Smithsonian Team Flickr: a library,archives, and museums collaboration in web 2.0 space

The Flickr Commons was created as a forum for institutions to share their rich photographic collections with the emerging Web 2.0 audience of Flickr; the Smithsonian Institution was the fourth member of the Commons. The Smithsonian effort was a direct collaborative effort of the libraries, archives, museums, and information technology staff that generated new pathways for collaboration between these units. As the world’s largest museum complex, these Smithsonian units serve as a microcosm for collaboration in the information age. The Flickr Commons project provided insights into how the knowledge, skills, and abilities of libraries, archives, and museums (LAM) can converge in the Web 2.0 environment to provide collection access to new, and in some cases unknown, audiences. Simultaneously, by putting “LAM” content into an environment that allows for direct interaction by these audiences, the knowledge of the content for holding institutions is enriched. By exposing Smithsonian content within the Flickr environment, the Institution is learning what content is desired by the Web 2.0 world, how to bring crowd-sourcing into professionally curated collections, and how to bring diverse institutional skills together in a collaborative project.     

Break the rules,save the records: human rights archives and the search for justice in East Timor

How do distinctive historical experiences and political regimes shape human rights archives? How do those archives and those experiences in turn influence the way painful pasts are remembered or forgotten? And what can historical accounts tell us about the wisdom of prevailing norms and practices regarding the management and control of human rights records? This paper explores these questions through a close analysis of the history and politics of the principal archive documenting human rights abuse in East Timor. It underscores the work of archival studies scholars who argue that human rights archives are always in some degree shaped by the historical and political context in which they emerge and that conflicts over matters of content, mandate, and rules of access are virtually inevitable. Noting that such conflicts typically pit political authorities against victims and their advocates, it argues that successful human rights archival programs hinge critically on sensitive historical and political analysis and that, under certain conditions, human rights archivists should play a more active role in facilitating the pursuit of justice for victims of human rights abuse. It also makes the case for a move away from large, state-controlled archives toward multiple, smaller archives with varied mandates. Finally, it proposes the adoption of a new hierarchy of interest in the management of archives; away from the long-accepted principles of national sovereignty and inalienability, and in the direction of access to the survivors of human rights violations and their advocates.     

Government publications in New Zealand libraries and the University of Oregon: A comparison

The kind and size of a library determines the need to collect and the method of controlling government publications. New Zealand libraries tend to handle these publications like any other book with the exception of official records and statistics. As a rule, public, rather than academic libraries, are the designated depositories. In comparing the concept of New Zealand libraries to that of the University of Oregon Library concerning government publications, I found that New Zealand libraries collect and store official and statistical publications and give them partial use; most government publications are integrated into the general collection (use is not known), and few libraries have separate government publication sections with special librarians governing the collection. On the other hand the University of Oregon collects all types of government publications for optimum use; many have been integrated into the general collection (use is not known); and a separate documents section is open to the public with several librarian specialists in attendance. Government publications in the general collection are not, as a rule, recognized as government publications by the public, but those publications are readily accessible. Many government publications at the University of Oregon Library are housed in the general collection, but since 1974 publications of the United States, Canada and many international organizations are shelved in the Documents Section. Use of the various classification schemes has proved successful; however, changes and improvements should be considered frequently to make the government publications collection the best able to serve the public.     

Technology and customer expectation in academic libraries: A special reference to technical/management libraries in Karnataka

Technology has transformed the way people live. Current day information seekers are empowered with multiple choices of information sources and libraries no longer remain the primary centre for information seekers. With diminishing time and geographical barriers the world has become a global village and information seekers are stressed with time constraints. It is the duty of library and information professionals to address these tech-savvy library users' needs and align their services to satisfy them.Recently, the author of this paper conducted a research study on the “Impact of technology on quality of services in technical and management libraries in Karnataka” sponsored by the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR), Government of India, New Delhi. The study was approved in 2005 and the final report was submitted to the government in 2007. This paper carries some of the results of this research study conducted by the author in Karnataka state in Southern India.     

