Digital Library Perspectives

- Publisher:
- Emerald Group Publishing Limited
- Publication date:
- 2021-02-01
Issue Number
- Nbr. 36-1, February 2020
- Nbr. 35-3/4, November 2019
- Nbr. 35-2, May 2019
- Nbr. 35-1, February 2019
- Nbr. 34-4, November 2018
- Nbr. 34-3, August 2018
- Nbr. 34-2, May 2018
- Nbr. 34-1, February 2018
- Nbr. 33-4, November 2017
- Nbr. 33-3, August 2017
- Nbr. 33-2, May 2017
- Nbr. 33-1, February 2017
- Nbr. 32-4, November 2016
- Nbr. 32-3, August 2016
- Nbr. 32-2, May 2016
- Nbr. 32-1, February 2016
Latest documents
- Cyberactivism as emergent language in Venezuela. Proposal of documentation and digital preservation using Omeka software
Purpose: The purpose of this study is to present a conceptual analysis to artistic manifestation represented through graphic and multimedia pieces that are available in social media networks as document-speeches in relation to protests in Venezuela during April-July, 2017. Also, this paper proposes the implementation of digital documentation tool that allows retrieval, organization, systematization and preservation of visual contents. Design/methodology/approach: Semiotic analysis based on 44 artistic pieces (images and videos) posted on Twitter, Instagram and YouTube to protest in Venezuela against the government of Nicolás Maduro in 2017. The authors defined a metadata group for content creation of multimedia and testing information retrieval from general data, textual contents, file formats and semiotic description using Omeka software. Findings: The digital documentation of artivism proposed has the potential to sustain over time as documents likely to be studied. It also constitutes an important analysis and a historical reconstruction, which must be taken into consideration to conduct research in the future political and social process of Venezuela. Social implications: Cyber-artivism, a concept related to online activism, is conceived as an artistic expression mediated by technologies and social media emerging in the context of social environments with a political–demographic character. Originality/value: Digital preservation of multimedia contents by their semiotic and historic value as artistic cyber-activism.
- Editorial
- From vision to action: librarians as change agents
- Library eArchiving with ZONTAL Space and the Allotrope Data Format
Purpose: The purpose of this technical paper is to evaluate the emerging standard “Allotrope Data Format (ADF)” in the context of digital preservation at a major US academic library hosted at Brigham Young University. In combination with the new information management system ZONTAL Space (ZS), archiving with the ADF is compared with currently used systems CONTENTdm and ROSETTA. Design/methodology/approach: The approach is a workflow-based comparison in terms of usability, functionality and reliability of the systems. Current workflows are replaced by optimized target processes, which limit the number of involved parties and process steps. The connectors or manual solutions between the current workflow steps are replaced with automatic functions inside of ZS. Reporting functionalities inside of ZS are used to track system and file lifecycle to ensure stability and data preservation. Findings: The authors find that the target processes leveraging ZS drastically reduce complexity compared to current workflows. Archiving with the ADF is found to decrease integration complexity and provide a more robust data migration path for the future. The possibility to enrich data automatically with metadata and to store this information alongside the content in the same information package increases reusability of the data. Research limitations/implications: The practical implications of this work suggest the arrival of a new information management system that can potentially revolutionize the archiving landscape within libraries. Beyond the scope of the initial proof of concept, the potential for the system can be seen to replace existing data management tools and provide access to new data analytics applications, like smart recommender systems. Originality/value: The value of this study is a systematic introduction of ZS and the ADF, two emerging solutions from the Pharmaceutical Industry, to the broader audience of digital preservation experts within US libraries. The authors consider the exchange of best practices and solutions between industries to be of high value to the communities.
- Critical success factors of the continued usage of digital library successful implementation in military-context. An organisational support perspective
Purpose: This paper aims to identify the critical success factors of the continued usage of digital library (DL) successful implementation from the perspective of users with organisation support factors as key antecedents. Design/methodology/approach: Based on the extensive literature review, this study has constructed a conceptual framework based on organisational support perspectives and updated Delone and McLean’s information system success model. A pilot study was carried out on a sample of 105 respondents from military-context. A survey instrument including 22 measurement items was designed to identify the level of DL information system (IS) successful implementation practices in military context. Descriptive statistical analysis and reliability analysis were used to analyse the data with SPSS software. Findings: The findings indicate that training and education, DL environment and communication support, continuation of usage intention, net benefits and user satisfaction are the critical success factors that play key role in ensuring the continued usage DL successful implementation in military context. The military-context DL needs to obtain critical success factors of DL practices implementation to sustain its continued usage, particularly for the active users of its members. Research limitations/implications: This study only considered the military personnel who have visited the five main military libraries. For practical implications, the development of instruments in this study may be valuable tools to evaluate DL in other DL settings in Malaysian context other than academic settings. Originality/value: This study makes a new contribution to DL IS successful implementation practices in military context. This study also provides important information for decision-makers involved in DL IS successful implementation practices and provides useful reference for future researchers in this research area.
