Librarianship and Information Science in Islamic East Africa 1966–1999: An Annotated Bibliography

This work is an annotated bibliography that consists of articles, books, conference papers, dissertations, and reports, etc. published in various library and information science forums on the subject of librarianship in Islamic East Africa. The goal of preparing this work is to provide a list of citations with abstracts that librarians, library students, and library scholars can use to perform research within this subject area and further the body of knowledge. The research methodology that was used to find these citations involved searching the database versions of ERIC, Dissertations Abstracts Online, and Library Literature within the online public access catalog of the Auburn University library system. It also involved searching the online databases of Library and Information Science Abstracts (LISA), British Education Index, and Education Abstracts within the DIALOG database as well as the respective print copies of these resources. While this work is by no means an exhaustive analysis of the entire East African library literature, it does strive to be comprehensive in terms of its country-by-country breakdown of librarianship within the region. Islamic East Africa for the purposes of this work incorporates the nations of Comoros, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan, and Tanzania. In providing a citation for a non-English language work, the English equivalent of the title of that work will be given next to the non-English title.     

The Web impact of open access social science research

For a long time, Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) journal citations have been widely used for research performance monitoring of the sciences. For the social sciences, however, the Social Sciences Citation Index® (SSCI®) can sometimes be insufficient. Broader types of publications (e.g., books and non-ISI journals) and informal scholarly indicators may also be needed. This article investigates whether the Web can help to fill this gap. The authors analyzed 1530 citations from Google™ to 492 research articles from 44 open access social science journals. The articles were published in 2001 in the fields of education, psychology, sociology, and economics. About 19% of the Web citations represented formal impact equivalent to journal citations, and 11% were more informal indicators of impact. The average was about 3 formal and 2 informal impact citations per article. Although the proportions of formal and informal online impact were similar in sociology, psychology, and education, economics showed six times more formal impact than informal impact. The results suggest that new types of citation information and informal scholarly indictors could be extracted from the Web for the social sciences. Since these form only a small proportion of the Web citations, however, Web citation counts should first be processed to remove irrelevant citations. This can be a time-consuming process unless automated.     

Bibliographical control in South Africa

This work is an annotated bibliography that consists of articles, books, conference papers, dissertations, and reports, etc. published in various library and information science forums on the subject of librarianship in Islamic East Africa. The goal of preparing this work is to provide a list of citations with abstracts that librarians, library students, and library scholars can use to perform research within this subject area and further the body of knowledge. The research methodology that was used to find these citations involved searching the database versions of ERIC, Dissertations Abstracts Online, and Library Literature within the online public access catalog of the Auburn University library system. It also involved searching the online databases of Library and Information Science Abstracts (LISA), British Education Index, and Education Abstracts within the DIALOG database as well as the respective print copies of these resources. While this work is by no means an exhaustive analysis of the entire East African library literature, it does strive to be comprehensive in terms of its country-by-country breakdown of librarianship within the region. Islamic East Africa for the purposes of this work incorporates the nations of Comoros, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan, and Tanzania. In providing a citation for a non-English language work, the English equivalent of the title of that work will be given next to the non-English title.     

Recent literature on government information

This column was prepared from a manual scan of library and information science journals, and manual or automated searches of sources including ERIC, PAIS International in Print, America: History and Life, Historical Abstracts, R.R. Bowker's Books in Print, Library Literature, Current Contents: Social and Behavioral Sciences, Government Reports Announcements & Index, EPIC, and the electronic discussion group GOVDOC-L. Citations are to items published or indexed from November 1993 through April 1994, including articles, books, reports, government publications, and chapters or essays in collected works. Reviews and short news articles are omitted. Each publication is cited once under its primary topic, and annotated if the content cannot be adequately determined from the title.Contributions of citations to this column should be addressed to the column editor, Susan M. Ryan, Government Documents Librarian, Stetson University, DeLand, FL 32720; Internet: ryan@-suvaxl.stetson.edu.     

Computer Analysis of Local Citation Information in Collection Management

Bibliographic information and cited references from source articles by members of the Emory University Physics Department were downloaded as an ASCII file from ISI's SCISEARCH (Science Citation Index) on DIALOG. This file was loaded into a word processing program for editing and then into a spreadsheet program for analysis. Information about format, subject and location of each cited reference was added to the spreadsheet. Analysis of the citations and added information can be useful in making collection management decisions.     