Technology and customer expectation in academic libraries: A special reference to technical/management libraries in Karnataka

Technology has transformed the way people live. Current day information seekers are empowered with multiple choices of information sources and libraries no longer remain the primary centre for information seekers. With diminishing time and geographical barriers the world has become a global village and information seekers are stressed with time constraints. It is the duty of library and information professionals to address these tech-savvy library users' needs and align their services to satisfy them.

Recently, the author of this paper conducted a research study on the “Impact of technology on quality of services in technical and management libraries in Karnataka” sponsored by the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR), Government of India, New Delhi. The study was approved in 2005 and the final report was submitted to the government in 2007. This paper carries some of the results of this research study conducted by the author in Karnataka state in Southern India.     

Here,there and everywhere: an analysis of reference services in academic archives

The purpose of this study is to investigate how archivists conduct reference services. The investigators administered two surveys to 19 participants at 15 Canadian academic archives to understand archivists’ behaviour while performing reference. There is no standard approach to reference as many archivists use institution-specific tools coupled with their own knowledge. Finding aids are the most frequently accessed tool and are most often used in conjunction with other tools. Limited resources are the primary barrier to the provision of effective reference services. The tools that are employed by archives are archivist focused, which results in reference services that are not user focused.     

Mirroring governance: archives,inventories and political knowledge in early modern Switzerland and Europe

The comparative study of archival inventories in early modern Switzerland reveals that three major regimes of inventorying logic emerged from the late fifteenth to the early eighteenth century. Early inventories constructed as lists gave way first to ideal-topographical inventories that relied on a double mapping of conceptual spaces against archival space and inventory pages, succeeded eventually by taxonomic inventories oriented around an active state apparatus and its needs. Synchronic and diachronic comparisons that focus on major reorganizations have proven effective in illustrating the scope and effectiveness of each of the successive regimes. A similar approach applied to major inventory projects across early modern Europe may identify further systems for making accumulating documents accessible to rulers, and may also allow us to trace genealogies of inventory practice regimes as they appeared in different regions, at different scales, and in diverse political contexts.

The next ten years in publishing: National,international, and educational perspectives

In describing the Renaissance-style publisher of the 1990s, this article emphasizes the craft and skills needed to maintain quality. Ian Montagnes suggests that these skills must now be taught formally, rather than by apprenticeship. He also describes one such training program that he has conducted for editors in developing countries. Ian Montagnes is assistant director and editor-in-chief of the University of Toronto Press. He has served continuously as either associated editor or editor ofScholarly Publishing: A Journal for Authors and Editors since its inception in 1969. He has also been active in the Canadian and American associations of university presses and the Society for Scholarly Publishing     

Books and the doctor in nineteenth-century Texas: some early attempts to establish medical libraries

This paper describes the nineteenth-century movement to establish medical libraries in Texas. It is concerned mostly with pre-origin efforts rather than with actual achievements. It is hoped that this study will provide the background for histories of the libraries which finally evolved as a result of the earlier effort and interest.     

Three ways of knowing: Agricultural knowledge systems of small-scale farmers in Africa with reference to Kenya

Research carried out in 2011 in Kirinyaga district, Kenya, shows how sense-making theory and methodology can be used to assess the use of local agricultural and external knowledge by small-scale farmers and its effects on small-scale agriculture. Two knowledge systems, the local knowledge system and the external or scientific knowledge system, are considered dominant. The two systems can be synergistic and small-scale farmers have mixed them in their farming activities. Blending systems improve communication, livelihoods, and economies within local communities, and increases their participation in development. Data were collected in focus group discussions with farmers' groups and interviews with individual farmers. Results show that most farmers in Kirinyaga use external agricultural information in their farming practices. A significant number use combined external agricultural information and local knowledge, which forms a third knowledge system. This third system requires the validation of the farmers' innovations and documentation of the knowledge for wider dissemination. Information providers should adopt policies that promote the use of the three knowledge systems by small-scale farmers.     

