Guide to the professional literature

Citation

Butterworth, M. (1999), "Guide to the professional literature", Asian Libraries, Vol. 8 No. 5. https://doi.org/10.1108/al.1999.17308eae.002

Guide to the professional literature

Co-ordinated by Margaret Butterworth

Articles about libraries and information management in Asia and the Pacific region are not plentiful in the mainstream literature. This column is designed to alert you to some of the most interesting journal literature specific to the region, as well as more general articles relevant to information professionals working in Asia and the Pacific.

Bakken, F., "The possible role of libraries in the digital future", Libri, Vol. 48, No. 2, 1998, pp. 81-7.

Internationally there is considerable interest in developing the information society in order to support new economic growth. A new economy is planned which to a large extent will be based on the trading of intellectual property globally under the umbrella of the development of electronic commerce. Different library types will meet different challenges brought about by this shift in the global economy. In its optimal form, electronic commerce of intellectual property will mean that from every access point on the global network it will be possible to search, order, download and pay for all kinds of items or commodities which can, in turn, be stored and transported digitally. One of the most serious challenges to library roles will be for those libraries which have offered services to the general public or to a large part of the public (for example, students in an academic library). These libraries are easily defined as political projects established to fulfil societal aims. New roles in the digital future have to be developed in accordance with the needs of market forces in general and in accordance with the laws of competition.

Chapman, S., Conway, P. and Kenney, A.R., "Digital imaging and preservation microfilm: the future of the hybrid approach for the preservation of brittle books", RLG DigiNews, Vol. 3 No. 1, February 15, 1999, http://www.rlg.org/preserv/diginews/diginews3-1.html#feature1

This is a useful summary of the main findings of the full report of the same name published by the Council on Library and Information Resources at http://www.clir.org/programs/cpa/hybridintro.html The purpose of this report is to disseminate information on a hybrid approach to preserving brittle books and to stimulate further discussion and research into this strategy. Topics include the characteristics of microfilm both as a source for, and end product of, digital conversion, the choice of a digital conversion path and proposed administrative and structural metadata for the page images.

Cohen, L.B., "Searching for quality on the Internet: tools and strategies", Choice 35 Supplement, 1998, pp. 11-33.

This article is part of a special supplement on reviews of Web resources appropriate to academic libraries. The piece cites and briefly describes major subject indexes and search tools for Internet resources. Cohen also provides searching information and tips at a level that anyone can understand. Various tables summarising key information about the cited resources accompany the article.

D'Angelo, J. and Little, S.K., "Successful Web pages: what are they and do they exist?", Information Technology and Libraries, Vol. 17 No. 2, 1998, pp. 71-81.

This reports on a project that sought to answer two questions: (1) "What published guidelines for Web page design currently exist?" and (2) "Do existing Web pages adhere to the published guidelines?". The methodology used for the second question is inadequate, but the paper contains a useful literature review of materials relevant to the first question.

Day, C., "Digital alternatives: solving the problem or shifting the costs?", Journal of Electronic Publishing, Vol. 4, 1998. http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/04-01/day.html

According to Day, publishers are driven by the wishes of authors on the one hand and readers on the other. As far as he can tell, there is no pressure from either group for any type of product "other than the traditional codex, carefully edited, nicely produced, and energetically marketed". Digital publication of a monograph simply shifts the cost of production from the publisher to the scholar.

"Digital libraries: technological advances and social impacts", Computer, Vol. 32 No. 2, 1999.

The focus of this issue of Computer is on digital libraries, with six papers on this topic. Half of the articles are from three of the six NSF-funded Digital Library Initiative projects, with additional contributions from those working with the JSTOR and New Zealand Digital Library projects. Although most of what is described in these articles comes from the "big science" end of digital libraries, some useful pointers at a more practical level are also to be found in the papers. In particular the JSTOR article is useful in terms of the technical decisions that were made while mounting a large archive of digital material.

Garfield, E., "From citation indexes to informetrics: is the tail now wagging the dog?", Libri, Vol. 48 No. 2, 1998, pp. 67-80.

