Search results

This study aims to analyze the distribution of novelty among scholarly papers in the field of library and information science (LIS) in China. Specifically, this study explores the distribution of novelty of papers in various journals, research topics and different periods. It is possible to understand the characteristics of LIS research in China and what factors have influenced it.

This paper collects articles published in Chinese library science journals indexed by the Chinese Social Sciences Citation Index from 2000 to 2022. The BERTopic model is used based on abstracts of the papers and to obtain the topic of each paper. Based on the combination innovation theory of reference pairs cited by focal papers, novelty scores of all papers are calculated. Next, this paper analyzes the novelty of papers under different topics. Finally, this paper analyzes the differences in author collaboration patterns across various topics, aiming to explain how these differences relate to the novelty of papers from a collaborative perspective.

This study shows that archival research topics have lower novelty than papers on journal evaluation and patent technology in Chinese LIS. Research papers in this field are gradually becoming more novel over time. Papers on different topics and with varying degrees of novelty exhibit distinct author collaboration patterns, with low-novelty topics more frequently featuring solo authorship, while high-novelty topics tend to involve a higher percentage of inter-institutional collaboration.

This study investigates the novelty characteristics of research papers on different topics in the field of LIS in China. The authors’ contribution includes visualizing research hotspots and trends in the field and analyzing authors’ collaboration patterns at the level of research topics, thereby providing new perspectives on the factors affecting the novelty of these papers.

In the era of digital intelligence, individuals are increasingly interacting with digital information in their daily lives and work, and a growing phenomenon known as digital hoarding is becoming more prevalent. Prior research suggests that humanities researchers have unique and longstanding information interaction and management practices in the digital scholarship context. This study therefore aims to understand how digital hoarding manifests in humanities researchers’ behavior, identify the influencing factors associated with it, and explore how they perceive and respond to digital hoarding behavior.

Qualitative research methods enable us to acquire a rich insight and nuanced understanding of digital hoarding practices. In this study, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 20 humanities researchers who were pre-screened for a high propensity for digital hoarding. Thematic analyses were then used to analyze the interview data.

Three main characteristics of digital hoarding were identified. Further, the research paradigm, digital affordance, and personality traits and habits, collectively influencing the emergence and development of digital hoarding behaviors, were examined. The subtle influence of traditional Chinese culture was encountered. Interestingly, this study found that humanists perceive digital hoarding as a positive expectation (associated with inspiration, aesthetic pursuit, and uncertainty avoidance). Meanwhile, humanists' problematic perception of this behavior is more widely observed — they experience what we conceptualize as an “expectation-perception” gap. Three specific information behaviors related to avoidance were identified as aggravating factors for digital hoarding.

The findings deepen the understanding of digital hoarding behaviors and personal information management among humanities researchers within the LIS field, and implications for humanities researchers, digital scholarship service providers, and digital tool developers are discussed.

Historical newspaper collections provide a wealth of information about the past. Although the digitization of these collections significantly improves their accessibility, a large portion of digitized historical newspaper collections, such as those of KBR, the Royal Library of Belgium, are not yet searchable at article-level. However, recent developments in AI-based research methods, such as document layout analysis, have the potential for further enriching the metadata to improve the searchability of these historical newspaper collections. This paper aims to discuss the aforementioned issue.

In this paper, the authors explore how existing computer vision and machine learning approaches can be used to improve access to digitized historical newspapers. To do this, the authors propose a workflow, using computer vision and machine learning approaches to (1) provide article-level access to digitized historical newspaper collections using document layout analysis, (2) extract specific types of articles (e.g. feuilletons – literary supplements from Le Peuple from 1938), (3) conduct image similarity analysis using (un)supervised classification methods and (4) perform named entity recognition (NER) to link the extracted information to open data.

The results show that the proposed workflow improves the accessibility and searchability of digitized historical newspapers, and also contributes to the building of corpora for digital humanities research. The AI-based methods enable automatic extraction of feuilletons, clustering of similar images and dynamic linking of related articles.

The proposed workflow enables automatic extraction of articles, including detection of a specific type of article, such as a feuilleton or literary supplement. This is particularly valuable for humanities researchers as it improves the searchability of these collections and enables corpora to be built around specific themes. Article-level access to, and improved searchability of, KBR's digitized newspapers are demonstrated through the online tool (https://tw06v072.ugent.be/kbr/).

