Is there a second life for librarians?

The purpose of this paper is to explore the roles of libraries within Second Life from the viewpoint of the librarians experienced in experimenting within virtual worlds. Exploration of currently available literature was undertaken to determine the important issues affecting libraries and librarians within virtual worlds. To explore these issues further, ten Second Life librarians were interviewed in order to distinguish which were most important and why. There is considerable diversity in the opinions of Second Life librarians, but all interviewees shared the belief that their efforts within Second Life had helped others and improved their own professional development. There was a strong consensus that it was important for librarians to embrace Second Life now, in order to be prepared for a future when virtual worlds, although perhaps not Second Life itself, were commonplace. Virtual worlds are growing in popularity, particularly with younger generations. If they are to be accepted as part of a multidimensional information space, the possibilities available within the virtual space need to be appreciated and understood by the information community. Librarians have a responsibility to aid their users in understanding the complexity and possibilities of information provision and delivery offered by virtual worlds. This can only occur by accepting and supporting experiments in environments like Second Life. This paper illustrates to the library community how Second Life is currently being used to provide information services, and to further an understanding of how the entire information community can benefit from embracing the possibility of exploring virtual worlds

Documentation for institutional repositories

In order to identify best practice, the documentation of seven academic institutional repositories(IRs) was compared and contrasted. This was followed by semi-structured interviews with six practitioners experienced in the set-up, management and maintenance of IRs, including representatives of three JISC FAIR projects. The aim was to identify the requirements of policy documentation provided by IRs. Although many issues were found to be handled differently depending on what IR software was used, or the stage of development of the IR, several common factors emerged. These included the importance of developing the documentation in collaboration with individual academics, departments and senior management whose views and needs are central to the success of the IR. Additional findings were that policies should be formulated only when the purpose and aims of the IR have been clearly defined and that the IR documentation itself should be concise and easy to understand, with the rights and responsibilities of stakeholders clearly presented

Extending document models to incorporate semantic information for complex standards

This paper presents the concept of hybrid semantic-document models to aid information management when using standards for complex technical domains such as military data communication. These standards are traditionally text based documents for human interpretation, but prose sections can often be ambiguous and can lead to discrepancies and subsequent implementation problems. Many organisations will produce semantic representations of the material to ensure common understanding and to exploit computer aided development. In developing these semantic representations, no relationship is maintained to the original prose. Maintaining relationships between the original prose and the semantic model has key benefits, including assessing conformance at a semantic level rather than prose, and enabling original content authors to explicitly define their intentions, thus reducing ambiguity and facilitating computer aided functionality. A framework of relationships is proposed which can integrate with common document modeling techniques and provide the necessary functionality to allow semantic content to be mapped into document views. These relationships are then generalised for applicability to a wider context

RoMEO Studies 2: how academics want to protect their open-access research papers

This paper is the second in a series of studies (see Gadd, E., C. Oppenheim, and S. Probets. RoMEO Studies 1: The impact of copyright ownership on author-self-archiving. Journal of Documentation. 59(3) 243-277) emanating from the UK JISC-funded RoMEO Project (Rights Metadata for Open-archiving). It considers the protection for research papers afforded by UK copyright law, and by e-journal licences. It compares this with the protection required by academic authors for open-access research papers as discovered by the RoMEO academic author survey. The survey used the Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL) as a framework for collecting views from 542 academics as to the permissions, restrictions, and conditions they wanted to assert over their works. Responses from self-archivers and non-archivers are compared. Concludes that most academic authors are primarily interested in preserving their moral rights, and that the protection offered research papers by copyright law is way in excess of that required by most academics. It also raises concerns about the level of protection enforced by e-journal licence agreements

Knowledge audit: findings from a case study in the energy sector

Knowledge audits are important processes through which organisations can understand what knowledge is needed, available and used for their current activities. They can also identify what knowledge is missing and how this omission restricts the organisation’s activities. Hence, knowledge audits can surface initiatives to improve the knowledge management (KM) processes of an organisation and, in turn, improve efficiency and effectiveness. An iterative cycle of knowledge audits allows for the organisation’s changing environment to be taken account of and for appropriate modifications to be made to the knowledge base. Despite the importance of knowledge audits, literature relating to their undertaking is sparse. This paper addresses the scarcity of such literature and reports the findings of a knowledge audit commissioned by an organisation that brings together public bodies and private organisations with the aim of maximising the collective knowledge, expertise and experience of its diverse members to address a nationally recognised research agenda. The audit included collecting qualitative data from a series of in-depth interviews with a representative sample of employees from the four main departments within the organisation. Interviewees were asked about their own roles, procedures and knowledge needs; they were also asked about their department’s knowledge requirements and about knowledge interfaces with external partners. Views about the culture and structure of the organisation were also sought. Results were analysed at a departmental level to form two knowledge maps per department – one illustrating the knowledge required by the department, the knowledge shared with other departments and the mechanisms for sharing this knowledge; the other illustrated knowledge flows with external partners. The maps were then used in conjunction with the interview transcripts to identify the strengths and weaknesses of each department’s knowledge activities. This process focussed on the impact of organisational culture and structure as well as the effectiveness of technological and ‘soft’ solutions for knowledge sharing. Following from the departmental analysis, a cross department comparison enabled best practices and company-wide weaknesses to be identified. Seven resulting recommendations were made that would support the sharing of departmental best practices and address organisational weaknesses: 1. Developing a holistic approach to knowledge sharing 2. Nurturing the organisational culture 3. Clarifying the strategic message 4. Improving the organisation of information 5. Improving the availability of staff 6. Developing inter-departmental communication 7. Commissioning future knowledge audits In addition to reporting the outcomes and outputs of the process, the paper also highlights challenges of the process and includes reflections on the suitability of the selected data collection and analysis methods for a knowledge audit

