Open access institutional repositories can be ill-equipped to manage the complexity of research outputs from departments of fine arts, media, drama, music, cultural heritage, and the creative arts in general. The U.K.-based Kultur project was funded to create a flexible multimedia repository model using EPrints software. The project launched the…

This study is a part of the larger project that develops a sustainable digital repository of professional development resources on emerging data standards and technologies for data organization and management in libraries. Toward that end, the project team developed an automated workflow to crawl for, monitor, and classify relevant web objects…

This dissertation analyzes how North Carolina State University's (NCSU) James B. Hunt Jr. Library extends the ways in which the information architectures of academic research libraries can function as a technology, as discourse, and as rhetoric. The starting point for the analysis is the libraries of antiquity, which functioned technologically as…

In his article "The McDonaldization of Academic Libraries?" Brian Quinn explores to what extent and to what effect academic libraries have become "McDonaldized," according to the concept developed by sociologist George Ritzer. Quinn identifies a number of ways in which the four dimensions of…

Academic, government, and corporate librarians organize and leverage internal resources and content through institutional repositories and library catalogs. Getting more value and usage from the content they license is a key goal. However, the ever-growing amount of content and shifting user demands for new materials or features has made the…

Using the "point oh" naming system for developments in librarianship is attracting debate about its appropriateness, basis and syntax and the meaning and potential of Library 2.0. Now a new term, Library 3.0, has emerged. Is there is any significant difference between the two models? Using documentary analysis to explore the terms, the…

The silo is a well-worn metaphor in information systems used to illustrate separateness, isolation, and lack of connectivity. Through the many iterations of system development, libraries, archives, and museums (LAMs) have sought to avoid silos and find the sweet spot between interface design and metadata interoperability. This effort is being…

Any librarian who has managed electronic resources has experienced the--for want of words--"joy" of gathering and analyzing usage statistics. Such statistics are important for evaluating the effectiveness of resources and for making important budgeting decisions. Unfortunately, the data are usually tedious to collect, inconsistently organized, of…

This article presents a reading of the user interface in one public library system. Its aim is to find out the frames and competences required and used in the communication between the computer and the patron. The authors see the computer as a text that is to be read by the user who wants to search for information from the library. The transition…

As libraries face a veritable explosion of electronic resources and as the interconnectedness of print and online resources becomes increasingly complicated, many librarians are challenged to find efficient and cost-friendly ways to manage these resources. In this article, the authors describe how a team of people from various library departments…

Libraries are not so unlike market giants Netflix, Amazon, and Pandora. Despite their significantly different business models and missions, they share an interest in facilitating the search for information, including what to read, view, and listen to next. Librarians, too, want their patrons to be able to use their tools to make connections among…

Darien Library, where the author serves as head of knowledge and learning services, launched a new website on September 1, 2008. The website is built with Drupal, an open source content management system (CMS). In this article, the author describes how she and her colleagues overhauled the library's website to provide an open source content…

The Digital Initiatives department at Miami University, like most digital initiatives and special collections departments, has a large number of rich digital image collections, stored primarily in a third-party database. Typically, these databases are not findable to the average Web user. From a desire to expose these collections to the wider Web…

In October 2009, California Digital Library (CDL), where the author serves as manager of strategic and project planning, jumped into the world of social networking by joining Twitter. From Twitter, the CDL staff publish the content of their monthly newsletter, "CDLINFO News," and also additional content created by CDL programs and…

There is a growing interest in making available and making sense of the data on the Web and trapped in databases. Rather than a web of unstructured documents, full of information understandable only to humans, there is a movement whose intention is to make these data structured, reusable, machine-readable, and interrelated. This approach to Web…