Looking At Institutional Repositories In Malaysian Public Universities

University libraries are developing and maintaining institutional repositories as a means of managing and disseminating digital materials. In most instances, these materials are created by the staff of the university and institutional repositories serve to disseminate information on the academic activities of the university community. There is a move amongst universities worldwide to develop and maintain their own institutional repositories. The size of the collection may range from hundreds to thousands and universities in Malaysia are showing signs of interest in this area. Numerous Malaysian public universities are slowly but surely developing institutional repositories either in isolation or collectively as a consortium. This paper presents the status of institutional repositories which are hosted by Malaysian public university libraries. As at 28 October 2008, the Registry of Open Access Repositories lists seven Malaysian institutional repositories and only four of them are from university libraries. This number is extremely small when compared to the existence of 20 public universities throughout Malaysia. Findings indicate that the other libraries are at various stages of developing their institutional repositories. Some are at the initial stage of designing and developing their repositories whilst others are enriching the contents of their repositories

Tracing information literacy of computer science undergraduates: A content analysis of students' academic exercise

Librarians have been using citation analysis as a means to determine the usage of their collection while others have used it look at undergraduate information behaviour. At the same time, various attempts are being made to relate citation analysis of bibliographies to information literacy competencies by mapping them to the performance indicators of established information literacy standards. This paper describes the analysis of bibliographies of final year project reports emanating from the Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology, University of Malaya. A total of 73 reports were analysed using a pre-designed scoring sheet and results presented included number of pages, number of citations, types of sources used, usage of Web resources, currency of sources and citation style. The contents analysis of the bibliographies indicates: (a) the least number of citations per report is 6 and the most is 165 with the most number of citations within the range of 11 to 20 cites; (b) there are more Web citations than citations to books, journal articles, undergraduate reports, Masters' dissertations and conference papers; (c) there are more citation to .com than to .org, .edu, .net and other URL extensions; (d) most citations are not dated and most of those dated are from within the last three years with the most current being 2005 and the oldest dated citation is 1935; and (e) most references have their print citations cited correctly but the Web citations cited incorrectly. Only a handful of indicators could be matched to the information literacy performance indicators of the ALAIACRUSTS 2005 Information Literacy Standards for Science and Engineering/ Technology

Industrial training for library & information science students : A Malaysian experience

Library profession is specialized and technical in nature, and so industrial training for the library science students must have both the elements of theory and practical skills incorporated. This is becoming more pertinent with the frequent debate lately as to the relevance of libraries in the wake of emerging web technologies. We are at a crossroad in time, when even ALA seems to have difficulty defining librarianship adequately. In Malaysia, four public universities run this program, two for undergraduates and two for postgraduate programs. The industrial training is partly based on the internship model where students undergo training from one to three months. This paper will present students’ comments as well trainers’ feedback of a training program for LIS students in a public university in Malaysia. A few challenges such as unsynchronized training schedules between school and industry, and varying library systems are identified which calls for more collaborative efforts between library schools and industrial trainers

UM in the news : marketing and promotion on social media platforms

Today’s technology has made it possible for news to be disseminated in the quickest manner. Users, especially from the higher learning institutions, need to stay connected with news in order to complete some of their learning processes. The aim of this paper is to analyse the strategies used in marketing and promoting of news by the University of Malaya Library (UML). The effectiveness of these strategies will be analyzed via the number of pages viewed, shares, clicks and viral lift. The study is descriptive in nature in which it will describe the strategies used by the UML to market and promote news and also the effectiveness of these strategies. It is hoped that this study will provide some insights on the marketing and promotion of news by libraries especially at higher learning institutions

Making Malaysian research available through publishing in open access e-journals and e-prints

Individual authors are making their research available by posting their articles to personal or institutional Web pages and to disciplinary repositories. The recent trend is to publish or self-archive in open-access journals and “e-print” (i.e., preprints or postprints) repositories, both of which make the full text of scholarly articles freely available to everyone on the open Internet. Electronic journals and electronic archives which are OAI compliant would help to solve Malaysian research visibility problems. Malaysian authors are already contributing to these archives since there is none locally. The open archives serve the authors by facilitating their self-archiving, ensuring the long-term preservation of their documents and by providing word-wide easy access to their papers. Shedding light on open access reveals that scholars in diverse disciplines are both adopting open access practices and being rewarded for it as that articles deposited in these repositories have begun to receive citations and have also begun to achieve impact valu