Museums at the crossroad: Contributing to dialogue, curiosity and wonder in natural history museums

The first natural history collections opened to the public were inspired by a sense of curiosity and wonder about the products of nature. They were ‘cabinets of curiosities’ that offered a first-hand interaction between owner and visitors. Nowadays, these two facets of the museum experience—dialogue and wonder—have been lost, in part, due to the information overload coming via the media and the impersonal nature of the museum visit. This paper offers some reflections on the evolution of the museum visit, suggests some ways to rediscover this ‘sense of wonder’ and provides ideas on how to promote two-way communication with museum visitors. Two examples of exhibitions are offered as illustrations of the points discussed.     

Insurgent citizens: the manufacture of police records in post-Katrina New Orleans and its implications for human rights

Inquiries into allegations of human rights abuses require a reliable corpus of evidence to proceed and hold violators accountable for their actions. The following article analyzes the 2005 police shootings that occurred on New Orleans’ Danziger Bridge in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, a case that illustrates the challenges confronting investigations into human rights violations in the USA. By examining an investigative police report, two survivors’ civil complaints, and federal court filings, the article argues that the methodical nature in which several police officers in post-Katrina New Orleans conspired to document the use of deadly force against several unarmed citizens demonstrates that police records created in the context of officer-involved shootings inhibit accountability processes as much as they facilitate them. The deliberate creation of such records, the article concludes, impairs the ability of a democratic nation to ensure human rights and bring their violators to account.     

整合档案文博资源 拓展社会服务空间——遂宁市档案馆与博物馆、文化馆联姻的做法

本文阐述了三馆“联姻”的重要意义，总结了因地制宜整合资源、信息共享、服务社会的做法。     

Towards efficient navigation in digital libraries: Leveraging popularity,semantics and communities to recommend scholarly articles

The growing popularity of digital libraries as a medium for communicating scientific discoveries has made a large variety of research articles easily accessible. However, this constitutes a putative issue of information overloading with recommendation engines providing a compelling solution to the problem. Scientific Recommender Systems alleviate this problem by suggesting potential papers of interest to a user. For any researcher seeking developments in their field, it is important that the recommended papers are of high quality, recent and related to the field of interest, which has been largely overlooked in prior approaches. This study thus proposes a graph-based hybrid recommendation technique, SPACE-R, that amalgamates quality, semantic similarity and community structure of nodes in a citation network. The creation of a popularity network, a derivative of a citation network, in combination with a two-stage candidate selection process involving community detection and neighbourhood network identification, contributes to an improvement in the accuracy and scalability of the proposed model. The incorporation of semantic similarity achieves the necessary diversity in recommendations. Experimental evaluations on four large datasets against five baselines reveal that SPACE-R achieves an improvement of up to 45.53%, 56.76%, 49.39%, 46.84% and 78.18% in recall, precision, MRR, mAP, and response time, respectively.     

Comparison of human performance by knowledge domain: Types, frequency, and sequencing of errors made while interacting with an information system

This study investigated whether measures of error type, frequency, and sequencing contribute to understanding how different types of domain knowledge influence human performance when using information systems. Micro-level analyses of errors were conducted to compare the performance of two groups using a geographical information system (GIS). Error types, error frequency, error sequencing, and task completion were measured and compared for the two groups. The two groups were similar in frequency of type of errors; both committed terminological and trial errors more frequently than the other 10 types. Error patterns or sequences were likewise similar, and domain of expertise did not affect task completion time. The group with domain knowledge in computer science showed a somewhat greater tendency to commit certain knowledge-based errors (KBEs), indicating an association between knowledge-based errors and procedural knowledge. The group with domain knowledge in geography committed certain rule-based errors (RBEs) more often, indicating an association between rule-based errors and declarative knowledge. Therefore, error type does hold promise as a measure of the relationship between domain knowledge type and human performance using information systems.