Humanities scholars can today engage in research inquiry using data from a range of varied collections which are often characterised by poor subject access, often resulting in systems that underperform and even effectively prevent access to data, information and knowledge. In spite of the availability of professional standards and guidelines to…

Metadata are crucial for discovery and access by providing contextual, technical, and administrative information in a standard form. Yet metadata are also sites of tension between sociocultural representations, resource constraints, and standardized systems. Formal and informal interventions may be interpreted as quality issues, political acts to…

This research identifies the similarities and differences between the MathSciNet search features and functions of the American Mathematical Society (AMS) and EBSCOhost platforms. A series of iterative MathSciNet queries were performed on both platforms. For each query, the total number of results and search behavior were documented and analyzed.…

Considering the importance of subject retrieval for scientific visibility, and the need to guide authors in self-archiving their papers in institutional repositories of university libraries, this study observed the patterns and strategies used by authors while indexing for keyword assignment. The study examined four categories of analysis:…

Discovery of digital items by scholars and the public is highly dependent upon effective metadata to ensure inclusion and prioritization in search engines. Subject descriptions based on controlled vocabulary, such as Library of Congress subject headings (LCSH), are particularly useful to enhance discovery, but they may be expensive to provide. In…

A college class of non-science majors completed a metadata project in 15 weeks for a Women's History collection at a southern 4-year university. The class "First and Second Wave of Feminism" explored for the first time a scientific method of cataloguing while learning to promote, restore and preserve the history of women in the United…

Based on a comparison of two nearly identical surveys in 2010 and 2016, this study examines the deepening practitioner concern over the use of social tagging within digital collections during the past six years. While participants reported a greater level of experience and increased use of social tagging, concerns regarding control, consistency,…

The objective of this article is to analyze the searching and indexing techniques of educational search engines' implementation while treating future challenges. Educational search engines could greatly help in the effectiveness of e-learning if used correctly. However, these engines have several gaps which influence the performance of e-learning…

Using assignments drawn from a first-year composition course that centers the Southern Life Histories Collection, part of the New Deal's Federal Writers' Project, this paper argues for a pedagogical approach that teaches students digital literacy through archival rhetorics by converting archival texts into data.

Learning has transcended into a life-long endeavor in the information age. It is no longer restricted to confines of formal classrooms. Consequently, a student is not restricted to traditional learning resources like teachers, textbooks or printed content. Digital resources available on the Internet form a very significant component of…

In recent years, computerized adaptive testing (CAT) has gained popularity as an important means to evaluate students' ability. Assigning tags to test questions is crucial in CAT. Manual tagging is widely used for constructing question banks; however, this approach is time-consuming and might lead to consistency issues. Automatic question tagging,…

As libraries respond to new teaching and research practices in the twenty-first century, it is important to consider how to advertise library services. Users are often surprised to learn about the varied expertise of library staff and the many services the staff provides. To investigate this issue, the author designed a study to identify a more…

With the advent of web based learning and content management tools, e-learning has become a matured learning paradigm, and changed the trend of instructional design from instructor centric learning paradigm to learner centric approach, and evolved from "one instructional design for many learners" to "one design for one learner"…

Vocabularies are linguistic resources that make it possible to access knowledge through words. They can constitute a mechanism to identify, describe, explore, and access all the digital resources with informational content pertaining to a specific knowledge domain. In this regard, they play a key role as systems for the representation and…

This research explores trends in knowledge organization (KO) in library and information science (LIS) curricula in 68 selected schools located in Southeast Asia, Europe, and North America. The research quantitatively analyzed KO course descriptions in order to identify the modules covered in these LIS programs' curricula. Information was gathered…