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Digital Reading: The transformation of reading practices
No full textThe paper aims to present the preliminary results of a two-year project having as scope the future of the book and libraries stemming from the current reading practices in Portugal. In the scope of the project, the presentation of the findings will be focused on the mobile consumption practices in Portugal. This research is based on a mixed methodology: a quantitative survey ? Network Society in Portugal ? articulated with a qualitative analysis of the discourses of the representatives of what Thompson calls the publishing chain (librarians, publishing houses, authors, and content and soft/hardware providers). To understand the impact of mobile devices on reading practices is crucial for libraries and publishing houses. Mobile devices offer augmented mobility ? a mobility that is connected, networked and collaborative. Although the hype is currently around eBooks, we are still faced with a market where the vast majority still reads books on paper. The sales of devices have exploded but eBooks are lagging behind. What do people use their tablets, iPads, and eReaders for? What are they reading and where? How do they articulate their readings with other media and cultural consumptions? Those are the central questions that we are aiming at answering
Open Access in developing countries: African Open Archives
No full textThis paper presents the results of a study on the open archives in developing countries. It provides the elements of type, size and contents of open archives. The methodology is based on information collected from open repository websites. The survey is based on an almost exhaustive sample list of developing countries websites retrieved from directories and a list of open repositories. The purpose of this study, carried out from 2011 up to now, is to measure, at a second level, the impact of open access on the Algerian researchers by analyzing their practices related to open access, through the identification of their scientific publications at a second level in the open archives, in which they can deposit
Some trends in Electronic Publication and Open Access in Portuguese History Journals
No full textIn the last decades, ICT development and the use of computer networks led to major changes in the way scientists communicate the results of their researches. One of the most important transformations occurred in scholarly communication through the acceleration in the unbounded disclosure of scientific information (open access). However, the adoption of new channels varies according to the scientific areas. This study is part of an ongoing research that aims to understand the impact of digital media in the mechanisms of production and dissemination of scientific knowledge within a specific scientific community: historians. This paper will look at whether and how the history journals in Portugal are adopting electronic publishing and providing open access to their contents. To operationalise the study, thirteen R&D Units were contacted and asked to provide a list of the journals published and the format used. Furthermore, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), Latindex and European Reference Index for the Humanities (ERIH) were researched. Finally, the websites of Portuguese higher education institutions with History Departments were consulted, with the aim of identifying any periodicals that might not have been previously identified. At the end, twenty-two titles were considered. Data seems to show that universities and History R&D Units increasingly value the free electronic access to research results produced by historians
?Tangible Culture? - Designing Virtual Exhibitions on Multi-Touch Devices
No full textCultural heritage institutions such as galleries, museums and libraries increasingly use digital media to present artifacts to their audience and enable them to immerse themselves in a cultural virtual world. With the application eXhibition: editor3D museum curators and editors have a software tool at hand to interactively plan and visualize exhibitions. In this paper we present an extension to the application that enhances the workflow when designing exhibitions. By introducing multi-touch technology to the graphical user interfaces the designing phase of an exhibition is efficiently simplified, especially for non-technical users. Furthermore, multi-touch technology offers a novel way of collaborative work to be integrated into a decision making process. A flexible export system allows to store created exhibitions in various formats to display them on websites, mobile devices or custom viewers. E.g. the widespread 3D scene standard Extensible 3D (X3D) is one of the export formats and we use it to directly incorporate a realtime preview of the exhibition in the authoring process. The combination of the tangible user interfaces with the realtime preview gives curators and exhibition planers a capable tool for efficiently presenting cultural heritage in electronic media
Development of a toolbox for publishing of living open access textbooks
No full textWe are suggesting a framework for open access publishing of comprehensive, elaborately structured digital textbooks, potentially enriched by extensive non-textual data. The framework will comprise of a software toolbox containing a collaborative authoring platform, manuscript workflow system, tools for editorial work, presentation platform, updating workflow, interfaces for dissemination and long-term preservation. In addition to the software toolbox itself, guidelines and standards for all aspects of digital textbook publishing, including peer review, metadata and editorial procedures, legal issues as well as a business model will be developed, resulting in a best practice guide to digital textbook publishing. The software and workflows will not be developed from scratch, but build upon existing open-source software, using the example of a scientific textbook of hand surgery as its first use case. This paper introduces the project and gives a prospectus of the proposed framework
Information Workers and their Personal Information Management: a Literature Review
No full textThe research described in this paper provides insights into tools and methods which are used by professional information workers to keep and to manage their personal information. A literature study was carried out on 23 scholarly papers and articles, retrieved from the ACM Digital Library and Library and Information Science Abstracts (LISA). The research questions were: How do information workers keep and manage their information sources? What aims do they have when building personal information collections? What problems do they experience with the use and management of their personal collections?The main conclusion from the literature is that professional information workers use different tools and approaches for personal information management, depending on their personal style, the types of information in their collections and the devices which they use for retrieval. The main problem that they experience is that of information fragmentation over different collections and different devices. These findings can provide input for improvement of information literacy curricula in Higher Education.It has been remarked that scholarly research and literature on Personal Information Management do not pay a lot of attention to the keeping and management of (bibliographic) data from external documentation. How people process the information from those sources and how this stimulates their personal learning, is completely overlooked
iPhone Mobile Application Design: The Case of Hacettepe University Libraries
No full textThanks to the features of the mobile devices which have been constantly evolving, there has been a diversity of mobile applications. It is highly possible to find a mobile application to carry out any transaction in an application store. Users, whose expectations have been increasing, hope that libraries will be accessible and controllable. Hence, libraries should move towards mobile platforms so that users can easily get access to them. In this study, we first review the criteria that should be paid attention when designing mobile applications for iPhone and then describe the iPhone mobile application that we developed for Hacettepe University Libraries
If You Can?t Retrieve it, Does it Exist? Accessibility of LIS Journals on the Internet
No full textPublic access to the World Wide Web became widespread in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and today documents are frequently published on the Internet. Open access (OA) to the scientific literature has been found to be increasing as more and more producers and publishers of scientific literature make their publications available free of charge on the Internet. The paper puts forward that it may be argued that only scholarly Internet documents that are retrievable through the search engine Google Scholar (GS) can be said to exist. The degree of coverage of GS is thus an important issue. The paper reports the results of a study of 159 journals in the field of Library and Information Science and their degree of coverage in GS. Journals publishing many issues a year are not found to be more retrievable than journals with fewer issues. Non-English and OA journals tend to have a lower degree of retrievability. The tendency is found to be even stronger for journals that are both OA and non-English. OA and non-English journals are very heterogeneous groups and the variation in their degree of retrievability is found to be much higher than in the case of traditional, toll-access journals, which resemble each other more in relation to retrievability
Always On: Museums in the Mobile Communication Era
No full textThe paper investigates the use of mobile tools by museums in order to provide mobile access to their permanent collections and special exhibitions. In fact, it deals with the wider topic of how museums tackle the complex issue of communicating with their present and potential audience using modern (i.e., mobile in this case) technologies. The paper presents and discusses the results of a survey that was proposed to Dutch and Flemish museums mainly dealing with modern and contemporary art or with science and technology. We tried to derive some trends and best practices in order to identify a good way to provide an engaging (mobile) experience to museum visitors. These results, although not always stirring in terms of answer percentages and of what most museums seem to be doing with new media, do show a clear interest towards mobile technologies and openness to innovation in the Dutch cultural sector