Although mentoring is widely valued and encouraged within librarianship, it has been conceived mostly as a professional relationship that occurs after one has obtained a position. Thus, mentoring among LIS students is not customary--largely because internships and field experiences are not universally required. To address this problem, the…

This paper studies the situated meaning given to a so-called "welcome" service for international students at a Catalan university. The official business of the service is to offer support with bureaucratic procedures and information about available services, including those for learning Catalan. However, the complex range of overlapping…

Bookstores, record stores, libraries, Facebook: these places--both physical and virtual--demonstrate an established and essential purpose as centers of community, expertise, convenience, immediacy, and respect. Yet as digital, mobile, and social shifts continue to transform culture and interactions, these spaces and places transform, too.…

With the success of applications spurring the tremendous increase in the volume of data transfer, efficient and reliable content distribution has become a key issue. Peer-to-peer (P2P) technology has gained popularity as a promising approach to large-scale content distribution due to its benefits including self-organizing, load-balancing, and…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate web services (in the form of parameterised URLs), specifically in the context of the ScotlandsPlaces project. This involves cross-domain querying, data retrieval and display via the development of a bespoke XML standard rather than existing XML formats and mapping between them.…

Libraries have been increasingly concerned with data creation, management, and publication. This increase is partly driven by shifting metadata standards in libraries and partly by the growth of data and metadata repositories being managed by libraries. In order to manage these data sets, libraries are looking for new preservation and discovery…

"Cloud computing" is currently the "buzzword" in the Information Technology field. Cloud computing facilitates convenient access to information and software resources as well as easy storage and sharing of files and data, without the end users being aware of the details of the computing technology behind the process. This…

The integration of librarians and technologists to deliver information services represents a new and potentially costly organizational challenge for many library administrators. To understand better how to control the costs of integration, the research presented here will use structural contingency theory to study the coordination of librarians…

Leading Chinese technology firms, from automobile manufacturer to information service provider, are evolving into some of the world's most innovative and competitive players, and dramatically changing the global business landscape. What underlies the rise of these firms is China's national strategy of transforming itself from a low-cost…

Introduction: This paper is about the challenges of working creatively and reflectively in the information-intensive environments characteristic of our digital age. Method: The paper builds upon earlier work about uncertainty in library and information science by incorporating work exploring risk cultures and uncertainty as everyday phenomena. It…

Purpose: Online information vendors currently offer a variety of additional services; among these are alert services which present requested information on recent publications to registered users. This paper aims to investigate a variety of alert services provided by four online information vendors. Design/methodology/approach: A comparison of the…

Demonstrating the value of library and information services has been a theme in library discussions in recent years. The application of many different approaches to evaluation has waxed and waned together with the development of theories of evaluation across the humanities and social sciences. Over the past two decades research and activity on…

Distance learning has flourished in Sudan during the last two decades; more and more higher education institutions offer distance learning programmes to off-campus students. Like on-campus students, distance learners should have access to appropriate library and information support services. They also have specific needs for library and…

The use of mobile technologies in higher education seem to be lagging those in other service sectors, which have been quick to utilize the advantages that mobile communications have to offer. Based on the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), this study analyzes the range factors and the level of influence on undergraduate intention to use a proposed…

Although the current interest in informal learning seems recent, performance improvement professionals have long had an interest in informal learning-the ways that people learn outside of formal structures. The earliest forms of learning for work were informal, including de facto and formal apprenticeship programs and the "school of…