The Open University (OU) is the UK's largest distance education provider and has a large and growing disabled student population. Disabled user support presents particular challenges for an online library service in the distance learning environment. The OU introduced guidelines for working with non-OU--authored content (external content) in 2011…

This paper examines BELF (Business English as a Lingua Franca) teaching and researching in China. A literature review is conducted using the China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) database. This survey includes a cursory literature search on BELF and a thorough literature study of 12 Chinese major academic journals. From the data collected…

The use of information and communication technology (ICT) in education is a way to facilitate interaction and accessing information for learning in higher education. However, finding a set of structured e-resources to facilitate learning within specific courses is still a big challenge in most higher education institutions. This includes the…

This study expanded the definition of reading practices to include both print- and Internet-based reading, and examined the relationship of reading profiles to Taiwanese college students' performance on various practices. The results showed that more time was spent on Internet-than print-based extracurricular reading, and that the three…

The present study gives an account of how the e-resources in general and EBSCO, PROQUEST, Project MUSE, and JSTOR in particular were used in the Indira Gandhi National Open University, New Delhi, India. It studies and highlights the access pattern of the patrons in an open university. The study suggests consistency and uniformity in computing and…

Purpose: This paper aims to address the problem of enhancing the selection of titles offered by a digital library, by analysing the differences in these titles when they are cited by local authors in their publications and when they are listed in the digital library offer. Design/methodology/approach: Text mining techniques were used to identify…

Human systems have to adapt to climate change and the natural disasters predicted to increase in frequency as a result. These disasters have both direct and indirect health effects. Certain groups, the poor, the elderly, children and those with disabilities are set to be more seriously impacted by disasters because of their greater inherent…

Open access has long emphasized access to scholarly materials. However, open access can also mean access to the means of producing visible and recognized journals. This issue is particularly important in developing and emergent countries. The SciELO (Scientific Electronic Library On-line) project, first started in Brazil and, shortly afterward, in…

Drawing on a critical theoretical paradigm and critically engaging with the externalization thesis that Gita Steiner-Khamsi and Jurgen Schriewer have developed, this article examines the politics of "Finnish education" in the ongoing Japanese education reform debate. More specifically, it examines the various discursive uses of…

Scholarly activities are a collection of academic related activities such as research, teaching and consultation work which result in research outputs such as journals, theses and articles in proceedings. The output will then be disseminated to researchers all over the world by means of the WWW. The four pillars of this scholarship i.e. discovery,…

As academic libraries move toward the electronic frontier for their serial subscriptions, there are several issues to be considered. This paper intends to outline the advantages and disadvantages with respect to electronic and paper serials, address selection criteria, and describe our practice in coping with these issues at the Leddy Library of…

The authors recount experiences of the variety of problems and issues involved in providing access to electronic journals in a large academic library. The paper excludes concerns emanating from decisions to subscribe to aggregations such as those produced by vendors like EBSCO, but concentrates on scholarly journals ordered individually, or as…

Results from two multiple regression models involving HighWire journal subscriptions in 2003 for 16 participating universities in the United States, United Kingdom, and Sweden indicate a highly predictive relationship between the number of article downloads and the number of users--meaning that the size of a user population can be estimated by…

Describes the Open Journal project, funded by the United Kingdom Electronic Libraries (eLib) program. Discusses aspects of publishing being transformed by the World Wide Web; Open Journal demonstrators and linking features and types; user responses; building better open journals; and post-project application plans of publishers. (Author/AEF)

Open access publishing is a hot topic today. But open access publishing can have many different definitions, and pros and cons vary with the definitions. Open access publishing is especially attractive to companies and small colleges or universities that are likely to have many more readers than authors. A downside is that a membership fee sounds…