World Digital Libraries: An international Journal

We present here our findings of a study, part of larger research focusing on understanding the structure and composition of the academic community of Digital Library (DL). Using social network analysis, the present study analyses the structural features of editorial boards (EBs) of leading journals of DL. Following the premise that boundaries and directions of a field, especially an evolving one such as digital libraries is shaped by journals and their editors, we undertook a study of the editorial boards of the top 56 journals in the field of digital libraries. Techniques from social network analysis are applied to the data to reveal the structures and relationships within the EBs and journals of the DL community. The paper reveals the structure of the scientific grouping as well as the key players in the system and finds the ‘diversified convergence’ of fields. The focus is on the stars of the DL community as well as journals. We have compared the results with our previous studies carried out on different communication platforms of the DL world. Our results show that while computer science is the common thread, library and information science is the field that dominates, both in the scheme of things of top-ranking journals as well as editors.

This study is intended to investigate the perceptions of South Asian LIS community towards open source software (OSS) adoption in libraries by adopting a quantitative research design. An online questionnaire-based survey was conducted to reach the geographically dispersed population in the vast region of South Asia. A Likert-type scale with 20 items was designed to collect data. A total of 190 responses were gathered from four countries, namely, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan. The collected data were analysed using Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS). Descriptive statistics, independent sample t-Test, and ANOVA were used to draw conclusions. Attention was given to two independent variables: organization type (public/private sector), and library type (academic/public/special). The overall results suggested that respondents had positive perceptions towards OSS adoption in libraries. However, the results of the t-Test and ANOVA indicated that ‘organization type’ and ‘library type’ were insignificant factors, as there were no significant differences of perceptions found among the respondents on the basis of ‘organization type’ or ‘library type’. This study is the first of its kind from a South Asian perspective. Its findings are useful for the LIS community, library system developers, software developers, technology administrators, and library administrators.

Web Intelligence is a direction for scientific research that explores practical applications of Artificial Intelligence to the next generation of web-empowered systems. In this paper, we present an agentbased web intelligent tutoring system. The decision-making process conducted in our intelligent system is guided by knowledge source networks, based on synergistic integration of knowledge acquired from distributed sources in order to obtain new knowledge or complement insufficient knowledge. We have provided its possible application to logistics support in networked organizations in the form of a case study of routing plans design as a part of the logistics support task.

Digital information is created easily by a wide range of electronic devices. But, it is surprisingly difficult to preserve digital information over a long period, because both technology as well as relevant organizational context change over time. Without careful protection, there is a real risk that these data can neither be retrieved from old storage media, nor that its content be rendered from old file formats or understood. In the future, our society may indeed be confronted with a digital ‘black hole’. From the 1990s, scientists and curators started to design long-term digital preservation systems and strategies that shall enable the survival of digital information. This survey article gives an overview of the current main preservation strategies. We further discuss and compare those strategies. Finally, we design two procedures for making information accessible and manipulable over time. At the end of the article, some emerging challenges for preservation strategies are addressed briefly.

This article describes how the new e-model evolved a new role for the NKC service group, how this service group contributes to the e-content lifecycle management process and how the new model ensures that NKC’s global e-library services are available to all associates regardless of location. It also provides details on how the service group empowers end users to locate needed resources and produces a positive impact on the company’s success.

In this paper, we have focused on open source software in the field of libraries, and have highlighted the features of several useful open source library software.