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…

After three years of collecting electronic resources of troubleshooting tickets in Springhare's LibAnswers at University of Houston Libraries, the author conducted an analysis of over 300 tickets. The type of problem was identified for each ticket and then categorized into a functional area using an existing categorization schema developed at…

The Internet is considered to be one of the most important mechanisms for sharing research (Chavkin & Chavkin, 2008), raising questions about the scope and variety of research-based education resources available online. Whereas years ago, the challenge for educators was to find relevant research information for practice, this challenge has…

We present an analysis of 50 repositories for educational content conducted through an "audit system" that helped us classify these repositories, their software systems, promoters, and how they communicated their licensing practices. We randomly accessed five resources from each repository to investigate the alignment of licensing…

The aim of this study is to identify achieved successes, existing gaps and possible prospects of implementing the principle of transparency by Russian universities. It was focused upon the information transparency of educational activities from the perspective of legal requirements and interests of applicants and university students. The analysis…

Purpose: The paper's aim is to propose a core journal decision method, called the local impact factor (LIF), which can evaluate the requirements of the local user community by combining both the access rate and the weighted impact factor, and by tracking citation information on the local users' articles. Design/methodology/approach: Many…

Purpose: This paper aims to provide an initial understanding of the constraints that historical video collections pose to video retrieval technology and the potential that online access offers to both archive and users. Design/methodology/approach: A small and unique collection of videos on customs and folklore was used as a case study. Multiple…

The Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), a unit within the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, is the world's largest social science data archive. The data sets in the ICPRS database give the social sciences librarian/subject specialist an opportunity of providing value-added bibliographic…

Discusses access to digital libraries on the World Wide Web via Web browsers and describes the design of a language-independent document classification system to help users of the Florida Center for Library Automation analyze search query results. Highlights include similarity scores, clustering, graphical representation of document similarity,…

Discusses indexing and access to digital resources, especially on the Internet. Topics include subject searching versus indexing; multiple terms of access; folk classification; basic level terms; folk access; Bradford's Law; Zipfian distributions; vocabulary scalability; the Resnikoff-Dolby 30:1 Rule; domain-specific indexing; and implications for…

The access and reproduction policies of the digital collections of 10 leading university digital libraries worldwide are classified according to factors such as the creation type of the material, acquisition method, copyright ownership etc. The relationship of these factors is analysed, showing how acquisition methods and copyright ownership…

This paper begins with some general remarks about the indexing of electronic publications. Characteristics of today's information world are highlighted, including decentralization, distributed data collections, and heterogeneous data structures and indexing procedures. Three possible models for managing access to information are summarized: a…

Provides a review of 20 digital libraries from around the world. Examines library objectives; funding, including the role of government and private sector organizations; subject coverage; collections; information storage and retrieval; search features; access to the collections; output formats; and sorting search output. (LRW)

This book describes how the following 12 virtual libraries use library skills to organize Internet resources: Agriculture Network Information Center (AgNIC); Argus Clearinghouse; Blue Web'n; BUBL Information Service; Edinburgh Engineering Virtual Library (EEVL); INFOMINE; Internet Public Library (IPL); Librarians' Index to the Internet (LII);…

Purpose: To help to clarify the role of XML tools and standards in supporting transition and migration towards a fully XML-based environment for managing access to information. Design/methodology/approach: The Ching Digital Image Library, built on a three-tier architecture, is used as a source of examples to illustrate a number of methods of data…