Garfield provides a review of citation indexes and their evolution into research evaluation tools including a discussion of the use of bibliometric data for evaluating US university departments by the National Research Council. The review covers the origin and uses of journal impact factors, validation studies of citation analysis, information retrieval and dissemination, citation consciousness, historiography and science mapping, citation classics and the history of contemporary science. Retrieval of information by cited reference searching is illustrated. The 15-year cumulative impacts of journals and the percentage of uncitedness, the emergence of scientometrics, old boy networks and citation frequency distributions are discussed.

Gessner, R., "The next-generation layout engine: Netscape's Gecko", Web Techniques, Vol. 4 No. 3, 1999, pp. 63-70. http://www.webtechniques.com/features/1999/03/gessner/gessner.shtml

Gecko is being developed under the Open Source model via mozilla.org http://www.mozilla.org/, which means that anyone can help work on it, and the benefit accrue to everyone. A "layout engine" is a piece of software that can take an object instance and any associated files (such as style sheets, images, etc.) and render those objects on your screen. Differences between layout engines in different Web browsers cause numerous problems for Web authors seeking complete control over the look of their Web pages. As a next generation layout engine, Gecko is aiming to provide full and native support for HTML and XML, cascading style sheets (full CSS1 and partial CSS2), and the Resource Description Framework (RDF). Gessner (a Netscape employee) claims that Gecko will be "the fastest, smallest, most standards-compliant HTML layout engine available".

Kao, C., Lin Y-C. and Lo, S.C., "Ranking university libraries: the Taiwan case", Libri, Vol. 48 No. 4, 1998, pp. 212-23.

This study develops a quantitative model for ranking university libraries based on five criteria (collections, personnel, expenditures, buildings, services) derived from a thorough discussion by the directors of 11 university libraries in Taiwan. Resources and services are of major concern. The relative importance of each criterion is represented by a weight summarised from the assessment by the directors of the university libraries in Taiwan. Observations from all criteria are collected and multiplied by the associated weights to produce a composite index. The index serves as a base for ranking the university libraries. In order to illustrate the method applied, the 24 university libraries in Taiwan are compared with real data. A robustness analysis shows that this method is very reliable in producing a ranking system for university libraries.

Kirschenbaum, M., "Documenting digital images: textual metadata at the Blake Archive", The Electronic Library, Vol. 16 No. 4, 1998, pp. 239-41.

Based at the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia, the goal of the William Blake Archive is to create a sustainable electronic environment for the scholarly study of Blake. Facing the challenge of how best to digitise the illuminated books which are the basis for Blake's literary reputation, the staff have pursued two complementary strategies: (1) working exclusively with non-proprietary data standards (SGML, JPEG, TIFF) and (2) extensive use of Java programming. The staff create an Image Documentation (ID) record to track the origin and processing of each image. They then insert the ID record into the portion of the JPEG file reserved for textual data. Through this approach the user can view the metadata in a separate window by selecting the Info button within the archive or with some common software programs such as X-View for Windows or JPEGView for Macintosh.

Kranch, D.A., "Beyond migration: preserving electronic documents with digital tablets", Information Technology & Libraries, Vol. 17 No. 3, 1998, pp. 138-48.

Preserving digital information is one of the great challenges facing librarians and archivists. There are numerous issues that must be addressed, from technical details to organizational structures. Kranch focuses mainly on the technical details by putting forward the idea of encapsulating digital content in a "tablet" that contains all the hardware and software required to use it. Such tablets would obviate the need for the information to migrate into new systems that replace the ones used to create the information in the first place.

Li, C.-S. and Stone, H.S. (Eds), "Digital library using next generation Internet", IEEE Communications Magazine, Vol. 37 No. 1, 1999.

This special focus on digital libraries includes six articles from various research perspectives, mostly industry (IBM, NEC, etc.). Although a few of the articles are at the cutting edge (such as the one on software agents) and unlikely to be of practical use, others (such as the one focusing on IBM's digital library projects and the one on searching the Web) relate either to projects in production now or to technologies that are about to be realised.

Lim, E., "Building a virtual national serials collection using the MEADS system", Australian Academic and Research Libraries, Vol. 29 No. 4, 1998, pp. 165-76.

