Internet Reference Services Quarterly

Our Year of Remote Reference: COVID19’s Impact on Reference Services and Librarians

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IFLA Journal: Table of Contents

Preservation storage in a flood damage mitigation effort at the National Library of France

IFLA Journal, Ahead of Print.
During a flood alert, the decision to evacuate a threatened collection of a library is an important one. If not thought out carefully, a hastily executed move can expose valuable collections to unforeseen threats. Although floods are usually slow to develop in Paris, the decision to make a preventive evacuation must be taken at the appropriate moment, considering the time needed for the relocation, the reality of the threat and the need for service continuity. In the context of its flood protection plan, the National Library of France has conceived a box model that contributes to saving time in case of a flood and prevents damage during an evacuation. Combining accessibility to documents with security requirements, this model can be implemented in different contexts.

IFLA Journal: Table of Contents

Applicability of traditional storage methods in Indonesia for today’s conservation practice

IFLA Journal, Ahead of Print.
This contribution aims to distil the experience from several conservation projects in Java, Indonesia, into a summary of methods in an attempt to arrive at some suggestions for best practice for the preservation of cultural heritage items in a tropical country. The related projects concerned a museum of contemporary art, traditional puppet theatre materials, a museum of traditional art and an archive.

IFLA Journal: Table of Contents

Public libraries’ responses to a global pandemic: Bangladesh perspectives

IFLA Journal, Ahead of Print.
The whole world is experiencing a new reality – the global outbreak of COVID-19, which has forced every institution into lockdown. This study aims to explore the responses of the government public libraries of Bangladesh. An online questionnaire was used to gather primary data from all of the 71 public libraries, which was followed by semi-structured interviews with eight librarians. The analysis suggests that more than 50% of the libraries had a low level of preparedness to face any crisis, and none of the libraries were fully prepared to manage this pandemic. All of the libraries were open for administrative functions without physical access to users. The study found that 52% of the libraries created public awareness through social media, while 46% supported local government organizations and 40% provided counselling services. Considering the existing challenges, the study recommends some measures for the public libraries of Bangladesh to cope with this situation.

IFLA Journal: Table of Contents

Dissemination of information in the COVID-19 era in university libraries in Nigeria

IFLA Journal, Ahead of Print.
In Nigeria, the first case of coronavirus (COVID-19) was reported on 27 February 2020 and as at date, there are about 13,000 confirmed cases across Nigeria. The spread of COVID-19 forced the lockdown of libraries. This study investigated the dissemination of information in meeting the information needs of library patrons during the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown of university libraries in Nigeria. Using a descriptive survey design, a sample population of 178 librarians from federal, state and private universities in Nigeria was questioned. The findings show that libraries disseminated information on personal hygiene to their patrons (hand-washing, cleanliness and the use of hand sanitizers) and sensitized the general public to COVID-19 by using posters and flyers. The findings also reveal that libraries disseminated information and links to e-resources to support patrons’ ongoing research. Moreover, It was revealed in the findings that lack of coordination, strike action by the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) and none subscription for data for librarians to work from home were challenges.

IFLA Journal: Table of Contents

Prevalence and source analysis of COVID-19 misinformation in 138 countries

IFLA Journal, Ahead of Print.
This study analysed 9657 pieces of misinformation that originated in 138 countries and were fact-checked by 94 organizations to understand the prevalence and sources of misinformation in different countries. The results show that India (15.94%), the USA (9.74%), Brazil (8.57%) and Spain (8.03%) are the four most misinformation-affected countries. Based on the results, it is presumed that the prevalence of COVID-19 misinformation can have a positive association with the COVID-19 situation. Social media (84.94%) produces the largest amount of misinformation, and the Internet (90.5%) as a whole is responsible for most of the COVID-19 misinformation. Moreover, Facebook alone produces 66.87% of the misinformation among all social media platforms. Of all the countries, India (18.07%) produced the largest amount of social media misinformation, perhaps thanks to the country’s higher Internet penetration rate, increasing social media consumption and users’ lack of Internet literacy.