CURATION AND MANAGEMENT OF CULTURAL HERITAGE THROUGH LIBRARIES

Libraries, museums and archives hold valuable collections in a variety of media, presenting a vast body of knowledge rooted in the history of human civilisation. These form the repository of the wisdom of great works by thinkers of past and the present. The holdings of these institutions are priceless heritage of the mankind as they preserve documents, ideas, and the oral and written records. To value the cultural heritage and to care for it as a treasure bequeathed to us by our ancestors is the major responsibility of libraries. The past records constitute a natural resource and are indispensable to the present generation as well as to the generations to come. Libraries preserve the documentary heritage resources for which they are primarily responsible. Any loss of such materials is simply irreplaceable. Therefore, preserving this intellectual, cultural heritage becomes not only the academic commitment but also the moral responsibility of the librarians/information scientists, who are in charge of these repositories. The high quality of the papers and the discussion represent the thinking and experience of experts in their particular fields. The contributed papers also relate to the methodology used in libraries in Asia to provide access to manuscripts and cultural heritage. The volume discusses best practices in Knowledge preservation and how to collaborate and preserve the culture. The book also deals with manuscript and archives issues in the digital era. The approach of this book is concise, comprehensively, covering all major aspects of preservation and conservation through libraries. The readership of the book is not just limited to library and information science professionals, but also for those involved in conservation, preservation, restoration or other related disciplines. The book will be useful for librarians, archivists and conservators. We thank the Sunan Kalijaga University, Special Libraries Association- Asian Chapter for their trust and their constant support, all the contributors for their submissions, the members of the Local and International Committee for their reviewing effort for making this publication possible

An Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Enabled Knowledge-Based Malay Society

Identify five conditions of an information rich society: the existence of a conducive info-structural environment, a reliable and robust ICT infrastructure, a community that is ICT literate, a community that have the necessary information skills, and the existence of supportive governance. The barriers comprise situations that are not in consonance with overall development objectives such as brain drain from developing countries to developed nations, the inability to recognize the potential of local knowledge databases, which if collated and provided widely through the ICT would increase the value and global use, the failure to apply, use or add value to existing knowledge, the lack of information skills in locating, searching and handling information; and lack of ICT skill. ICT is seen as an enabler and not the sole instrument of an information rich society. Describe studies that indicate that the Malay society is not ICT illiterate and do know the importance of IT in their daily lives. The Malays are aware of current S& T issues and readily utilize the widely available public information channels. The Internet is mainly used for communication via e-mails and searching for information. In Malaysia, a supportive governance (government and citizens) is already in place but there is the need to improve the info-structure environment and increase ICT literacy to enable a knowledge-based Malay society

Information literacy via the web: a framework

Information literacy is defined as the ability to recognize when information is needed and the ability to locate, evaluate, and use effectively the needed information. The availability of massive amount of information is creating a need for education on how to evaluate and use information. Turning information into knowledge through intelligent use is critical for everyone in higher education. Institutions of higher learning have a special responsibility to prepare students for careful and informed use of information. In fulfilling this responsibility, different institutions have developed different ways of assuring information literacy competency among their students. Currently, nine public universities in Malaysia conduct some form of information literacy course for their undergraduates using the teacher-centred approach, each one labeled differently. Interestingly, all these programmes are prepared and delivered by the library staff with no collaboration from the academics. However, the programmes offered differ considerably from university to university since Malaysia does not have national information literacy competency standards for higher education to be used as a benchmark for the preparation and delivery of information literacy courses. Recent changes in higher education and the current focus on e-learning offer librarians and academics opportunities to explore the Web not only as a resource tool but also as a learning tool. This paper presents a proposal for the development of a generic template-based prototype of a Web-based information literacy course for undergraduates at the Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology, University of Malaya with the necessary contents. Once completed the template could be used across the curriculum by all disciplines throughout the various public universities