- Ethics, human rights and violence in Chihuahua’s digital journalism. Evidence from a media observatory
Purpose: This paper presents the findings of a project that aims to analyze the ethical treatment of the news, with special attention to the reporting of violent events, as it is carried out by digital news outlets from the State of Chihuahua (Mexico). Design/methodology/approach: A media observatory was established to collect and analyze the 9,115 news reports of violent events from February to June 2019 and was published by 12 digital news outlets in Chihuahua. Quantitative data analysis was carried out using three analytical axes – ethics, human rights and violence. Each axis was, in turn, subdivided into three criteria, and this paper identifies how compliant were each news outlet and individual news report with those criteria. Findings: Data analysis established that 5,385 of the news reports (59.1 per cent of the total news analyzed) met all the nine desirable criteria, whereas other subsets did not comply with up to a minimum five criteria. How the observed news outlets and their reports complied with the criteria used is specified in this paper. Originality/value: The methodology used and the data analyzed seek to develop ethical and socially responsible journalism. Hence, this paper offers various possibilities, such as raising new questions related to journalistic deontology, helps engage responsible journalists and also represents an area of opportunity for library and information professionals who are immersed in digital environments (e.g. digital libraries and library professionals that are the ideal professionals to store, manage and disseminate the records produced by media observatories). Moreover, the data analyzed help to set a maximum limit for the non-compliance with each of the criteria analyzed, which can even lead to the development of an ethical and social responsibility accreditation that can be granted to news outlets with the best practices for journalism.
- Librarian’s perspective for the implementation of big data analytics in libraries on the bases of lean-startup model
Purpose: This study aims to propose a model based on philosophical thoughts of Dr S.R Ranganathan and the lean-startup method for the execution of big data analytics (BDA) in libraries. The research paves a way to understand the role and required competencies of Library and Information Science (LIS) professionals for the implementation of BDA in libraries. Design/methodology/approach: In the BDA analytics context, a session with a proposed model was presented to the audience to get the response of librarians about the required competencies and skills. The research tool was developed based on the literature review to know the role of LIS professionals and their required competencies/skills for BDA. The questionnaire was distributed in the BDA session to collect the responses of the participating audience on the variables that focused on the role and core competencies of LIS professionals in BDA. In the analysis of results, the independent t-test was applied to know the mean value of the overall response rate. Findings: The findings show that perceptions of LIS professionals in the understanding of BDA ranked high in data privacy, data availability, data organization and data literacy. Digital data curation, policies supervision and providing the data consultancy also showed a significant relationship among these variables. Besides, the correlation between the required skills for BDA, metadata skills, data ethics, data acquisition, data cleaning, data organization, data analysis, digital curation, data clustering, data protection rules and digital visualization also showed a beneficial relationship. Originality/value: This study also helps to understand the perspective of LIS professionals for the implementation of BDA in libraries and to fill the literature gap in the respective.
- Establishing clients’ satisfaction levels with automated library based services. A case study at University of Cape Coast library, Ghana
Purpose: Library automation is required in academic libraries to meet the dynamic demands of clients. This study aims to investigate the level of clients’ satisfaction of Sam Jonah library automation. Design/methodology/approach: The study utilized the descriptive research design by using an exploratory case study research method. A disproportionate stratified random sampling was used to select 322 respondents (undergraduates, postgraduates and lecturers/researchers) who consented to participate in the study. Questionnaire and informal interview were used for the data collection. Findings: The study showed that more than half of the clients of Sam Jonah library were moderately satisfied with the library’s automation. Clients mostly access internet/Wi-Fi and reference service. Patronage of the services including photocopying, borrowing of books (circulation), e-resources/academic databases, institutional repository, library website and the OPAC was not encouraging. Increase in user education was recommended to improve their usage. Research limitations/implications: The study was limited to only one academic library, namely, Sam Jonah library of the University of Cape Coast, Ghana. Originality/value: The study provides insight into a case study of satisfactory level of clients in accessing automated services of Sam Jonah Library to serve as a basis for further research.