University libraries in Australia are now facing a crisis of unimaginable proportion, and their ability to supply the scholarly information required to support teaching and research has been seriously impaired by the inexorable annual rise in the cost of serials and by the falling value of the Australian dollar. While Australian universities collectively spent $86.5 million on serials in 1996 and acquired some 290,426 serial titles, the lack of cooperation and rationalisation has meant that considerable duplication exists. This paper argues that, contrary to the current belief that any collecting agreement based on the Distributed National Collection concept can only be achieved with additional funding from the Commonwealth Government, the Australian university system can easily fund the creation of a great scholarly collection of serials for use by the nation merely by increasing the average expenditure on libraries from 5.1 per cent to 5.3 per cent of total university expenditure. Once the national collection has been built, virtual access can be provided using a model of access and document delivery called MEADS (Monash Electronic Access and Delivery of Serials). This is a Web-based document delivery system that provides a browsable database of the contents pages of the relevant serials which authorised users can access, and use to send requests for the supply of journal articles. The contents pages are linked electronically to participating consortium member libraries which can supply the articles automatically to the user within an agreed turnaround time. The system has many advantages in that it is targeted, cost effective, and particularly suitable for a multi-campus university environment. There are, however, many issues that need to be resolved before a national MEADS system can be implemented successfully.

Majid, S., "Managing CD-ROM service in Malaysian academic libraries", Australian Academic and Research Libraries, Vol. 29 No. 4, 1998, pp. 200-10.

Proper management and promotion of CD-ROM service is desirable to make it more popular and cost effective for developing countries. This article explores the management of CD-ROM services in Malaysian academic libraries and marketing strategies used to popularise them. The study shows that these libraries use a variety of marketing and promotional channels, some of which need improvement. Similarly, Malaysian academic libraries need to strengthen their end-user education programmes to suit users with different levels of computing and information retrieval skills. The paper also suggests several measures for enhancing the use of CD-ROM service in Malaysian academic libraries.

Marama, I.D., "Use of the technological university library by international students", The International Information & Library Review, Vol. 30 No. 2, 1998, pp. 87-96.

Marama describes the use of a questionnaire and interview for a study into the use of Abubakar Tafawa Balewa University Library (ATBU), Bauchi, by international students. Areas studied include problems faced by students, services that are new or different from their home countries and services from which they have benefitted. The study concludes by proffering solutions to problems identified.

Oder, N., "Cataloging the Net: can we do it?", Library Journal, Vol. 123 No. 16, 1998, pp. 47-51.

This overview article takes a look at a number of the most significant Internet cataloguing projects, and delves into the issues of creating and maintaining indexes to Internet resources. Oder interviewed dozens of project managers, and their differing opinions on what to do and how to go about it are reflected in the piece. Sidebars focusing on the Librarians' Index to the Internet http://sunsite. berkeley.edu/InternetIndex/ and the major commercial efforts accompany the piece.

Olsen, K.A., Sochats, K.M. and Williams, J.G., "Full text searching and information overload", The International Information & Library Review, Vol. 30 No. 2, 1998, pp. 105-22.

This article classifies information retrieval applications into three classes depending on the correspondence between a user's request and the queries posed to the document base. It is argued that the mapping of requests (on a semantic level) to formalised queries (often on a lexical level) determines the range of retrieval effectiveness that may be obtained and that this classification may explain the discrepancy found in some information retrieval tests. It may also shed new light on a debate in the profession about the efficiency of retrieval systems in relation to precision, recall and information overload.

Schwartz, C., "Web search engines", Journal of the American Society for Information Science, Vol. 49 No. 11, 1998, pp. 973-82.

Schwartz reviews the literature on Web search engines. Starting with a brief but thorough historical overview, the article then looks at current literature on Web search engines, the types of search services available, the content they offer, their features, how results are presented, and their performance. The piece ends with a look to the future, focusing on personalisation, results summarisation, query expansion, coverage and metadata.

"Special section: Coalition for Networked Information", Information Technology and Libraries, Vol. 17 No. 2, 1998, pp. 82-108.

The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) is one of very few organisations that bridge the gap between librarians, computer scientists and other information professionals. CNI has been active in a number of areas that are of common interest to these groups. In this issue there are articles on building collaboration between librarians and information technologists and a variety of specific programmes.

Stokker, J., "A researchers' centre: one library's experience in meeting the needs of research level students and academic staff", Australian Academic and Research Libraries, Vol. 29 No. 4, 1998, pp. 190-9.

