The US National Science Foundation has established a program to create a National Science, Mathematics, Engineering and Technology Education Digital Library (NSDL). One of the subsidiary NSDL libraries under development is the National Civil Engineering Educational Resources Library (NCERL). The first phase of NCERL is the creation and collection of digital resources in three areas of civil engineeringâ geotechnical (soil), rock, and water engineering (GROW). The concept of interactivities guides the design, development, and evaluation efforts of the GROW digital collection. This article describes the salient features of GROW, defines and discusses interactivities as an emerging, integral part of teaching and learning in civil engineering education. Interactivities take place at three distinct levels: the information resource, the collection, and the context. Very simply, the concept of interactivities can be defined as the emphasis on structured representations of interactive multimedia resources. Additionally, resources are designed with rich learning tasks and organized in pedagogical collections supplemented with contextual information. Preliminary evaluation of GROW-NCERL using interactivities is briefly described.

Bibliometric measures for evaluating research units in the book-oriented humanities and social sciences are underdeveloped relative to those available for journal-oriented science and technology. We therefore present a new measure designed for book-oriented fields: the â libcitation count.â This is a count of the libraries holding a given book, as reported in a national or international union catalog. As librarians decide what to acquire for the audiences they serve, they jointly constitute an instrument for gauging the cultural impact of books. Their decisions are informed by knowledge not only of audiences but also of the book world, e.g., the reputations of authors and the prestige of publishers. From libcitation counts, measures can be derived for comparing research units. Here, we imagine a matchup between the departments of history, philosophy, and political science at the University of New South Wales and the University of Sydney in Australia. We chose the 12 books from each department that had thehighest libcitation counts in the Libraries Australia union catalog during 2000â 2006. We present each bookâ s raw libcitation count, its rank within its LC class, and its LC-class normalized libcitation score. The latter is patterned on the item-oriented field normalized citation score used in evaluative bibliometrics. Summary statistics based on these measures allow the departments to be compared for cultural impact. Our work has implications for programs such as Excellence in Research for Australia and the Research Assessment Exercise in the United Kingdom. It also has implications for data mining in OCLCâ s WorldCat.

This paper reviews research into social tagging and folksonomy (as reflected in about 180 sources published through December 2007). Methods of researching the contribution of social tagging and folksonomy are described, and outstanding research questions are presented. This is a new area of research, where theoretical perspectives and relevant research methods are only now being defined. This paper provides a framework for the study of folksonomy, tagging and social tagging systems. Three broad approaches are identified, focusing first, on the folksonomy itself (and the role of tags in indexing and retrieval); secondly, on tagging (and the behaviour of users); and thirdly, on the nature of social tagging systems (as socio-technical framewor

This bibliography presents selected works, published between 1992 and the present, that are useful in understanding network-based electronic publishing. Key sources that deal with related topics, such as digital libraries, intellectual property rights, the NII and the NREN, and network software tools, are also included. It does not provide detailed coverage of the large body of literature that deals with general electronic publishing topics. The citation for the first part of this bibliography, which was previously published in The Public-Access Computer Systems Review, is included.

Three of the major issues in information ethics—intellectual property, speech regulation, and privacy—concern the morality of restricting people’s access to certain information. Consequently, policies in these areas have a significant impact on the amount and types of knowledge that people acquire. As a result, epistemic considerations are critical to the ethics of information policy decisions (cf. Mill 1978 [1859]). The fact that information ethics is a part of the philosophy of information highlights this important connection with epistemology. In this paper, I illustrate how a value-theoretic approach to epistemology can help to clarify these major issues in information ethics. However, I also identify several open questions about epistemic values that need to be answered before we will be able to evaluate the epistemic consequences of many information policies.

This study explores the provision of public library services to the Tamil Community through the National Library Board of Singapore's system of public libraries. Results of the study are analyzed and implications for services deduced through focus group interactions and researcher observations. The study concludes that improvement is needed in collections, facilities, programming, and services, particularly in the area of provision to young people. Focus group participants also propose an Internet portal in Tamil. Many indicate that the library could, through facilitating the reading and use of the Tamil language, help in promoting the usage of the Tamil language in Singapore. The recognition of Tamil as a national language of Singapore has given the Tamils intrinsic satisfaction because the language provides them with a living link to their ethnic culture. They believe the library can help them regain their cultural identity and also assist them in repositioning themselves positively in Singaporean society. The contribution of this study to the professional literature is the idea of cultural identity being central in public library services to special user groups.

This article takes campus libraries and computer labs as some of the physical standards in the evaluation of LIS programs. It uses both outputs and inputs of a program to measure its presentations.

Scientists in developing countries have a problem: those who work under adverse conditions in developing countries need to achieve more to win recognition than those who work under better conditions in developed countries, and often scientists in these developing countries watch their work go unnoticed, no matter its quality. Technology exacerbates this inequality and further marginalizes scientists on the periphery. It is important for researchers to know what is happening around the world and to publicize their own work. Information is key to the growth of knowledge, and dissemination of information is crucial for scientific enterprise.

This research evaluates the success of open access self-archiving in several well-known institutional repositories. Two assessment factors have been applied to examine the current practice of self-archiving: depositorship and the availability of full text. This research discovers that the rate of author self-archiving is low and that the majority of documents have been deposited by a librarian or administrative staff. Similarly, the rate of full-text availability is relatively low, except for Australian repositories. By identifying different practices of self-archiving, repository managers can create new strategies for the operation of their repositories and the development of archiving policies.

The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography presents selected English-language articles, books, and other printed and electronic sources that are useful in understanding scholarly electronic publishing efforts on the Internet. Most sources have been published between 1990 and the present; however, a limited number of key sources published prior to 1990 are also included. Where possible, links are provided to sources that are freely available on the Internet. SEPB includes "Scholarly Electronic Publishing Resources," a selective directory of related Web sites, and the "Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog," a list of new resources. The primary version of SEPB is an HTML document; however, to facilitate printing, an Adobe Acrobat version of the bibliography is also available. This paper takes a detailed look at the development of the bibliography, and it presents cumulative use statistics for the period October 1996-December 2000.