- Semantic annotation and harvesting of federated scholarly data using ontologies
Purpose: Effective synthesis of learning material is a multidimensional problem, which often relies on handpicking approaches and human expertise. Sources of educational content exist in a variety of forms, each offering proprietary metadata information and search facilities. This paper aims to show that it is possible to harvest scholarly resources from various repositories of open educational resources (OERs) in a federated manner. In addition, their subject can be automatically annotated using ontology inference and standard thematic terminologies. Design/methodology/approach: Based on a semantic interpretation of their metadata, authors can align external collections and maintain them in a shared knowledge pool known as the Learning Object Ontology Repository (LOOR). The author leverages the LOOR and show that it is possible to search through various educational repositories’ metadata and amalgamate their semantics into a common learning object (LO) ontology. The author then proceeds with automatic subject classification of LOs using keyword expansion and referencing standard taxonomic vocabularies for thematic classification, expressed in SKOS. Findings: The approach for automatic subject classification simply takes advantage of the implicit information in the searching and selection process and combines them with expert knowledge in the domain of reference (SKOS thesauri). This is shown to improve recall by a considerable factor, while precision remains unaffected. Originality/value: To the best of the author’s knowledge, the idea of subject classification of LOs through the reuse of search query terms combined with SKOS-based matching and expansion has not been investigated before in a federated scholarly setting.
- Mining archival genealogy databases to gain new insights into broader historical issues
Purpose: Several genealogical databases are now publicly available on the Web. The information stored in such databases is not only of interest for genealogical research but might also be used in broader historical studies. As a case study, this paper aims to explore what a crowdsourced genealogical online database can tell about income inequality in Denmark during the First World War. Design/methodology/approach: The analysis is based on 55,000 family-level records on the payment of local income taxes in a major Danish provincial town (Esbjerg) from a publicly available database on the website of The Esbjerg City Archives combined with official statistics from Statistics Denmark. Findings: Denmark saw a sharp increase in income inequality during the First World War. The analysis shows that the new riches during the First World War in a harbour city such as Esbjerg were not “goulash barons” or stock-market speculators but fishermen. There were no fishermen in the top 1per cent of the income distribution in 1913. In 1917, more than 37 per cent of the family heads in this part of the income distribution were fishermen. Originality/value: The paper illustrates how large-scale microdata from publicly available genealogical Web databases might be used to gain new insights into broader historical issues.
Featured documents
- Chickens, aprons, markets, and cans. How the National Agricultural Library uses Omeka as its content management system for digital exhibits
Purpose: This paper describes how the content management system (CMS) Omeka supports the representation and presentation of the National Agricultural Library’s (NAL’s) digital exhibits, including some observations on its strengths and weaknesses. It also looks at Omeka’s major features through a...
- Digital preservation of law reviews: Two ways
Purpose: This paper will aim to explain two strategies for digital preservation of law reviews, informing law librarians of the options which might best suit their needs. Design/methodology/approach: On November 7, 2008, the Durham Statement on Open Access to Legal Scholarship was released to the...
- Implementing an open source integrated library system (ILS) in a special focus institution
Purpose: The paper aims to explore the circumstances and processes involved in implementing and migrating from a proprietary integrated library system (ILS) (Follett’s Destiny) to an open-source ILS (Koha) for a special focus institution. Design/methodology/approach: In 2012, the campus libraries...
- Library Lights Out. A creative collaboration between the library, students, and university housing
Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to describe the development and implementation of Library Lights Out, an annual collaboration between the library and Housing & Residential Life at Eastern Washington University (EWU). This creative outreach program features collaborative educational and...
- Perceptions, preferences of scholarly publishing in Open Access journals. A survey of academic librarians in Africa
Purpose: The purpose of the study is to know the various factors librarians consider while selecting Open Access (OA) journal for publication and to identify the challenges librarians face with OA journal publishing. Design/methodology/approach: Online questionnaire was designed to collect data...
- The library and the academic resource center. Building and supporting programs, services and resources collaboratively at a new university
Purpose: – This paper aims to explore the library’s on-going relationship with the academic resource center (ARC), and how over the past two years, there have been new services and programs thriving as a result of this collaboration. The paper presents three case studies that demonstrate the...
- Cloud computing and virtual machines in LIS education: options and resources
Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to consider how and why virtual machines (VMs) and cloud computing and related development environments built on cloud-based resources may be used to support and enhance the technological elements of library and information science (LIS) education. Design/metho...
- Digital preservation practices in university libraries. An investigation of institutional repositories in Africa
Purpose: The purpose of the study is to investigate the digital preservation practices in institutional repositories (IRs) in Africa. Design/methodology/approach: Data were collected from the IRs developed in university libraries in Africa, and it was done in two phases. The phases are website...
- Implementing IT governance: a primer for informaticians
Purpose: The purpose of this article is to explore the relevance of information technology (IT) governance to informaticians. In most organizations, informatics is part of the IT function. Therefore, an understanding of IT governance is of benefit to informaticians in their day-to-day work. In...
- Linking historical collections in an event-based ontology
Purpose: This study aims to explore a way of representing historical collections by examining the features of an event in historical documents and building an event-based ontology model. Design/methodology/approach: To align with a domain-specific and upper ontology, the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO)...