This research proposes to organise and distil this massive amount of data, making it easier to understand. Using data mining, machine learning techniques and visual approaches, researchers and managers can extract valuable insights (on guests' preferences) and convert them into strategic thinking based on exploration and predictive analysis. Consequently, this research aims to assist hotel managers in making informed decisions, thus improving the overall guest experience and increasing competitiveness.

This research employs natural language processing techniques, data visualisation proposals and machine learning methodologies to analyse unstructured guest service experience content. In particular, this research (1) applies data mining to evaluate the role and significance of critical terms and semantic structures in hotel assessments; (2) identifies salient tokens to depict guests' narratives based on term frequency and the information quantity they convey; and (3) tackles the challenge of managing extensive document repositories through automated identification of latent topics in reviews by using machine learning methods for semantic grouping and pattern visualisation.

This study’s findings (1) aim to identify critical features and topics that guests highlight during their hotel stays, (2) visually explore the relationships between these features and differences among diverse types of travellers through online hotel reviews and (3) determine predictive power. Their implications are crucial for the hospitality domain, as they provide real-time insights into guests' perceptions and business performance and are essential for making informed decisions and staying competitive.

This research seeks to minimise the cognitive processing costs of the enormous amount of content published by the user through a better organisation of hotel service reviews and their visualisation. Likewise, this research aims to propose a methodology and method available to tourism organisations to obtain truly useable knowledge in the design of the hotel offer and its value propositions.

The study aims to enhance our understanding of shared community oral history stewardship by exploring its practices and challenges from the perspectives of the stakeholders involved.

This study employed in-depth semi-structured interviews with community oral history stewards. Each interview focused on their experiences and perspectives regarding community-based oral history projects. The interview data were transcribed and analyzed using a grounded theory approach.

Community oral history stewards found oral history stewardship entails substantial effort, long-term commitment, and challenges. They concurred on the importance of partnerships between communities and archives in preserving community stories, with institutional archives providing valuable support, resources, and engagement beyond mere preservation platforms. Establishing trust between communities and archives emerged as a fundamental requirement for fruitful collaboration.

Community oral history has stood out as the prevailing form within the theory and practice of oral history, but its shared stewardship practices have not been thoroughly explored from the stakeholders' viewpoints.

The PICCH research project contributes to opening a dialogue between cultural heritage archives and users. Hence, the users are identified and their information needs, the search strategies they apply and the search challenges they experience are uncovered.

A combination of questionnaires and interviews is used for collection of data. Questionnaire data were collected from users of three different audiovisual archives. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with two user groups: (1) scholars searching information for research projects and (2) archivists who perform their own scholarly work and search information on behalf of others.

The questionnaire results show that the archive users mainly have an academic background. Hence, scholars and archivists constitute the target group for in-depth interviews. The interviews reveal that their information needs are multi-faceted and match the information need typology by Ingwersen. The scholars mainly apply collection-specific search strategies but have in common primarily doing keyword searching, which they typically plan in advance. The archivists do less planning owing to their knowledge of the collections. All interviewees demonstrate domain knowledge, archival intelligence and artefactual literacy in their use and mastering of the archives. The search challenges they experience can be characterised as search system complexity challenges, material challenges and metadata challenges.

The paper provides a rare insight into the complexity of the search situation of cultural heritage archives, and the users’ multi-facetted information needs and hence contributes to the dialogue between the archives and the users.

Archival institutions must make their holdings and services known to the public to ensure increased usage. It is the obligation of archival institutions to adopt strategies to market their services to increase the usage of their holdings. Therefore, this study aims to assess the National Archives of Zimbabwe’s (NAZ) decentralisation drive as a strategy to market its archival services.

The multiple case study research design, which is interpretive and qualitative, was used for the study. The study used interviews, questionnaires and document review as data collection tools. The collected data were presented, analysed and discussed using the thematic data analysis approach.

Findings revealed that the NAZ decentralised provincial records centres were actively involved in the marketing of archival services offered by the NAZ. The study also established that the decentralised provincial records centres perform activities such as records surveys, training, oral history, issuance of brochures, guided tours and career guidance, which increase their interactions with communities they serve. The decentralised offices took advantage of these interactions to market archival services offered by the NAZ.

