Endstation Fitnessstudio? Die Situation der britischen Bibliotheken im Nachhall der Finanzkrise

Der Artikel beleuchtet die Sparmassnahmen in Grossbritannien seit Ausbruch der Finanzkrise 2008 und ihre Auswirkungen auf das Bibliothekswesen. Nach der Regierungsübernahme der Konservativen Partei 2010 wurde ein rigoroses Sparprogramm initiiert, das die verschiedenen Bibliothekstypen in unterschiedlichem Maße betraf: Für die kommunal finanzierten Public Libraries hatten sie verheerende, teils existenzielle Auswirkungen, die Nationalbibliotheken waren ebenfalls stark, wenn auch unterschiedlich betroffen. Die Universitätsbibliotheken hingegen kamen etwas besser durch die Krise, vor allem weil ihre Trägerorganisationen die fehlenden staatlichen Mittel durch die Erhöhung von Studiengebühren ausgleichen konnten. The article analyzes the impact of the Austerity Programme on the different types of libraries of the United Kingdom, initiated by the Conservative Party in 2010. For the Public Libraries it had severe consequences that resulted in closings in many cases. While the development of the National Libraries wasn’t totally equal, they suffered budget cuttings and staff reduction as well, while the University Libraries went through the crisis quite unharmed, mainly because their mother organizations managed to compensate cuttings of public funding by raising tuition fees.

Umgang mit Sparprogrammen in öffentlichen Verwaltungen der Schweiz

In öffentlichen Verwaltungen der Schweiz und ihren internen und angegliederten Betrieben werden hin und wieder Sparprogramme durchgeführt. Als Teil der öffentlichen Verwaltung Kanton Basel-Stadt wird exemplarisch für die Universitätsbibliothek Basel aufgezeigt, welche Optimierungsmethoden beim Umgang mit einem allfälligen Sparprogramm in Frage kommen könnten. Es sind Optimierungsmethoden, welche im Hinblick auf die Einführung des „Neuen Führungsmodells Bund 2017 (NFB 17)“ bei der Schulung von höheren Kadern der Bundesverwaltung von 2013 bis 2016 prioritär zu Grunde gelegt wurden. In Swiss public administrations and their organizational units, savings programs may be implemented from time to time. As part of the public administration of Basel, the Basel University Library was chosen to show examples of which methods could be considered for a potential savings program. These methods were given priority with regard to the introduction of the “Neues Führungsmodell Bund 2017 (NFB 17)” in the training of senior cadres of the Federal Administration from 2013 to 2016.

Editorial: Sparzeiten in Bibliotheken / Austerity for libraries

In Open Access’s Long Shadow – A view from the Humanities

Historians have been in recent years among the most vocal critics against open access to scientific literature. Discussing the controversies they have triggered in Europe and in the USA, we argue that research on open access should be broadened chronologically and thematically. The first section recalls the very first debate on open access that took place among library professionals at the turn of the XXth century and points similarities with the present situation. The second section reviews the criticisms levelled by humanities disciplines against mandatory regulations on open access. The third section argues that the potential of open access for science democratization and knowledge dissemination may not be taken for granted and need further empirical assessment.

Publications en libre accès des universités du Burkina Faso: analyse d’impact et visibilité internationale

Nous avons rendu disponibles, en libre accès sur internet, les collections de mémoires et de thèses soutenues à l’Université de Bobo Dioulasso et à l’Université de Ouagadougou 1 (Burkina Faso). L’analyse des données de consultation (« fichiers de log » présents sur le serveur hôte) permet de produire plusieurs indicateurs concernant l’impact et la visibilité internationale des documents constituants les collections. Nous présentons la répartition temporelle et géographique des consultations, les fréquences des accès spécifiques à chaque document, la nature des questions, l’impact des moteurs de recherche. Ces résultats montrent qu’en mettant à disposition sur Internet des documents scientifiques produits par des institutions africaines, l’importance de leur visibilité et de leur impact peuvent être démontrés en utilisant les données de consultation disponibles sur le serveur. La comparaison de ces données avec celles disponibles pour les documents en libre accès de l’Institut français pour le développement (IRD) permet de conclure que les niveaux de consultation pour les publications scientifiques des pays du « Nord » et du « Sud » sont assez similaires.

