Rania Siatri

The use of marketing concepts in library services: a literature review

Purpose – Marketing supports the reaching of organizational goals by focusing on the identification and satisfaction of customer needs, thus it can also contribute considerably in achieving the objectives of non-profit organizations such as libraries. The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the literature on the incorporation of marketing notions and the implementation of marketing techniques in library management. It reviews definitions, present different opposing views, marketing issues, social media and Web 2.0 and opinions on the adoption of marketing in a non-profit organization environment, and examines different successful examples of marketing implementation, concentrating on the gains resulting from such a move. Design/methodology/approach – A thorough literature search on various databases and on various aspects of this topic was reviewed. The literature review is organised on emerging themes directly drawn from the literature, thematically and chronologically within each section....

Marketing applications in Greek academic library services

Purpose – This paper aims to describe marketing methods, techniques and activities used in Greek academic libraries and their staff perceptions regarding the importance of marketing applications. In addition, it identifies factors which hinder the uptake of marketing, and investigates the evaluation methods used. Design/methodology/approach – There are 151 central and departmental academic libraries in Greece, yet there is limited published research concerning their marketing activities. Therefore, it was intended to discover the reasons behind the low/non-use of marketing in Greek academic libraries. A three-section questionnaire was designed as the main research tool and distributed to 151 libraries. Survey results are presented and analysed according to the structure of the questionnaire. Findings – Whilst marketing techniques and methods are used in academic libraries worldwide, the spread of marketing in Greek academic libraries proved to be limited. Basic operational problems were identified as the ...

Greek academic librarians' perceptions of the impact of Google on their role as information providers

The increased popularity of Google search engine in the daily routine in one’s workplace and in the academic information seeking process is undeniable. ‘Googling’ challenges the traditional skills of librarians as information providers and the role of library and information service provision in the digital era. This paper reports on the preliminary findings of a qualitative study investigating the perceptions of Greek academic librarians on the impact of Google and ‘Googling’ on their role as information providers in the digital era. To address the needs of this study a set of semi structured interviews was employed with library managers and librarians. The findings of this study revealed that Greek academic librarians use mainly Google Search for its easy information provision but advise on adequate training on Google sources evaluation before use. It was suggested that libraries need to support life-long learning, and enhance their services quality in order to survive. Additionally, IT and managerial skills acquisition seems to be vital. Research also revealed the essential role of LIS departments in the provision of life-long learning and the organisation of training programmes.

A review of the library and information services in Greece: current developments that shape LIS education

This paper provides a brief review of the development of Greek libraries in order to provide a context for the later papers on education for library and information studies in Greece.

A Survey on the Importance of Learning Object Metadata for Relevance Judgment

The purpose of this study was to investigate university students’ perceptions about the usefulness - importance of learning object metadata elements of the UK LOM Core application profile when judging the relevance of learning objects. In order to address this objective an online questionnaire survey was conducted among university students using a clustered sampling technique. A total of 252 students respondent to the questionnaire. Participants represented different disciplines (for example, from Humanities & Social Sciences to Sciences & Engineering), levels of familiarization with the web and educational level (postgraduates and undergraduates). The results showed that participants preferred content related and educational metadata elements as well as metadata elements about the date and the language of a learning object as opposed to technical metadata elements or metadata elements about the version of the learning object. The conclusions show that these findings can have implications in the design and use of learning object metadata schemas for students in the UK Higher Education.

Metadata and Semantic Research

The dynamic and distributed nature of the Semantic Web demands for methodologies and systems fostering collective participation to the evolution of datasets. In collaborative and iterative processes for dataset development, it is important to keep track of individual changes for provenance. Different scenarios may require mechanisms to foster consensus, resolve conflicts between competing changes, reversing or ignoring changes etc. In this paper, we perform a landscape analysis of version control for RDF datasets, emphasizing the impor‐ tance of change reversion to support validation. Firstly, we discuss different representations of changes in RDF datasets and introduce higher-level perspec‐ tives on change. Secondly, we analyze diverse approaches to version control. We conclude by focusing on validation, characterizing it as a separate need from the mere preservation of different versions of a dataset.