Ridge, M. (Ed.). (2014). Crowdsourcing our cultural heritage. Farnham: Ashgate.

Worley, L., & Spells, S. (2014). BIALL handbook of legal information management (2nd ed.). Farnham: Ashgate.

Editorial

Broughton, V. (2015). Essential classification (2nd ed.). London: Facet Publishing.

Research support for academics: Case studies of two Vietnamese Universities

With the introduction of quality assurance and accreditation requirements for Vietnamese universities, academics are under increasing pressure with regard to teaching workloads and improved research outcomes, for example, in the number and quality of research publications produced (Ninh, 2013; MoET, 2017a). Using two prominent Vietnamese universities as case studies, this paper explores the ways in which the libraries in the two universities currently provide support for research, the gaps in service provision, and the issues that impact on the ability of libraries to provide a high standard of service. The findings provided some insights into the type of strategies that could be adopted in the future, emphasising the need to involve collaboration with other university services, improvements in library staff research skills and knowledge, and ways of overcoming the barriers of organisational, cultural and social attitudes.

Implementing Koha at Regent University College, Ghana: A case study of options, opportunities and challenges

This paper shares the automation experience of Regent University College in relation to the selection and implementation of Koha library management system. It is a first time automation project which looked at the options available to Regent, a private university in Ghana. The background information and the literature review provide the context for the decision to choose the ‘independent’ route of a wholly in-house solution. Koha as an open source system meets the systems requirements and financial needs of Regent. In addition, it provided the Project team with the ‘sandbox’ in which to try its hands at offering the Koha solution to Regent. Examples from earlier adopters of Koha guided the selection and adoption and the ten-month account gives the detail of events leading to the selection and adoption. Lessons learnt include the development of staff expertise, working strengths of library and IT staff, and project management skills. The benefits are cost savings made for the parent institution and service improvement for the Regent Ghana Library. The major challenge was staff time and commitment to the full implementation of the project. Also, as the first reported case study on Koha in Ghana, it serves as guide to would be adopters of the library system

CILIPS Conference 2017 – Student Report

This article gathers the perceptions of three students attending the MSc in Information & Library Studies at the University of Strathclyde, after participating at the CILIPS Conference – Strategies for Success - held in Dundee on 6-7 June 2 017. The authors provide an informative overview of the presentations and workshops delivered on the second day of the event, enriched by personal viewpoints. Learning outcomes of a first experience as attendees of a professional conference are outlined, together with a reflection on current state and future developments of the information and library sector.

The development and use of a research self-efficacy scale to assess the effectiveness of a research training program for academic librarians

Research self-efficacy – or research confidence – has been shown to be a predictor of research productivity. There is also some evidence that it is a mediating factor between the research training environment and research productivity. To explore the connection between research training and research self-efficacy, the authors developed, validated, and later expanded a scale to measure research self-efficacy among academic librarians. They used the expanded 38-item scale to measure the research self-efficacy of participants from a three-year research training workshop for academic librarians, comparing results before and after the workshop. Participants experienced significant increases in research self-efficacy across all 38-questions, within the annual cohorts and across all three years. The question-level results were used to make changes to the summer workshops in Years 2 and 3, in order to improve the effectiveness of the summer workshop to increase research self-efficacy. This study confirms that a measurement of research self-efficacy can be a useful tool in assessing the effectiveness of research training and improving that training.

Where are the sleeping beauties and princes in educational technology journals?

Library Hi Tech, Ahead of Print.
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to introduce an affective computing-based method of identifying sleeping beauties and their princes in five educational technology journals. Design/methodology/approach This study develops an information technology-based methodology to analyze sleeping beauties in the field of educational technology. The authors seek to determine the characteristics of studies which trigger the awakening of sleeping beauties (called “princes”). The keywords and Hirsch index (H-index) are used as two essential analysis indicators. Findings Between 2000 and 2015, these five journals included 7,864 articles with a total of 77,700 citations and 24,312 keywords. This study identified articles as being in deep sleep (75.7 percent), less deep sleep (14.7 percent), and awakening (5.5 percent) states. According to the analytical results, 431 of 7,864 articles are qualified as “sleeping beauties.” Of the 431 sleeping beauties identified, 232 articles were awakened by trend princes, while 286 were awakened by H-index princes. A total of 128 sleeping beauties were awakened by both prince types. Besides, impact factors (IFs) of journals do not have a significant effect on the number of sleeping articles. Research limitations/implications There are two main research limitations in this study. The first one is the amount of target journals. Only five well-known educational technology journals are analyzed in this research. There may be more valuable sleeping publications in other journals not been found. The second limitation is that the authors merely pick up the lead author of citing papers as the indicator to determine the H-index prince. The contributions of the rest of authors are not taken are not taken into consideration. These limitations should be further studied. Originality/value To the knowledge, this study is the first one reporting the identification of sleeping beauty and princes in educational technology field. Furthermore, the authors devise an informational method to determine sleeping publications, sleeping beauty, and princes. A systematic analysis of five well-known journals in the field of educational technology field confirms the existence of “sleeping beauties.” It is reported that improvements to a journal’s IF are positively correlated to increased numbers of sleeping beauties being awakened. To reduce the number of such articles, or to reduce the overall sleeping duration, journal editors should not only seek to raise the journal’s IF, but also strategically select keywords for maximum visibility, and promote articles to high H-index authors.

Strategies for using ResearchGate to improve institutional research outcomes

Library Review, Volume 66, Issue 8/9, Page 726-739, November 2017.
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate how to help improve a higher education institution’s research profile by using existing resources and existing research outputs. Design/methodology/approach This study was based on quantitative data extracted manually from QS University Rankings-Asia 2016, the 2015 Ranking of Pakistani higher education institutions (HEI) and ResearchGate (RG). Resultant data were loaded into Excel and analyzed in SPSS version 21. Findings The results of this study indicate that, while there is no direct correlation between an institution’s national/international ranking and its respective RG score, there is a tendency for lower-ranked institutions to have a lower RG score. Research limitations/implications This study was limited to data extracted from RG; however, it would be useful to apply the same methodology to other relevant academic scholarly network sites (ASNS). Practical implications This paper has suggested strategies which may be of relevance to those institutions in other countries which are aspiring to lift their national ranking through improved research profiles. Libraries are important contributors to the support of institutional research goals. Originality/value There have been no previous published research studies on either the potential for ASNS to contribute to enhancing research outcomes for Pakistani HEI or the role that libraries could play in supporting these outcomes.