Zahid Ashraf Wani

University libraries: step towards a web based knowledge management system

Purpose – Web based knowledge management systems have opened new arrays in the present web based world. Because of innumerable features, they have become the first hand choice of every organization. The objective of this paper is to propose a web based knowledge management system for university libraries that will support the creation, organization, storage, dissemination and utilization of the institutions digital knowledge assets. The paper also aims to illustrate the requirements of a web based knowledge management system (WBKMS) for university libraries along with their key advantages.Design/methodology/approach – Existing web based knowledge management systems were surveyed and a model framework was developed keeping in view the prevailing loopholes in the present systems.Findings – The study evolves into a model web based knowledge management system catering for the needs of the users in the present bit and byte world.Research limitations/implications – Further research can be conducted into design...

A review of eminence of scientometric indicators in scientific research productivity

The evaluation and assessment of scientific research output is essential to determine its success, eminence, growth and development of an individual or an institution. A reasonable and unbiased research assessment should reflect the diversity and impact of research output. In this background, productivity and quality of scholarly content offer a strong foundation for its pragmatic evaluation. The citations along-with the number of scientific publications are primarily used to evaluate research content. With the passage of time, the field of metric sciences emerged to evaluate and assess scholarly content. These have come up with desired indexes and indicators that have become integral to the evaluation process. The science indicators, in this context, are of great importance as they offer researchers, research organizations, funding agencies etc. with an empirical measure to evaluate the performance of research output. In this milieu, an endeavor is made to review the literature on the various aspects of scientometric indicators.

Citation Analysis in Open Access World: A Case Study of Health Science Open Access Repositories

The study made an attempt to carry out the citation analysis of primary literature archived in select Open Access Institutional repositories in the field of Health Science listed by Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR). A total of 99 articles harvested from three select Health Science repositories were tested in two primary literature indexing databases, viz., Web of Science and Google Scholar for citation analysis. Among these, Google Scholar could not retrieve three (10.34 per cent) articles while for Web of Science this number goes to 26 (89.66 per cent). The number of citations received by the deposited contents is higher in Google Scholar (59.57 per cent) as compared to Web of Science (40.42 per cent). However, the average citation per article is higher in Web of Science (3.24) in comparison to Google Scholar (2.53). There are 27 articles in the resource corpus which have not received any citation. Number of such articles in Google Scholar and Web of Sciences are 20 (20.83 per cent) and 7 (9.59 per cent), respectively.

Digital Library of Kashmiri Willow Wicker Items: A Small Step towards Preservation of Culture

The handicrafts of Kashmir are famous throughout the world. Kashmiri willow wicker items are losing market due to the negligence from the stakeholders of the state. This craft needs to be revamped in order to preserve our cultural heritage. The present study is a small effort in this regard and attempts to show how the culture can be preserved in this modern age with the help of electronic media. A detailed survey was conducted to find out the products made by willow wicker. All the product-related information to these products was accumulated in the form of a digital library. In this study, Greenstone Digital Library (GSDL) software was used to gather the documents containing information related to each item of willow wicker for easy retrieval using various access points.

Open Courseware Repositories: An Analysis of Content Diversity and Visibility

Open Courseware (OCW) is one of the wwws indispensable tools which are highly useful for stakeholders. But the utility and visibility of such resources can increase manifolds if they are highly index-able and visible through search engines. This paper is an endeavour to assess format diversity, web traffic, and visibility of select OCW repositories. The work sheds light on retrieval efficiency of different search engines vis-a-vis OCW. Open Courseware repositories that were enlisted under science and Technological Subjects in ‘Catalogue of Open Courseware Consortium’ were sifted and selected after thorough review of their OA policies. Out of 20 repositories indentified only 18 proved to be AO. A total of four repositories were short listed by way of random sampling for in-depth study in terms of their content diversity and visibility by prominent and special search engines (07). Among various formats, pdf is the most common format (52.31 per cent) archived by OCW repositories. OCW visibility differs from search engine. ‘Google’ turned to be most reliable tool by retrieving 73.58 per cent OCWs while ‘incywincy’ retrieved none. General search engines (73.58 per cent − 52.44 per cent) have shown very good performance compared to special search engines (42.68 per cent − 0 per cent). Among the repositories ‘Open Michigan’ is most visible Open Courseware repository with 70 per cent average visibility whereas ‘NJIT’ is least visible (29.82 per cent.)