction and visualised the n-grams using the word cloud. The study identified top-10 unigrams, bigrams, and trigrams and constructed the research contexts with human judgement using the frequencies of the n-grams. From the analysis authors observed some major research contexts like DH research, the use of digital technologies, ICT, social networks, cultural heritage, DH projects, and natural language processing. Bigrams were identified as more significant. This study can be helpful for scholars to understand the current research context and usage of terms

Digital Reference Service for Senior Citizen Patrons in Public Libraries of Siliguri Subdivision, West Bengal: Prospects and Possibilities

Reference service is the core of the public library services. At present, various categories of digital reference tools available on the web. With the help of those tools, public library services can be enhanced to a great extent. Public libraries should stay conscious of when providing services to older adults making sure all their special needs. The study is an attempt to explore the digital reference services available for senior citizens of public libraries in Siliguri sub-division, West Bengal. Authors found that lack of awareness is prominent among the senior citizens and recommend library professionals and policymakers to glorify the public library system through digital reference service