IFLA Journal: Table of Contents

Advocacy of the Sustainable Development Goals in Jordanian academic libraries

IFLA Journal, Ahead of Print.
In view of the increased importance of the Sustainable Development Goals and the limited number of public libraries in Jordan, it is important to investigate the role and practices of academic libraries in promoting knowledge and skills to support the Sustainable Development Goals in Jordan. It is also important to explore the challenges that might hinder the accomplishment of the Sustainable Development Goals. The results of this study support the fact that academic libraries can significantly contribute to the Sustainable Development Goals (M = 3.53) by providing access to relevant and up-to-date information (M = 4.16) and giving training on information literacy (M = 4.03). Access to information contributes to the quality of life of society (M = 4.41). This article provides insights for academic librarians and decision-makers into disseminating measures for promoting knowledge and skills related to the Sustainable Development Goals among students and the public community in Jordan. The study recommends some relevant strategies, such as the collaboration of academic libraries with governmental and health institutions to support the realization of the Sustainable Development Goals in Jordan.

IFLA Journal: Table of Contents

Onboarding in the age of COVID-19

IFLA Journal, Ahead of Print.
Due to the transition to a remote/virtual working environment, the process of onboarding new hires has to make a shift to the remote/virtual as well. In this article, a review of past and present practices at a mid-sized academic library is conducted, as well as an autoethnographic reflection of a new hire’s experience with onboarding. Best practices and suggestions are presented to help inform other libraries that are also going through a remote/virtual onboarding experience.

Internet Reference Services Quarterly

A Structural Equation Modeling Approach to Evaluating Library Personnel Intention to Adopt Big Data Technology in Nigerian Academic Libraries

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IFLA Journal: Table of Contents

A review of the library and information science profession in the Maldives: Development, challenges and opportunities

IFLA Journal, Ahead of Print.
The Republic of Maldives, a small island developing state in the Indian Ocean, has achieved upper-middle-income and high human development category status, and one of the strongest information and communications technology infrastructures in South Asia. However, the country’s library and information science sector, which saw its inception over seven decades ago, has yet to advance beyond the initial development phase. This article traces the emergence of the library and information science sector in the country and draws attention to the myriad challenges faced by it. The article is also an attempt to draw the attention of government decision-makers and motivate them to understand and resolve the difficulties faced by the library and information science sector through engaging library and information science employers, educational institutions, professional trainers, and library and information science professionals. Some concerns are identified and five key action areas with associated action steps are suggested. These may resonate with other small developing countries that are facing similar scenarios.

IFLA Journal: Table of Contents

Expanding digital academic library and archive services at the University of Calgary in response to the COVID-19 pandemic

IFLA Journal, Ahead of Print.
Despite the uncertain challenges facing libraries of all types during the COVID-19 pandemic, new best practices and innovative ways of approaching services have emerged. Including the groundbreaking Taylor Family Digital Library in 2011, the University of Calgary Libraries and Cultural Resources has been contributing towards the ongoing development of the digital academic library. The COVID-19 pandemic has necessitated a rapid leveraging of digital skills, platforms, expertise, and models of service delivery to continue providing exceptional and transformative experiences for the University of Calgary community. The initiatives discussed in this article include online work teams, virtual 360-degree tours, the online library chat service, digital collections agreements, and remote services for archives and special collections.

IFLA Journal: Table of Contents

Curation of manuscripts in the tropical savanna climate of north-eastern India

IFLA Journal, Ahead of Print.
The tropical savanna climate of north-eastern India has special features due to the region’s alternative weather and geographical location. There are more than 50,000 rare manuscripts stored in different manuscript preservation centres in this region. The National Mission for Manuscripts has taken many initiatives to preserve these manuscripts, including digitization. However, no significant changes related to the physical condition of the manuscripts have been observed. Most of the manuscripts are deteriorating naturally due to improper care. The process of the deterioration of manuscripts due to the effects of the environment, weather and climate can be minimized by taking appropriate measures. This article discusses the status of the physical condition of the manuscripts in this region along with the effects of climate and weather. It also discusses the need for special care of the manuscripts in this geographical location with simple preventive measures or techniques.

IFLA Journal: Table of Contents

Users’ experiences of reference services in Thai academic libraries

IFLA Journal, Ahead of Print.
This research aimed to analyse the user experiences of reference services in academic libraries based on the marketing mix 7Ps concept. The sample was instructors and students from eight national research universities in Thailand. Questionnaires were returned by 337 instructors (86.41%) and 399 students (100%). The results show that the component of the marketing mix 7Ps that was most important for reference services according to the users was people (β = .881), followed by place (β = .868), promotion (β = .863), product (β = .856), price (β = .854), process (β = .805) and physical environment (β = .789). When considering product, the most important services were counselling, research information seeking, instruction and answering, respectively. The results of this marketing mix 7Ps study reveal users’ attitudes with regard to various aspects that can be integrated with service design and create a model for developing library service innovation.