The first year of operation of the Researchers' Centre of the Queensland University of Technology Library is reviewed. The impetus for the centre, issues relating to its establishment, its daily management and evaluation of its operation, are discussed. The first of its type in Queensland and one of only a few in Australia, the Researchers' Centre aims to meet the information needs of research-level students and academic staff through a combination of access to electronic products, expert advice and state-of-the-art study space in a one-stop-shop operation. In contrast to areas dedicated to study space only, which universities have traditionally offered research students, the QUT Library Researchers' Centre offers value-added facilities and services.

Teplitskaia, H., "Librarians as facilitators of democracy and partners in international relations", Libri, Vol. 48 No. 2, 1998, pp. 102-15.

Despite the traditional perception of librarians as politically passive information specialists, owing to a new world order, librarians are playing an increasingly important role in fostering international relations and collaboration in business, education and culture. With the availability of the Internet, librarians can strengthen democracy and economic development by facilitating access to international information and stimulating communication, critical thinking, and cross-cultural skills of their clients. This article presents a library networking case study between the USA and the new independent states of the former Soviet Union. It shares outreach methods applicable to diverse projects targeting emerging democracies, and encourages greater participation by librarians in local and international co-operative initiatives.

Ur Rehman, S., Abu Baker, A.B. and Majid, S., "Needed capabilities and development strategies for future information professionals: a Malaysian perspective", The International Information & Library Review, Vol. 30 No. 2, 1998, pp. 123-41.

A survey of professional leadership of library and information organisations in Malaysia was conducted to gather their perceptions about the trends in the field during the next ten years, the extent of preparedness of entry-level professionals and the strategies they proposed for an improvement in education and development programmes. A total of 148 senior and middle managers from 30 organisations, equally divided among academic, public and special libraries, were interviewed. Qualitative analysis of the responses revealed that the participants strongly felt that future libraries would be electronically interconnected, would have a variety of media to access and would undergo organisational changes. They noted major discrepancies in the demands and preparedness of the entry-level professional in the areas of information technology, management capabilities and behavioural dimensions. A number of measures were proposed for improvement in formal education, continuing education activities and the role of the professional association.

Varian, H.R., "The future of electronic journals", Journal of Electronic Publishing, Vol. 4, 1998, http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/04-01/varian.html

In this article, Varian looks at the economics of journal production in order to make some observations about the future of electronic journals. Electronic submission and distribution of manuscripts among editorial staff and reviewers can reduce the cost of journal production by almost one-half. Electronic distribution can bring further savings and has the value-added benefit of allowing precise monitoring of the number of hits per article, full-text search capabilities, and hyperlinkage to other relevant articles. Varian provides a provocative model for how electronic journals can solve what he calls the "filtering" issue. In the current scenario more articles are being published. In other words, if you really want to publish something, chances are you can find someone to publish it; this indicates that the filtering function of peer review ­ designed to ensure that only the work that is worthy gets published ­ may not be working. While electronic publishing will only add to the information glut, Varian's model proposes that reviewers' anonymous evaluations be linked (and searchable) to the actual article.

Vaughan, L.Q., "A cross-cultural comparison of business information use", The International Information & Library Review, Vol. 30 No. 2, 1998, pp. 157-68.

Vaughan compares a Western culture, Canada, and an Eastern culture, China, in the use of business information. As part of a larger project of measuring the impact of information on development, four surveys of the business communities in these two countries were conducted. Two of them were carried out in Shanghai, with one aimed at small business and the other at medium-sized business. The other two were conducted in Canada with the same coverage as the corresponding surveys in China. Data were collected on the use of various types of information sources in business operations. Results show that informal information sources are more important and better used than the formal ones in both cultures. However, business people's self-perception of their information use differs between the two cultures. Electronic information sources are currently poorly used in both countries.

Wade, R. and Williamson, V., "Cataloguing costed and restructured at Curtin University of Technology", Australian Academic and Research Libraries, Vol. 29 No. 4, 1998, pp. 177-89.

This paper outlines the results of a review of the cataloguing operations at the library at Curtin University of Technology and the three other publicly funded universities in Western Australia. It identifies the cost savings to be achieved by re-engineering cataloguing and related operations, and separates them from the savings to be expected from outsourcing. The review itself concerned all four libraries equally, but this paper includes current operational experience from Curtin only.