Librarianship and Information Science in the Maghreb 1966–1999: An Annotated Bibliography

This work is an annotated bibliography that consists of articles, books, conference papers, dissertations, reports, etc. published in various library and information science forums on the subject of librarianship in the Maghreb. The goal of preparing this work is to provide a list of citations with abstracts that librarians, library students, and library scholars can use to perform research within this subject area and further the body of knowledge. The research methodology that was used to find these citations involved searching the database versions of ERIC, Dissertations Abstracts Online, and Library Literature within the online public access catalog of the Auburn University library system. It also involved searching the online databases of Library and Information Science Abstracts (LISA), British Education Index, andEducation Abstracts within the DIALOG database as well as the respective print versions of these resources. While this work is by no means an exhaustive critique of the entire Maghrebi library and information science literature, it does strive to be comprehensive in terms of its country-by-country analysis of librarianship and information science within the region. In providing a citation for a non-English language work, the English equivalent of the title of that work will be given next to the non-English title.     

Librarianship and Information Science in the Maghreb 1966–1999: An Annotated Bibliography

This work is an annotated bibliography that consists of articles, books, conference papers, dissertations, reports, etc. published in various library and information science forums on the subject of librarianship in the Maghreb. The goal of preparing this work is to provide a list of citations with abstracts that librarians, library students, and library scholars can use to perform research within this subject area and further the body of knowledge. The research methodology that was used to find these citations involved searching the database versions of ERIC, Dissertations Abstracts Online, and Library Literature within the online public access catalog of the Auburn University library system. It also involved searching the online databases of Library and Information Science Abstracts (LISA), British Education Index, andEducation Abstracts within the DIALOG database as well as the respective print versions of these resources. While this work is by no means an exhaustive critique of the entire Maghrebi library and information science literature, it does strive to be comprehensive in terms of its country-by-country analysis of librarianship and information science within the region. In providing a citation for a non-English language work, the English equivalent of the title of that work will be given next to the non-English title.     

Dissemination and impact of U.S. department of education's library research and demonstration projects: A citation analysis

Between 1965 and 1980, the Library Research and Demonstration Branch within the Department of Education awarded over $25 million to 312 projects. By tracing the citations in Social Sciences Citation Index from a random sampling of 52% of these projects, this study has attempted to assess the dissemination and impact of the projects in the professional literature.Approximately half of the projects were not cited in SSCI. The citations tended to be clustered among a small number of library-related serials. A small number of funded projects accounted for a large number of the citations. The most cited projects cost only one-fifth as much as the most expensive studies, yet were cited nearly five times as often.     

Scatter and obsolescence of journals cited in theses and dissertations of librarianship

This article analyzes the bibliometric features (the number of pages, completion years, the fields of subject, the number of citations, and their distribution by types of sources and years) of 100 theses and dissertations completed at the Department of Librarianship of Hacettepe University between 1974 and 2002. Almost a quarter (24%) of all dissertations were on university libraries, followed by public libraries (9%). Doctoral dissertations were, on average, twice as long as master's theses and contained 2.5 times more citations. Monographs received more citations (50%) than journal articles did (42%). Recently completed theses and dissertations contained more citations to electronic publications. Fourteen (or 3.2% of all) journal titles (including Türk Kütüphaneciliği, College & Research Libraries, and Journal of the American Society for Information Science) received almost half (48.9%) of all citations. Eighty percent of journal titles were cited infrequently. No correlation was found between the frequency of citations of the most frequently cited journals and their impact factors. Cited journal titles in master's and doctoral theses and dissertations overlapped significantly. Similarly, journal titles cited in dissertations also overlapped significantly with those that were cited in the journal articles published in the professional literature. The distribution of citations to foreign journal titles fit Bradford's Law of Scattering. The mean half-life of all cited sources was 9 years. Sources cited in master's dissertations were relatively more current. Single authorship was the norm in cited resources. Coupled with in-library use data, findings of the present study can be used to identify the core journal titles in librarianship as well as to evaluate the existing library collections to decide which journal titles to keep, discard, or relegate to off-site storage areas.     

Comparison of three web-scale discovery services for health sciences research

Objective

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relative effectiveness of three web-scale discovery (WSD) tools in answering health sciences search queries.

Methods

Simple keyword searches, based on topics from six health sciences disciplines, were run at multiple real-world implementations of EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS), Ex Libris''s Primo, and ProQuest''s Summon. Each WSD tool was evaluated in its ability to retrieve relevant results and in its coverage of MEDLINE content.