Integration of distributed terminology resources to facilitate subject cross-browsing for library portal systems

Purpose – The paper aims to develop a prototype middleware framework between different terminology resources in order to provide a subject cross-browsing service for library portal systems. Design/methodology/approach – Nine terminology experts were interviewed to collect appropriate knowledge to support the development of a theoretical framework for the research. Based on this, a simplified software-based prototype system was constructed incorporating the knowledge acquired. The prototype involved mappings between the computer science schedule of the Dewey Decimal Classification (which acted as a spine) and two controlled vocabularies, UKAT and ACM Computing Classification. Subsequently, six further experts in the field were invited to evaluate the prototype system and provide feedback to improve the framework. Findings – The major findings showed that, given the large variety of terminology resources distributed throughout the web, the proposed middleware service is essential to integrate technically and semantically the different terminology resources in order to facilitate subject cross-browsing. A set of recommendations are also made, outlining the important approaches and features that support such a cross-browsing middleware service. Originality/value – Cross-browsing features are lacking in current library portal meta-search systems. Users are therefore deprived of this valuable retrieval provision. This research investigated the case for such a system and developed a prototype to fill this gap

E-commerce websites for developing countries – a usability evaluation framework

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to develop a methodological usability evaluation approach for e-commerce websites in developing countries. Design/methodology/approach – A multi-faceted usability evaluation of three Jordanian e-commerce websites was used, where three usability methods (user testing, heuristic evaluation and web analytics) were applied to the sites. Findings – A four-step approach was developed to facilitate the evaluation of e-commerce sites, mindful of the advantages and disadvantages of the methods used in identifying specific usability problems. Research limitations/implications – The approach was developed and tested using Jordanian users, experts and e-commerce sites. The study compared the ability of the methods to detect problems that were present, however, usability issues not present on any of the sites could not be considered when creating the approach. Practical implications – The approach helps e-commerce retailers evaluate the usability of their websites and understand which usability method(s) best matches their need. Originality/value – This research proposes a new approach for evaluating the usability of e-commerce sites. A novel aspect is the use of web analytics (Google Analytics software) as a component in the usability evaluation in conjunction with heuristics and user testing

Developing IPR solutions for academic author self-archiving

This paper describes the work of the UK JISC-funded RoMEO (Rights Metadata for open archiving) project. It reports on a survey of 542 academic authors and an analysis of 80 journal publishers’ copyright transfer agreements, and how they have informed the development of some simple rights metadata by which academics can protect their research papers in an open access environment. It also reports on a survey of 22 OAI Data Providers and 13 OAI Service Providers, and how the results have informed the development of a “metadata protection solution” that describes the conditions of use of freely available metadata

Journal copyright transfer agreements: their effect on author self archiving

This paper reports on the results of an analysis of 80 copyright transfer agreements (CTAs) with particular regard to their effect on author self-archiving. It shows the number of CTAs asking for copyright assignment, the time of assignment and what happens when copyright cannot be assigned. It outlines the warranties required of the author, and the exceptions granted back to the author by which they may use their own work. In particular it focuses on the number of CTAs allowing selfarchiving and the conditions under which they may do so. It concludes that whether an author can safely self-archive or not depends on a complex matrix of the following factors: i) whether copyright assignment or a non-exclusive licence is required; ii) the time of copyright assignment; iii) if (and when) CTA’s actually allow self-archiving; iv) if publishers do not allow self-archiving, but do not see it as ‘prior publication’; v) whether the preprint is legally a separate copyright work to the refereed postprint; and vi) whether the author wishes to self-archive a pre-print, postprint or both

The IPR issues facing self-archiving: key findings of the RoMEO Project

Introduction Inspired by the Open Archives Initiative, the United Kingdom (UK) Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) established the FAIR (Focus on Access to Institutional Repositories) programme in 2002. One of the programme's objectives was to "explore the challenges associated with disclosure and sharing [of content], including IPR and the role of institutional repositories". To this end, the JISC funded a one-year project called RoMEO (Rights Metadata for Open archiving). RoMEO, which took place between 2002–2003, specifically looked at the self-archiving of academic research papers, and the subsequent disclosure and harvesting of metadata about those papers using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) by OAI Data and Service Providers [Open Archives Initiative, 2002a]. The RoMEO project aimed to develop simple rights metadata by which academics could protect their research papers in an open-access environment and also to develop a means by which OAI Data and Service Providers could protect their open-access metadata. RoMEO proposed to show how such rights solutions might be disclosed and harvested under OAI-PMH. The RoMEO project was divided into two phases: a data-gathering phase and a development phase. The project team produced a series of six studies based on their work [Gadd, Oppenheim, and Probets, 2003a; 2003b, 2003c, 2003d, 2003e, 2003f]. (In the remainder of this article, these studies will be referred to as RoMEO Studies 1–6). This article aims to provide an overview of all the activities of the RoMEO project and to report on its key findings and recommendations