The study illustrated that decentralisation of archival institutions and services to the lower tiers of government is a powerful strategy for the marketing of archival services. Therefore, there is need for archival institutions to adopt or enhance the use of this strategy to increase the usage of archives.

This study aims to explore the applications of natural language processing (NLP) and data analytics in understanding large-scale digital collections in oral history archives.

NLP and data analytics were used to analyse the oral interview transcripts of 904 survivors of the Japanese American incarceration camps collected from Densho Digital Repository, relying specifically on descriptive analysis, keyword extraction, topic modelling and sentiment analysis (SA).

The researchers found multiple geographic areas of large residential communities of ethnic Japanese people and the place names of the concentration camps. The keywords and topics extracted reflect the deplorable conditions and militaristic nature of the camps and the forced labour of the internees. When remembering history, the main focus for the narrators remains the redress and reparation movement to obtain the restitution of their civil rights. SA further found that the forcible removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans during Second World War negatively impacted and brought deep trauma to the narrators.

This case study demonstrated how NLP and data analytics could be applied to analyse oral history archives and open avenues for discovery. Archival researchers and the general public may benefit from this type of analysis in making connections between temporal, spatial and emotional elements, which will contribute to a holistic understanding of individuals and communities in terms of their collective memory.

This study aims to investigate the compliance of Kuwait’s College of Basic Education (CBE) with records management standards (RMS), legislation and regulations.

This case study collects data from semi-structured interviews and a thorough internet search of relevant records management (RM) policies and procedures.

The findings reveal the shortcomings of the bottom-up approach to RM, which poses significant risks due to inadequate management and monitoring; lack of compliance with local or national records and archives regulations; and a general unawareness of RMS and best practices among interviewees.

This study focuses on CBE, potentially limiting generalizability to other academic institutions in Kuwait, but offers valuable insights for polities that similarly lack records legislation and wish to improve their RM practices and comply with international standards.

This study proposes a more top-down approach to RM with the adoption of international RMS to improve practices, minimize risks and reduce legal liabilities. Positive outcomes will support the case for records and archives legislation (RAL) in Kuwait and provide the framework for its establishment.

The study argues that the passage of RAL and the subsequent implementation of RMS will improve citizens’ Right to Access Information.

This study initiates a pioneering effort in understanding Public Authority for Applied Education and Training and CBE’s level of compliance with RMS, legislation and regulations and their challenges.

This paper aims to examine the creation of the first commercial school in early independent Argentina in 1826 – the Academy of Accountancy of Buenos Aires (AABA) – at the request of the Argentine Government, which entrusted its direction to French expatriate Amédée Brodart, who was considered an expert in commercial education.

This study adopts a microhistory approach based on individual biography and archival research. First, it investigated published biographies of contemporary political figures Brodart had been in contact with. Then, the Argentine archives of the Ministry of Finance and the Arturo Jauretche Museum of the Bank of the Province of Buenos Aires provided information on Brodart’s life during his expatriation to Latin America. Finally, the French Archives of the Paris National Library and ESCP Business School in Paris provided information on Brodart’s life before his departure for Argentina and after his final return to France. These primary sources include extracts from Brodart’s correspondence, financial ledgers, study plans and a few rare iconographic documents.

AABA was connected to a nationalist agenda: to develop Argentinian trade to overcome national underdevelopment and to counter political agitation in the country. However, the lack of local expertise in commercial education, as well as Argentine authorities’ desire to avoid depending on foreign powers, led them to call on a French expatriate rather than on a network of organizations to open this school.

This paper contributes to the literature on the history of commercial education in Latin America and to the literature on the international transfer of commercial education models. This paper is also among the first to consider the origin story of Argentina’s relationship with commercial education.

This research offers new reflexive perspectives on the emergence of commercial education in Latin America by highlighting the agentivity of local actors.

Through a lens of dependency ambiguity, this paper repositions narratives of the development of commercial education in Latin America away from a Western-centric explanation, highlighting the role of local contextual actors. In doing so, it offers an alternative history of commercial education focused on Latin America.