Results

All WSD tools returned between 50%–60% relevant results. Primo returned a higher number of duplicate results than the other 2 WSD products. Summon results were more relevant when search terms were automatically mapped to controlled vocabulary. EDS indexed the largest number of MEDLINE citations, followed closely by Summon. Additionally, keyword searches in all 3 WSD tools retrieved relevant material that was not found with precision (Medical Subject Headings) searches in MEDLINE.

Conclusions

None of the 3 WSD products studied was overwhelmingly more effective in returning relevant results. While difficult to place the figure of 50%–60% relevance in context, it implies a strong likelihood that the average user would be able to find satisfactory sources on the first page of search results using a rudimentary keyword search. The discovery of additional relevant material beyond that retrieved from MEDLINE indicates WSD tools'' value as a supplement to traditional resources for health sciences researchers.     

Information Transfer in Articles About Libraries and Student Success

Connecting academic libraries to the higher education environment is crucial for demonstrating the impact of libraries on student success. The purpose of this study is to examine the information transfer between the disciplines of library and information science (LIS) and higher education in order to evaluate the influence of ideas between the two disciplines. Information transfer was analyzed in 39 articles focused on the library's contributions to student success by examining the cited references, the author and collaborator affiliations, and the forward citations. The findings from the cited reference analysis suggest that LIS is borrowing concepts and methods through citations from the discipline of education. Authorship affiliations showed that some non-LIS authors are publishing in the field of LIS and that LIS authors are collaborating with non-LIS authors. Finally, based on the forward citations, other disciplines are rarely citing LIS research about student success. This article's findings highlight the need to consider research and collaborators outside of the LIS field when researching the library's contribution to student success.     

Using the Web for research evaluation: The Integrated Online Impact indicator

Previous research has shown that citation data from different types of Web sources can potentially be used for research evaluation. Here we introduce a new combined Integrated Online Impact (IOI) indicator. For a case study, we selected research articles published in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology (JASIST) and Scientometrics in 2003. We compared the citation counts from Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus with five online sources of citation data including Google Scholar, Google Books, Google Blogs, PowerPoint presentations and course reading lists. The mean and median IOI was nearly twice as high as both WoS and Scopus, confirming that online citations are sufficiently numerous to be useful for the impact assessment of research. We also found significant correlations between conventional and online impact indicators, confirming that both assess something similar in scholarly communication. Further analysis showed that the overall percentage for unique Google Scholar citations outside the WoS were 73% and 60% for the articles published in JASIST and Scientometrics, respectively. An important conclusion is that in subject areas where wider types of intellectual impact indicators outside the WoS and Scopus databases are needed for research evaluation, IOI can be used to help monitor research performance.     

Interactive overlays: A new method for generating global journal maps from Web-of-Science data

Recent advances in methods and techniques enable us to develop interactive overlays to a global map of science based on aggregated citation relations among the 9162 journals contained in the Science Citation Index and Social Science Citation Index 2009. We first discuss the pros and cons of the various options: cited versus citing, multidimensional scaling versus spring-embedded algorithms, VOSViewer versus Gephi, and the various clustering algorithms and similarity criteria. Our approach focuses on the positions of journals in the multidimensional space spanned by the aggregated journal–journal citations. Using VOSViewer for the resulting mapping, a number of choices can be left to the user; we provide default options reflecting our preferences. Some examples are also provided; for example, the potential of using this technique to assess the interdisciplinarity of organizations and/or document sets.     

Evolution of a State Periodical Index: Converting an In-House Index to a MARC-Based Database on the Web

This article describes the process of transforming the Arkansas Periodical Index, which began as a card file index in the University of Arkansas (U. of A.) Libraries, to an online database. As in many other states, in-house indexes were compiled to cover local history journals and subject-related magazines. A variety of software now exists to mount locally created databases, one option being the choice to use the same turnkey software that runs the library's online catalog. We began by converting our card files to a local Inmagic DB/Textworks database. The U. of A. received the 1991 Gale Research Award for Excellence in Reference and Adult Library Services for that design. We later mapped the database structure to MARC fields and mounted it as a Web-accessible database through our library OPAC vendor, Innovative Interfaces, Inc. (III). The authors begin with a brief history of periodical indexing, the reasons for choosing MARC formatting, and the field mapping required. The article explains the development of the database to include other publication formats, such as material from biographical compendiums, newspaper indexing, and university publications. The mapping incorporates indexing several publication formats in the same database. It also provides fields for linking citations back to the OPAC records, where users may find call numbers for journals or books, be connected to the full text of articles when available, or to an association's own website when applicable. We address some of the concerns for libraries in developing indexing projects. The article offers a mapping table of migrated fields that can be used by others wanting to encourage the rediscovery of local print periodicals and to expand access to the various materials otherwise buried in the library's special collections. The Arkansas Publications Index was released in April 2005 and is available free at http://arkindex.uark.edu/.     