Information and Organization

From sites to vibes: Technology and the spatial production of coworking spaces

Publication date: Available online 28 August 2021

Source: Information and Organization

Author(s): Nada Endrissat, Aurélie Leclercq-Vandelannoitte

Information and Organization

Who needs the help desk? Tackling one's own technological problem via self IT service

Publication date: September 2021

Source: Information and Organization, Volume 31, Issue 3

Author(s): Sam Zaza, Iris Junglas, Deborah J. Armstrong

Information and Organization

Overcoming resource challenges in peer-production communities through bricolage: The case of HomeNets

Publication date: September 2021

Source: Information and Organization, Volume 31, Issue 3

Author(s): Aljona Zorina

Information and Organization

Editorial Board

Publication date: September 2021

Source: Information and Organization, Volume 31, Issue 3

Author(s):

Information and Organization

Engaging with uncertainty: Information practices in the context of disease surveillance in Burkina Faso

Publication date: September 2021

Source: Information and Organization, Volume 31, Issue 3

Author(s): Stine Loft Rasmussen, Sundeep Sahay

International Journal of Metadata, Semantics and Ontologies

Applying cross-data set identity reasoning for producing URI embeddings over hundreds of RDF data sets

Applying cross-data set identity reasoning for producing URI embeddings over hundreds of RDF data sets
Michalis Mountantonakis; Yannis Tzitzikas
International Journal of Metadata, Semantics and Ontologies, Vol. 15, No. 1 (2021) pp. 1 - 22
There is a proliferation of approaches that exploit RDF data sets for creating URI embeddings, i.e., embeddings that are produced by taking as input URI sequences (instead of simple words or phrases), since they can be of primary importance for several tasks (e.g., machine learning tasks). However, existing techniques exploit either a single or a few data sets for creating URI embeddings. For this reason, we introduce a prototype, called LODVec, which exploits LODsyndesis for enabling the creation of URI embeddings by using hundreds of data sets simultaneously, after enriching them with the results of cross-data set identity reasoning. By using LODVec, it is feasible to produce URI sequences by following paths of any length (according to a given configuration), and the produced URI sequences are used as input for creating embeddings through word2vec model. We provide comparative results for evaluating the gain of using several data sets for creating URI embeddings, for the tasks of classification and regression, and for finding the most similar entities to a given one.

International Journal of Metadata, Semantics and Ontologies

Children's art museum collections as Linked Open Data

Children's art museum collections as Linked Open Data
Konstantinos Kotis; Sotiris Angelis; Maria Chondrogianni; Efstathia Marini
International Journal of Metadata, Semantics and Ontologies, Vol. 15, No. 1 (2021) pp. 60 - 70
It has been recently argued that it is rather beneficial to cultural institutions to provide their datasets as Linked Open Data, to achieve cross-referencing, interlinking, and integration with other datasets in the LOD cloud. In this paper, we present the Greek Children's Art Museum (GCAM) linked dataset, along with dataset and vocabulary statistics, as well as lessons learned from the process of transforming the collections to HTML-embedded structured data using the Europeana Data Model and the Schema.org model. The dataset consists of three cultural collections of 121 child artworks (paintings), including detailed descriptions and interlinks to external datasets. In addition to the presentation of GCAM data and the lessons learned from the experimentation of non-ICT experts with LOD paradigm, the paper introduces a new metric for measuring datasets quality in terms of links to and from other datasets.

International Journal of Metadata, Semantics and Ontologies

Analysis of structured data on Wikipedia

Analysis of structured data on Wikipedia
Johny Moreira; Everaldo Costa Neto; Luciano Barbosa
International Journal of Metadata, Semantics and Ontologies, Vol. 15, No. 1 (2021) pp. 71 - 86
Wikipedia has been widely used for information consumption or for implementing solutions using its content. It contains primarily unstructured text about entities, but it can also contain infoboxes, which are structured attributes describing these entities. Owing to its structural nature, infoboxes have been shown useful to many applications. In this work, we perform an extensive data analysis on different aspects of Wikipedia structured data: infoboxes, templates and categories, aiming to uncover data issues and limitations, and to guide researchers in the use of these structured data. We devise a framework to process, index and query the Wikipedia data, using it to analyse different scenarios such as the popularity of infoboxes, their size distribution and usage across categories. Some of our findings are: only 54% of Wikipedia articles have infoboxes; there is a considerable amount of geographical and temporal information in infoboxes; and there is great heterogeneity of infoboxes across a same category.

