ITAL Information Technology and Libraries (E-Journal)
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Using Server-Side Include Commands for Subject Web-Page Management: An Alternative to Database-Driven Technologies for the Smaller Academic Library
Get PDFFrustrated by the time-consuming process of updating subject Web pages, librarians at Samford University Library (SUL) developed a process for streamlining updates using Server-Side Include (SST) commands. They created text files on the library server that corresponded to each of 143 online resources. Include commands within the HTML document for each subject page refer to these text files, which are pulled into the page as it loads on the user's browser. For the user, the process is seamless. For librarians, time spent in updating Web pages is greatly reduced; changes to text files on the server result in simultaneous changes to the edited resources across the library's Web site. For small libraries with limited online resources, this process may provide an elegant solution to an ongoing problem
Book Review: Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity
Get PDFBook Review: Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativit
An Evidence-Based Review of Academic Web Search Engines, 2014-2016: Implications for Librarians’ Practice and Research Agenda
Get PDFAcademic web search engines have become central to scholarly research. While the fitness of Google Scholar for research purposes has been examined repeatedly, Microsoft Academic and Google Books have not received much attention. Recent studies have much to tell us about the coverage and utility of Google Scholar, its coverage of the sciences, and its utility for evaluating researcher impact. But other aspects have been woefully understudied, such as coverage of the arts and humanities, books, and non-Western, non-English publications. User research has also tapered off. A small number of articles hint at the opportunity for librarians to become expert advisors concerning opportunities of scholarly communication made possible or enhanced by these platforms. This article seeks to summarize research concerning Google Scholar, Google Books, and Microsoft Academic from the past three years with a mind to informing practice and setting a research agenda. Selected literature from earlier time periods is included to illuminate key findings and to help shape the proposed research agenda, especially in understudied areas
New Strategies in Library Services Organization: Consortia University Libraries in Spain
Get PDFNew political, economic, and technological developments, as well as the growth of information markets, in Spain have created a foundation for the creation of library consortia. The author describes the process by which different regions in Spain have organized university library consortia
Privacy and User Experience in 21st Century Library Discovery
Get PDFOver the last decade, libraries have taken advantage of emerging technologies to provide new discovery tools to help users find information and resources more efficiently. In the wake of this technological shift in discovery, privacy has become an increasingly prominent and complex issue for libraries. The nature of the web, over which users interact with discovery tools, has substantially diminished the library’s ability to control patron privacy. The emergence of a data economy has led to a new wave of online tracking and surveillance, in which multiple third parties collect and share user data during the discovery process, making it much more difficult, if not impossible, for libraries to protect patron privacy. In addition, users are increasingly starting their searches with web search engines, diminishing the library’s control over privacy even further.While libraries have a legal and ethical responsibility to protect patron privacy, they are simultaneously challenged to meet evolving user needs for discovery. In a world where “search” is synonymous with Google, users increasingly expect their library discovery experience to mimic their experience using web search engines. However, web search engines rely on a drastically different set of privacy standards, as they strive to create tailored, personalized search results based on user data. Libraries are seemingly forced to make a choice between delivering the discovery experience users expect and protecting user privacy. This paper explores the competing interests of privacy and user experience, and proposes possible strategies to address them in the future design of library discovery tools
A Case Study on the Path to Resource Discovery
Get PDFA meeting in April 2015 explored the potential withdrawal of valuable collections of microfilm held by the University of Maryland, College Park Libraries. This resulted in a project to identify OCLC record numbers (OCN) for addition to OCLC’s Chadwyck-Healey Early English Books Online (EEBO) KBART file.[i] Initially, the project was an attempt to adapt cataloging workflows to a new environment in which the copy cataloging of e-resources takes place within discovery system tools rather than traditional cataloging utilities and MARC record set or individual record downloads into online catalogs. In the course of the project, it was discovered that the microfilm and e-version bibliographic records contained metadata which had not been utilized by OCLC to improve its link resolution and discovery services for digitized versions of the microfilm resources. This metadata may be advantageous to OCLC and to others in their work to transition from MARC to linked data on the Semantic Web. With MARC record field indexing and linked data implementations, this collection and others could better support scholarly research.[i] A KBART file is a file compliant with the NISO recommended practice, Knowledge Bases and Related Tools (KBART). See KBART Phase II Working Group, Knowledge Bases and Related Tools (KBART): Recommended Practice: NISO RP-9-2014 (Baltimore, MD: National Information Standards Organization (NISO), 2014), accessed March 14, 2017, http://www.niso.org/publications/rp/rp-9-2014/
Engelond: A Model for Faculty-Librarian Collaboration in the Information Age
Get PDFThe question of how best to incorporate information literacy instruction into the academic curriculum has long been a leading concern of academic librarians. In recent years, this issue has grown beyond the boundaries of professional ibrarianship and has become a general concern regularly addresssed by classroom faculty, educational administrators, and even regional accrediting organizations and state legislatures. This essay reports on the success of a pilot program in course-integrationi nformation literacy instruction in the field of medieval studies. The author's experience with the "Engelond" project provides a model for the ways in which information literacy instruction can be effectively integrated into the academic curriculum, and for the ways in which a successful pilot program can both lead the way for further development of the general instructional program in an academic library, and serve as a springboard for future collaborative projects between classroom faculty and academic librarians
Bibliographic Classification in the Digital Age: Current Trends & Future Directions
Get PDFBibliographic classification is among the core activities of Library & Information Science that brings order and proper management to the holdings of a library. Compared to printed media, digital collections present numerous challenges regarding their preservation, curation, organization and their resource discovery and access. In this regard true native perspective is needed to be adopted for bibliographic classification in digital environments. In this research article, we have investigated and reported different approaches to bibliographic classification of digital collections. The article also contributes two evaluation frameworks that evaluate different classification schemes and elaborate different approaches that exist in theory, in manual practice and automatically in digital environments. The article presents a bird-eye-view for researchers in reaching a generalized and holistic approach towards bibliographic classification research, where new research avenues have been identified.
Reference Rot in the Repository: A Case Study of Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) in an Academic Library
Get PDFThis study examines ETDs deposited during the period 2011-2015 in an institutional repository, to determine the degree to which the documents suffer from reference rot, that is, linkrot plus content drift. The authors converted and examined 664 doctoral dissertations in total, extracting 11,437 links, finding overall that 77% of links were active, and 23% exhibited linkrot. A stratified random sample of 49 ETDs was performed which produced 990 active links, which were then checked for content drift based on mementos found in the Wayback Machine. Mementos were found for 77% of links, and approximately half of these, 492 of 990, exhibited content drift. The results serve to emphasize not only the necessity of broader awareness of this problem, but also to stimulate action on the preservation front.  
Using a Native XML Database for Encoded Archival Description Search and Retrieval
Get PDFThis article is an attempt to develop Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology into an analytical tool for examining the relationships between the height of the bookshelves and the behavior of library readers in utilizing books within a library. The tool would contain a database to store book-use information and some GIS maps to represent bookshelves. Upon analyzing the data stored in the database, different frequencies of book use across bookshelf layers are displayed on the maps. The tool would provide a wonderful means of visualization through which analysts can quickly realize the spatial distribution of books used in a library. This article reveals that readers tend to pull books out of the bookshelf layers that are easily reachable by human eyes and hands, and thus opens some issues for librarians to reconsider the management of library collections