I had the pleasure of reviewing Action Research and New Media (Hearn, G., Tacchi, J., Foth, M., & Lennie, J., 2009) and found it to provide a timely discussion of how action research methodology can be integrated into the exploration, development, and application of today’s new media. I found this text to be both relevant to my own research interests around the use of action research to better ...

Collaboration generally refers to people working together as a team towards a common goal. Here we discuss a different kind of collaboration: salesbased transactions which occur between two parties who have different goals, which are nevertheless mutually interdependent. Findings from an ethnographic field study of the way travel agents and customers build up complex products (e.g. round-thewor...

Pylearn2 is a machine learning research library. This does not just mean that it is a collection of machine learning algorithms that share a common API; it means that it has been designed for flexibility and extensibility in order to facilitate research projects that involve new or unusual use cases. In this paper we give a brief history of the library, an overview of its basic philosophy, a su...

Librarians have many and varied difficulties. For some library problems research is not the best remedy. Improved coordination, clarification of values, or drawing on existing research results may suffice. When research is indicated, it pays to be selective. Investing in research, like any other kind of investment, should be judged in terms of the probability of success, the likely delay before...

IN THE coMPLETION OF ITS MISSION the National Commission on the Financing of Postsecondary Education will be reviewing a broad spectrum of fiscal requirements. The supporting role of libraries may easily cause this sector of the total picture to be given minimal notice or even to be overlooked; yet the significance of the library's contribution to the educational and research processes and thei...

On September 3, 2003, the Medical Library Association adopted a policy statement on the role of expert searching in health sciences libraries. The policy highlighted the need for more thorough literature searching following the unfortunate death of a healthy research volunteer in a clinical trial that might have been prevented by a more complete literature review [1–3]. In light of this policy,...

This column gives an overview of current trends in digital library research under the following headings: digital library architecture, systems, tools and technologies; digital content and collections; metadata; interoperability; standards; knowledge organisation systems; users and usability; legal, organisational, economic, and social issues in digital libraries.

This paper presents a framework for evaluating the usability and effectiveness of digital libraries of various kinds. The framework consists of six attribute groupings (audience; institution; access; content; services; design and development). Each attribute grouping contains a number attributes expressed as continua, or dimensions. This framework allows us to think about digital libraries in a...