The last 5 years have heralded a number of important changes to virtual libraries in academic and public settings. Despite this continual effort to improve library catalogs and websites, the fundamentals of these online spaces remain relatively unchanged. Digital collections are within reach of many libraries, yet they remain difficult to…

This publication follows the tradition of publishing selected papers from Pacific Islands Association of Libraries, Archives and Museums (PIALA) annual conferences. This 21st annual conference was held in Kosrae, Federated States of Micronesia, November 14-17, 2011. The volume begins with a listing of the members of the PIALA 2011 Planning…

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…

The increasing prevalence of digital information systems and technologies compels libraries across the globe to update systems and provide users with a digital experience outside the confines of the structural library, providing useful benefits to the user while creating new areas of concern such as digital information preservation.…

The idea of Digital Libraries emerged in the early 1990s from a vision of a "library of the future", without walls and open 24 hours a day. These digital libraries would leverage the substantial investments of federal funding in the Internet and advanced computing for the benefit of the entire population. The world's knowledge would be a key press…

Traditional library web products, whether online public access catalogs, library databases, or even library web sites, have long been rigidly controlled and difficult to use. Patrons regularly prefer Google's simple interface. Now social bookmarking and tagging tools help librarians bridge the gap between the library's need to offer authoritative,…

Millennial students make up a large portion of undergraduate students attending colleges and universities, and they have a variety of online resources available to them to complete academically related information searches, primarily Web based and library-based online information retrieval systems. The content, ease of use, and required search…

Discusses the impact of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and the digital divide in India. Considers the impact of information technologies, including the Internet and the Web, on the life and work of people; digital determinism; library and information infrastructure and superstructure; digital library initiatives; and the need…

Describes Gopher, a distributed document delivery service for electronic publishing across a computer network that allows a user to access data using a client-server communications model. The use of Gopher in campuswide information systems is described, and its use in libraries with electronic journals and multimedia documents is discussed. (three…

Describes the origin of the DOI (Digital Object Identifier) as a persistent identifier for managing copyrighted materials and its development; creation of the U.S. Navy digital health sciences library for isolated primary care providers and their patients; Cornell and CNRI prototype architecture for interoperable digital objects and repositories;…

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…

This paper discusses the concept of geolibraries and reviews related literature. Highlights include: the opportunity of geolibraries to elevate the work of both GI (Geographical Information) scientists and librarians; geolibraries' focus on digital information and metadata, as well as the distributed nature of the libraries and collections; the…

Explores the academic environment of a total information system for school libraries based on the idea of a digital intranet. Discusses safety; customization; the core library collection; curriculum-specific collections; access to short-term resources; Internet access; personalized features; search engines; equity issues; and staffing. (LRW)

Dalhousie is a medium-sized university, with about 15,000 FTE students, located in Halifax, Nova Scotia. It is one of Canada's oldest and most prestigious universities, yet, like many other public institutions, it frequently suffers from a lack of adequate funding to fulfill all the conflicting needs of the various faculties and departments. This…

Digital library systems focus principally on the reader: the consumer of the material that constitutes the library. In contrast, this paper describes an interface that makes it easy for people to build their own library collections. Collections may be built and served locally from the user's own Web server, or (given appropriate permissions)…