Sandra Romagnoli

Information society and information technology

Abstract The article studies the use of new technologies to provide high value-added services, in the context of public libraries in Buenos Aires and surrounding areas. It presents a diagnosis of the current situation, aiming to determine whether these information units are prepared to respond to the needs of the community they serve within the information society. A survey with closed questions is administered based on the following categories: general information, resources, library automation, bibliographic control, networks integration, electronic services, and financing sources. Seventy-three responses were provided by the libraries studied. The analysis verifies the lack of standards looking towards information exchange and the distributed processing of information, the absence of information quality control, and the limited exploitation of new information and communication technologies.

ILS vs. DBMS in Latin American Web OPACs: Discriminant Analysis Applied to User Interface

This chapter reports on the research project “Online Public Access Catalogs (OPACs) in Mercosur” Project F054, (UBACYT Scientific Program 20042007, Universidad de Buenos Aires). The aim of the project was to investigate the use of new information technologies in libraries in a selected geographical grouping. The project revealed that only minimal services were available through most online public access catalogs in libraries of Mercosur member and associate countries. Further, the survey indicated that many of them were in an early stage of implementation (Barber et al. 2006, 2007a, 2007b, 2008). According to international trends catalog functions should be based on user needs. Consequently, results provided by this research offer relevant information that could be taken into account by libraries in the region when software and functionalities were being evaluated and/or considered. Given the many challenges that libraries face in the information age, the aim of Project F036 – “Online public access catalogs (OPACs) in Latin America” (UBACYT Scientific Program 2008-2010, Universidad de Buenos Aires)