Mechanization of library procedures in the medium-sized medical library. XI. Two methods of providing selective dissemination of information to medical scientists

The purpose of this study was to determine if a computerized commercial selective dissemination of information service could contribute to the services offered to the patrons of a specific medical library who were already participating in a manual selective dissemination of information service. The citations generated by the two services were contrasted on the basis of literature coverage, timeliness of retrieval, and relevancy of output. Eighty-four percent of the discrete citations retrieved were from 664 periodicals subscribed to by both services. Only 16 percent of the total of 1,387 discrete citations were produced by both services. The manual service was more timely; and, although it produced fewer citations, a higher percentage of these were relevant. Numerically, a total of 346 useful citations were recovered by the manual service and 379 from the commercial service. It appears, therefore, that a computerized commercial SDI service could contribute to the services offered to the medical scientists participating in a manual SDI service.     

Students' perceptions of their information literacy skills: the confidence gap between male and female international graduate students

In the 2015 Summer Session I, the information literacy team combined two instruments, the Information Literacy Assessment (ILA) and the Students' Perceptions of Their Information Literacy Skills Questionnaire (SPIL-Q), into one survey and distributed it to the college's international graduate students through a Google Form. It was distributed to 932 international graduate students, and 172 valid respondents completed the survey. The purpose of this research was to compare the confidence gap in information literacy skills between men and women, particularly in international graduate students. Data collected illustrated that female international business students (n = 70) tended to be slightly more confident than their male counterparts (n = 102) regarding their perceived information literacy skills as evidenced by their SPIL-Q average score across all six IL topics, 3.78, vs. male student's average score of 3.58.     

Recent literature on government information

The purpose of this column is to provide government information scholars and students with a broad overview of recent publications about government information from the literature of librarianship, archives, information technology management, public policy and law. Given the volume of literature produced in this field, a columnist cannot claim comprehensive coverage. This column seeks to provide a broad, representative survey of literature that illustrates significant trends in the field.Entries were identified through searches of bibliographic databases such as Library Literature, PAIS International, Ebsco Academic Elite, The Index to Legal Periodicals and Books, Science Direct, Westlaw's JLR database, WorldCat, and from manual scans of journals, newsletters, and Internet sites. Citations are to monographs and serials, journal and periodical articles, books, newsletters, and Internet sites. Coverage for this edition of the column includes items from 2002 and 2003, with a smattering of 2001 items that have come to my attention since the last installment of this column. Each citation is listed once under its primary topic and annotated if its content cannot be adequately determined from the title. Book reviews and Internet site reviews are generally excluded.Contributions and suggestions for the next column may be addressed to the column editor at the address below.Material for this column is grouped into the following categories: Freedom of Information/Secrecy, E-Gov/Technology, Archives/Libraries/History, Government Printing Office, Federal, State/Local, and International.     

Comparative analysis of epilepsy abstracts and a MEDLARS bibliography

Bibliographic retrievals on epilepsy prepared by MEDLARS and Excerpta Medica Foundation (EMF) monthly during 1968 were comparatively analyzed. EMF retrieved 1,116 citations with an average delay of 5.41 months, compared to 1,006 citations retrieved by MEDLARS with an average delay of 6.45 months. Differences in size of retrieval and delay between the systems were not significant. A total of 365 journals were represented, but a smaller group of ninety-one journals with citations in both retrievals formed a "core" of productive journals yielding over half the output of both systems. About 300 articles were cited in both searches, leaving 800 citations retrieved by EMF but not by MEDLARS and 700 citations retrieved by MEDLARS but not by EMF. Thus neither system was felt to provide comprehensive coverage of the epilepsy literature. Discrepancies in retrieval were found to be due primarily to indexing and retrieval procedures and not to coverage of different journals by the two systems.