Elena Maceviciute

Assessing digital preservation frameworks: the approach of the SHAMAN project

How can we deliver infrastructure capable of supporting the preservation of digital objects, as well as the services that can be applied to those digital objects, in ways that future unknown systems will understand? A critical problem in developing systems is the process of validating whether the delivered solution effectively reflects the validated requirements. This is a challenge also for the EU-funded SHAMAN project, which aims to develop an integrated preservation framework using grid-technologies for distributed networks of digital preservation systems, for managing the storage, access, presentation, and manipulation of digital objects over time. Recognising this, the project team ensured that alongside the user requirements an assessment framework was developed. This paper presents the assessment of the SHAMAN demonstrators for the memory institution, industrial design and engineering and eScience domains, from the point of view of users needs and fitness for purpose. An innovative synergistic use of TRAC criteria, DRAMBORA risk registry and mitigation strategies, iRODS rules and information system models requirements has been designed, with the underlying goal to define associated policies, rules and state information, and make them wherever possible machine-encodable and enforceable. The described assessment framework can be valuable not only for the implementers of this project preservation framework, but for the wider digital preservation community, because it provides a holistic approach to assessing and validating the preservation of digital libraries, digital repositories and data centres.

Research libraries in a modern environment

– The purpose of this paper is to examine the monographic literature related to developments in research libraries within recent years and the strategies that they are adopting to deal with change. The main aim is to identify any visibly established directions along which research libraries adapt to their social and organizational environments. , – Qualitative content analysis was applied to identify topics emerging from the texts. The chosen texts were read and topics signifying directions of change in the immediate environment of research libraries were mapped. This initial topic map was used for ascertaining the reactions of research libraries to identified changes. The activities of libraries directed to future anticipated changes were noted separately. , – The review shows the surprising resilience of research libraries and their ability to change within a short period of time. This ability signifies that research and academic libraries as organizations perfectly adapt to the incessant transformations of current times, contrary to the widely spread stereotypical image of them as conservative institutions. At the same time, they seem to be keeping true to their core of mediating services to researchers and to their place in the chain of scholarly communication. , – The article identifies the main directions of transformation of research libraries and outlines their potential roles in the future of digital scholarly communication.

Trust in Healthcare: An Information Perspective

This article reports on an exploratory analysis of existing data obtained through a national survey carried out in Sweden. The survey questionnaire seeks information on a wide range of issues, including healthcare, library use and Internet use. The analysis presented here explores the relationship among these variables and the concept of trust in healthcare institutions. The results indicate that most of the correlations theoretically suggested were very small and that trust in health institutions in general is high but not strongly related to standard demographic variables found in a general survey of a large population. This exploratory study suggests that more specific indicators of health, experience from health institutions and health-related media exposure are needed to test, in greater depth, the relationships between information exposure, health and attitudes towards health institutions.

EURIDICE project: The evaluation of image database use in online learning

Digital images and image databases can support a wide range of learning objectives. The EURIDICE project aims to assess the requirements for the image databases, on one hand, and to incorporate images into HEI teaching, on the other. The aim of this paper is to analyse the tasks and process of evaluation of the EURIDICE image repository offered for e-learning purposes as a part of the whole Project. It relates image use to the e-learning methodologies adopted at the partner universities, describes the project and the evaluation process that was designed to assess the contents and scope, the search capabilities, indexing and description of images, and incorporation of the offered resource into the study process. The results of evaluation by one educational partner show that image databases can be effectively integrated with e-learning platforms. It also makes clear that the requirements for image databases expressed by students and teachers are high. Therefore, the design of the database and retrieval system has to meet these demands before the service could be fully developed on a commercial basis.

E-Books in Swedish Public Libraries: Policy Implications

The aims of the paper are: review the situation of e-books delivery in the Swedish public libraries (as it looked at the end of 2012); identify the barriers that public libraries encounter in providing access to e-books; highlight the policy-related problems of e-book provision through public libraries. A survey was carried out in October, 2012 of all public libraries in Sweden. 291 questionnaires were issued. 185 were completed, response rate was 63.3%. The provision of an e-book service has arisen as a result of either demand or an ideological belief that the ethos of democratic values and equality of access requires libraries to offer material in all media. Librarians find the situation of e-books provision through libraries unsatisfactory: the provider of titles removes them from the catalogue without warning or explanation, there are too few titles for children and students, and access to popular titles is delayed.

Effective Use of Repositories: A Case for Information Literacy Development?

The investigation reported here use statistical analysis of a repository database, analysis of policy documents, interviews with policy makers and staff identified as research active, and an online questionnaire directed at all research active staff in the institution. The results of the research suggest that not all university staff are fully information literate and that university administrators, aided by the university library, need to ensure that everyone is aware of the benefits of open access publishing and the role of repositories, if the institution’s policies are to be implemented effectively.