Experience and anecdotal evidence suggest that men and women use—or do not use—public libraries in different ways and amounts. Compared to extensive research on male and female differences in reading, computer use or within the context of the school library, there is relatively little descriptive research showing the library preferences of adult men and women. This study analyzed over 1,200 use...

The term libcitations was introduced by White et al. (2009) as a name for counts of libraries that have acquired a given book. Somewhat like citations, these library holdings counts, which vary greatly, can be taken as indicators of the book’s cultural impact. Torres-Salinas and Moed (2009) independently proposed the same measure under the name catalog inclusions. Both articles sought an altmet...

Libraries in large number are moving away from the traditional, vendor-sourced library catalogue software in favor of open source software that can be tailored to meet the community’s needs by the people who are most familiar with those needs: library staff. Open source products and some vendor products outside the traditional ILS market allow libraries to pool data created by users– tags, revi...

Roger C. Schonfeld is Director, Library and Scholarly Communication Program at Ithaka S+R; e-mail: [email protected]. © 2015 Roger C. Schonfeld, Attribution-NonCommercial (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) CC BY-NC. In many academic and professional fields, the society-sponsored journal has for a century had a unique position in scholarly discourse. An annual meeting and ...

The Twitter hashtag is a unique tagging format linking Tweets to user-defined concepts. The aim of the paper is to describe various applications of Twitter hashtags and to determine the functional characteristics of each application. Twitter hashtags can assist in archiving twitter content, provide different visual representations of tweets, and permit grouping by categories and facets. This st...

Until now, information retrieval (IR) managers have been absorbed by efforts to increase the amount and quality of scholarly deposits. Other pressing concerns have been to develop the software, standards, and other tools to insure access, exchange, and discovery of the works in the IRs. But building an IR without making plans for technological, organizational, and resourcing sustainability is l...

Many search systems provide users with recommended queries during online information seeking. Although usage statistics are often used to recommend queries, this information is usually not displayed to the user. In this study, we investigate how the presentation of this information impacts use of query suggestions. Twenty-three subjects used an experimental search system to find documents about...

This essay captures the reflections of several students who studied with Professor F. W. Lancaster during his tenure at the University of Illinois Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS) from 1970 to 1992 and beyond. It is organized around the emerging themes as expressed by a diverse group of students in the United States and from around the globe. These students have given ...

The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) has been widely adopted since its initial release in 2001. Initially developed as a means to federate access to diverse e-print archives through metadata harvesting and aggregation, the protocol has demonstrated its potential usefulness to a broad range of communities. Two years out from the release of the stable production...

One of the presumed advantages of next-generation library catalogue interfaces is that the user experience is improved—that it is both richer and more intuitive. Often the interfaces come with little or no user-facing documentation or imbedded “help” for patrons based on an assumption of ease of use and familiarity of the experience, having followed best practices in use on the Web. While there...