International Journal of Metadata, Semantics and Ontologies

An ontology-driven perspective on the emotional human reactions to social events

An ontology-driven perspective on the emotional human reactions to social events
Danilo Cavaliere; Sabrina Senatore
International Journal of Metadata, Semantics and Ontologies, Vol. 15, No. 1 (2021) pp. 23 - 38
Social media has become a fulcrum for sharing information on everyday-life events: people, companies, and organisations express opinions about new products, political and social situations, football matches, and concerts. The recognition of feelings and reactions to events from social networks requires dealing with great amounts of data streams, especially for tweets, to investigate the main sentiments and opinions that justify some reactions. This paper presents an emotion-based classification model to extract feelings from tweets related to an event or a trend, described by a hashtag, and build an emotional concept ontology to study human reactions to events in a context. From the tweet analysis, terms expressing a feeling are selected to build a topological space of emotion-based concepts. The extracted concepts serve to train a multi-class SVM classifier that is used to perform soft classification aimed at identifying the emotional reactions towards events. Then, an ontology allows arranging classification results, enriched with additional DBpedia concepts. SPARQL queries on the final knowledge base provide specific insights to explain people's reactions towards events. Practical case studies and test results demonstrate the applicability and potential of the approach.

International Journal of Metadata, Semantics and Ontologies

Persons, GLAM institutes and collections: an analysis of entity linking based on the COURAGE registry

Persons, GLAM institutes and collections: an analysis of entity linking based on the COURAGE registry
Ghazal Faraj; András Micsik
International Journal of Metadata, Semantics and Ontologies, Vol. 15, No. 1 (2021) pp. 39 - 49
It is an important task to connect encyclopaedic knowledge graphs by finding and linking the same entity nodes. Various available automated linking solutions cannot be applied in situations where data is sparse, private or a high degree of correctness is expected. Wikidata has grown into a leading linking hub collecting entity identifiers from various registries and repositories. To get a picture of connectability, we analysed the linking methods and results between the COURAGE registry and Wikidata, VIAF, ISNI and ULAN. This paper describes our investigations and solutions while mapping and enriching entities in Wikidata. Each possible mapped pair of entities received a numeric score of reliability. Using this score-based matching method, we tried to minimise the need for human decisions, hence we introduced the term human decision window for the mappings where neither acceptance nor refusal can be made automatically and safely. Furthermore, Wikidata has been enriched with related COURAGE entities and bi-directional links between mapped persons, organisations, collections, and collection items. We also describe the findings on coverage and quality of mapping among the above mentioned authority databases.

International Journal of Metadata, Semantics and Ontologies

Documenting flooding areas calculation: a PROV approach

Documenting flooding areas calculation: a PROV approach
Monica De Martino; Alfonso Quarati; Sergio Rosim; Laércio Massaru Namikawa
International Journal of Metadata, Semantics and Ontologies, Vol. 15, No. 1 (2021) pp. 50 - 59
Flooding events related to waste-lake dam ruptures are one of the most threatening natural disasters in Brazil. They must be managed in advance by public institutions through the use of adequate hydrographic and environmental information. Although the Open Data paradigm offers an opportunity to share hydrographic data sets, their actual reuse is still low because of metadata quality. Our previous work highlighted a lack of detailed provenance information. The paper presents an Open Data approach to improve the release of hydrographic data sets. We discuss a methodology, based on W3C recommendations, for documenting the provenance of hydrographic data sets, considering the workflow activities related to the study of flood areas caused by the waste-lakes breakdowns. We provide an illustrative example that documents, through W3C PROV metadata model, the generation of flooding area maps by integrating land use classification, from Sentinel images, with hydrographic data sets produced by the Brazilian National Institute for Space Research.

International Journal of Information Management

Psychological determinants of users’ adoption and word-of-mouth recommendations of smart voice assistants

Publication date: Available online 14 August 2021

Source: International Journal of Information Management

Author(s): Anubhav Mishra, Anuja Shukla, Sujeet Kumar Sharma