The study surveys two large sets of activities concentrating on digital libraries to examine the following questions: Does digital library research inform digital library practice? And vice versa? To what extent are they connected, now that nearly a decade has passed since they began? Examined were research projects supported by the first and second Digital Library Initiative (DLI), digital library projects listed by the Association for Research Libraries (ARL) and Digital Library Federation (DFL), and selected literature, focusing on the last five years. Methods concentrate only on examination of visible or â surfaceâ sources or records, i.e. information that can be gathered from web sites, open literature, and published data. Limitations of the method are acknowledged; accordingly, caveats are made about conclusions. From this data we conclude that the two activities are not as yet demonstratively connected. A set of differing interpretations and conclusions are included.

Running scholarly presses as profit centers is becoming increasingly unsustainable as many are barely able to stay solvent in todayâ s market economy. Under increasing financial pressures university presses are creating a bottleneck for the publishing of scholarly articles, making less of it available more slowly. By restricting access and limiting outlets for publication, todayâ s commercially structured scholarly publishing system runs counter to the aims of scholarly publishingâ to circulate discourse and research findings through academic institutions and into the world. The open access movement is one response to a general failure of the for-profit scholarly publishing system. This paper looks at what it would mean to reconfigure scholarly publishing away from commerce and toward an open access model, and the potential role of libraries within an open access publishing system.

This is a preprint to be published in Journal of Documentation. Purpose - A general overview with up-to-date information on UDC use worldwide. Design/methodology/approach - The research combined e-mail interviews with LIS professionals in 208 countries, literature research and information obtained from UDC distributors/publishers (AENOR, BSI, UDC Consortium). The following categorization of UDC use was offered: A - dominant system; B - used in some kind of libraries only; or C - rarely used. Findings - Of the 208 countries contacted and researched through the literature in 2004-2006, the UDC was found to be used in 124 (60%) of the countries. In 34 (28%) of the countries researched (in Europe, Asia and Africa), UDC is the main classification system used across national information networks. In 45 (36%) of the countries it is used in certain kinds of libraries. In the remaining 45 (36%) of the countries it is used rarely, in only a few libraries or information centres. Research limitations/implications - It was beyond the scope of this research to provide any information regarding the actual number of institutions using UDC in a given country or to give an estimate of the size and number of document collections organized by it. Although a decline in UDC use since the 1980s was reported from a number of countries, it was not possible to measure this accurately. Practical implications: The interest shown for using UDC in the organization of digital collections, information exchange and cross domain and cross collection resource discovery depends on accurate knowledge of its actual usage worldwide. This gives a measure of its global importance and verifies its credentials as an indexing standard. This research, which attempted wider and more systematic coverage than previous surveys, should help clarify the status of UDC and its potential use in the networked environment. Originality/value - Up-to-date information on the presence of the UDC system across countries and languages. Paper type: Research paper

This essay will consider new copyright models in libraries, and how libraries can and should modify their own systems to promote and provide access to open content. It focuses on the reasoning behind supporting new models and methods of distribution, especially with regards to open licenses like Creative Commons, and the resources and systems libraries have developed to provide access to open licensed work. The paper examines the current roles libraries take in promoting Creative Commons and Open Access, and possible future roles, as well as how libraries organize and share open access works and develop relationships with other producing or developing content.

This paper examines important artifacts of scientific research, namely models. It proposes that the representations of scientific models be treated as works. It discusses how bibliographic families of models may better reflect disciplinary intellectual structures and relationships, thereby providing information retrieval that is reflective of human information seeking and use purposes such as teaching and learning. Two examples of scientific models are presented using the Dublin Core metadata elements.

When two selection environments operate upon each other, mutual shaping in a co-evolution along a particular trajectory is one possible outcome. When three selection environments are involved, more complex dynamics can be expected as a result of interactions involving bi-lateral and tri-lateral relations. Three selection environments are specified in the Triple Helix model: (1) wealth generation (industry), (2) novelty production (academia), and (3) public control (government). Furthermore, this model somewhat reduces the complexity by using university-industry-government relations for the specification of the historical conditions of the non-linear dynamics. Whereas the historical analysis informs us about how institutions and institutional arrangements carry certain functions, the evolutionary analysis focuses on the functions of selection environments in terms of outputs. One can no longer expect a one-to-one correspondence between institutions and functions; a statistics is needed for the evaluation of how, for how long, and to what extent institutional arrangements enhance synergies among different selection environments. The empirical contributions to this Triple Helix issue point in the direction of â rich ecologiesâ : the construction of careful balances between differentiation and integration among the three functions.

This study explored what technological protection measures (TPM) publishers/vendors of licensed scholarly resources employ by assessing the use restrictions experienced in a sample of resources from history/art history, engineering and health sciences. The analysis develops a framework of use restrictions that distinguishes between soft TPM - which discourage use - and hard TPM - which strictly limit or forbid uses. Within soft TPM, the framework identifies six use discouraging TPM: extent of use, obfuscation, omission, amalgamation, frustration and threat. The study concludes that these soft TPM are common in licensed scholarly resources. Further, while hard TPM are less common, they are not unknown.

To be published in New Media & Society, 8(6), 2006 (forthcoming). Abstract: Internet search engines function in a present which changes continuously. The search engines update their indices regularly, overwriting Web pages with newer ones, adding new pages to the index, and losing older ones. Some search engines can be used to search for information at the internet for specific periods of time. However, these â date stampsâ are not determined by the first occurrence of the pages in the Web, but by the last date at which a page was updated or a new page was added, and the search engineâ s crawler updated this change in the database. This has major implications for the use of search engines in scholarly research as well as theoretical implications for the conceptions of time and temporality. We examine the interplay between the different updating frequencies by using AltaVista and Google for searches at different moments of time. Both the retrieval of the results and the structure of the retrieved information erodes over time.

This is a preprint accepted for publication in Government Information Quarterly (2007) 24(1), pg. 64-88. This paper develops a framework to assess the text-based public information provided on program level government agency Websites. The framework informs the larger e-government question of how, or whether, state administrative agencies are using Websites in a transformative capacity - to change relationships between citizens and government. It focuses on assessing the degree to which text information provided on government Websites could facilitate various relationships between government agencies and citizens. The framework incorporates four views of government information obligations stemming from different assumptions about citizen-government relationships in a democracy: the private citizen view, the attentive citizen view, the deliberative citizen view and the citizen-publisher view. Each view suggests inclusion of different types of information. The framework is employed to assess state Websites containing information about Chronic Wasting Disease, a disease effecting deer and elk in numerous U.S. states and Canada.

Crawling the Web to build collections of documents related to pre-speciï¬ ed topics became an active area of research during the late 1990â s, crawler technology having been developed for use by search engines. Now, Web crawling is being seriously considered as an important strategy for building large scale digital libraries. This paper covers some of the crawl technologies that might be exploited for collection building. For example, to make such collection-building crawls more effective, focused crawling was developed, in which the goal was to make a â best-ï¬ rstâ crawl of the Web. We are using powerful crawler software to implement a focused crawl but use tunneling to overcome some of the limitations of a pure best-ï¬ rst approach. Tunneling has been described by others as not only prioritizing links from pages according to the pageâ s relevance score, but also estimating the value of each link and prioritizing them as well. We add to this mix by devising a tunneling focused crawling strategy which evaluates the current crawl direction on the ï¬ y to determine when to terminate a tunneling activity. Results indicate that a combination of focused crawling and tunneling could be an effective tool for building digital libraries.