Two major collections of dissertations and theses defended at the University of Bobo Dioulasso and the University of Ouagadougou 1 have been made available open access on the Internet. The data analysis of accesses available via the host server makes it possible to produce several indicators concerning the impact and the international visibility of the available documents. We will present the temporal and geographical distribution of the consultations, the specific frequencies for each document, the nature of the questions, the impact of the search engines. These results seem to show that by making available on the Internet scientific documents produced by African institutions their visibility and impact are demonstrable with the data collected by the server. A comparison of these data with those available for the open access documents of the French Institute for Development (IRD) show that the levels of consultation for scientific publications from "Northern" and "Southern" countries are quite similar.

Editorial: Libraries in African Studies

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Basler Africa Portal

The article aims to present the project "Africa Portal" in which five institutions located in Basel create an integrated search interface in order to make their data accessible. Following a description of the process concerning normalizing different data structures and formats, the article also focuses on the outcomes and the possible developments of the "Africa Portal" in the future.

The legal implications of providing information services in PUL in Kenya

This is a research paper on Public University Libraries (PULs) which are charged with the responsibility of providing the university community with information for the parent institutions’ core activities of teaching, learning, study and research. In carrying out this responsibility, PULs have to address issues of law as these relate to the provision of information services. The purpose of this study was to investigate the legal implications of providing information services in public university libraries in Kenya. The study applied the qualitative methodology but also used a limited application of quantitative approach with issues of statistical significance. Basing on a sample of 77 librarians from public universities libraries, data was collected and analyzed using the narrative method. The study established the actual and potential implications of laws that support information (UDHR, CK, FOI, IFLA and WSIS declarations) and those that put limits to information (Copyright law, penal code, Official Secrets Act). Although librarians were knowledgeable and had skills regarding their work, evidence from the study showed that they needed to extend their knowledge and understanding in the area of laws that have implications on the provision of information as a way of enhancing their work. In conclusion the paper notes that there is scope for librarians, using their wealth of knowledge and expertise, to seek interaction with policy makers and make relevant and useful contribution on law and information. These findings are significant in that they give general direction with regard to law and the provision of information services. The research highlights the importance for librarians to create links with policy makers in order to set up a relationship with mutual benefits.

Measuring the Societal Impact of Research with Altmetrics: An Experiment

All research at Dutch universities is assessed on a regular basis following the Standard Evaluation Protocol (SEP). From 2015 onwards, one of the protocol’s criteria for measuring research success is the societal impact of the research. As traditional metrics do not provide an indication of public reach and influence, the African Studies Centre in Leiden (ASCL) decided to experiment with the new suite of alternative metrics – altmetrics – that measure the number of times a research output is viewed, downloaded or mentioned online. I analyzed the presence of altmetric indicators in 148 publications using Altmetric.com and evaluated the content that Altmetric.com tracked. This paper describes the ASCL Altmetric experiment and reports on its results.

Transfer Learning for OCRopus Model Training on Early Printed Books

A method is presented that significantly reduces the character error rates for OCR text obtained from OCRopus models trained on early printed books when only small amounts of diplomatic transcriptions are available. This is achieved by building from already existing models during training instead of starting from scratch. To overcome the discrepancies between the set of characters of the pretrained model and the additional ground truth the OCRopus code is adapted to allow for alphabet expansion or reduction. The character set is now capable of flexibly adding and deleting characters from the pretrained alphabet when an existing model is loaded. For our experiments we use a self-trained mixed model on early Latin prints and the two standard OCRopus models on modern English and German Fraktur texts. The evaluation on seven early printed books showed that training from the Latin mixed model reduces the average amount of errors by 43% and 26%, compared to training from scratch with 60 and 150 lines of ground truth, respectively. Furthermore, it is shown that even building from mixed models trained on standard data unrelated to the newly added training and test data can lead to significantly improved recognition results.