Search results

Teachers, students, librarians, scholars and domain experts often spend a lot of time and effort to select good and suitable textbooks. This study aims to propose and construct a computer-aided bibliometric system to rate textbooks. Through the software system designed here, the quality of every textbook can be easily and quickly known. This system will benefit both scholars and librarians.

Four methods were used to evaluate textbooks in this study, including: questionnaire recommendation analysis, dissertation citation analysis, library circulation analysis and bibliography analysis. The system architecture includes three subsystems: the textbook indexing and searching subsystem, the statistics added-value analysis subsystem and the citation report inquiry subsystem. An example demonstrates the usability and validity of the proposed method and system. The example uses surveying textbooks. The following percentages were used in the correlation calculation: textbook citation percentage (TCP), textbook library circulation percentage (TLP) and textbook recommend percentage (TRP).

There are three textbook assessment methods applied in this study, including: dissertation citation, library circulation and questionnaire recommendation. Dissertation citations for textbooks have a high correlation value with library circulation. The frequency correlation calculation was 0.7, while the TCP, TLP and TRP correlation calculation was 0.84. Therefore, the dissertation citation method can be accepted to evaluate textbooks effectively.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first work related to evaluating surveying textbooks using a computer-aided bibliometrics system that can deal with large amounts of data and generate results quickly. This can be applied to other fields as well.

The first question a library manager should ask when deciding whether or not to automate the library's circulation function is: Will an automated system help the library meet its priorities better than a manual system? The next consideration is library staff. Personnel play a critical part in determining the success of any library service. And, of course, they are the library's most costly expenditure. Some questions to ask are, will an automated circulation system:

The welcomed introduction of Fred Moseley to a 27-page excerpt from Marx's Economic Manuscript of 1867–1868 draws attention to the influence of turnover times on the formation of prices of production. This chapter discusses the profit-adjustment decomposition outlined by Marx in these pages where he tries to distinguish the influences of turnover time and capital composition on the formation of the prices of production. It provides an alternative decomposition based on Marx's analysis in the second volume of Capital and argues that these pages do not support Moseley's claim that prices of production are intended only to describe a long-run equilibrium condition. It therefore suggests considering the profit adjustment in relation to the dynamic formation of the general rate of profit throughout the equalization process.

Building circulation has an important impact on human comfort of buildings and is one of the critical factors in building design. A quantitative walkability evaluation of building circulation can benefit both building design and operation. However, indoor walkability of building circulation is determined not only by objective path features but also by subjective user preference. How to incorporate the preference from a large group of users into the design process is still a challenging issue.

This study proposes a participatory framework of indoor path walkability evaluation based on user preference. Hierarchical indicators are developed to objectively measure indoor path features. Furthermore, group decision-making theory is adopted to aggregate individual user preference into user common preference for determining the relative indicator weights. Finally, integrated walkability scores (IWSs) are calculated to evaluate indoor path walkability quantitatively.

A total of three case scenarios demonstrate that the proposed evaluation framework provides an efficient way for designers and owners to measure user preference quantitatively, analyze building circulations based on user preference and compare the walkability of different building design schemes.

The developed methods provide an efficient way for designers and owners to measure user preference quantitatively, analyze building circulations based on user preference and compare the walkability of different building design schemes.

This study develops a comprehensive and quantitative walkability evaluation approach that considers both objective path features and subjective user preference derived from user characteristics and walking purposes, which provides an effective way to incorporate user feedback into the building design process and operation.

This study explored spatial usage of a public library based on activity logs produced by real users. The purpose of this paper is to provide preliminary data for decision-making when establishing the library operation policy.

To achieve the goal, the author collected a variety of data including 274,242 seat reservations logs, 3,361,284 collection usage logs, and 96,098 user information for the four years in which the National Library of Korea, Sejong actually operated. The crawled data were analyzed statistically in terms of demography, month, day of week, time of day and room by room. The author conducted additional in-depth analysis according to the external factors such as weather or social demographic environment. Finally, the author discussed several issues and verified feasibility of the proposals to support decision-making in operating a library in conclusion with a secondary librarian interview.

The usage rate in all the spaces of the National Library of Korea, Sejong, has been increasing since its opening, and, in particular, the usage rate increases sharply in January, February, July and August. In addition, the usage rate during weekends was higher than that during weekdays, and all the four spaces had a high usage rate during the afternoon. These results seem to be related to weather, users’ life pattern, users’ age, and position of PCs and seats. Based on the circulation logs analysis of children’s collections, users in their 10s and 40s showed the same space usage pattern.

This study has significance in that it attempted to analyze logs produced by real users during the actual library operation period, which has not been frequently attempted in the previous studies on libraries. The findings will be provided as basic data to support decision-making for efficient operation of libraries.

This paper explores the possibility of adding user‐oriented class associations to hierarchical library classification schemes. Some highly associated classes not grouped in the same subject hierarchies, yet relevant to users’ knowledge, are automatically obtained by analyzing a two‐year log of book circulation records from a university library in Taiwan. The library uses the Chinese Decimal Classification scheme, which has similar structure and notation to the Dewey Decimal Classification. Methods, from both collaborative filtering and information retrieval research, were employed and their performance compared based on similarity estimation of classes. The results show that classification schemes can, therefore, be made more adaptable to changes of users and the uses of different library collections by analyzing the circulation patterns of similar users. Limitations of the methods and implications for applications are also discussed.

The purpose of this study is to present findings of an approval plan assessment project, which analyzed circulation statistics for four Gobi Select designations: research essential, research recommended, basic essential and basic recommended.

This study approaches approval plan assessment by analyzing three years of circulation statistics to determine which, if any, of the Gobi Select designations circulated the most.

This study reveals that books designated as “basic essential” have circulated at higher rates than other designations.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, no other studies have made use of Gobi Select designations to analyze circulation statistics for books obtained on an approval plan.

The purpose of this paper is to summarize a library use study of the central and community branches of a Canadian public library. An exit survey documented the in-branch activities of users as a part of a library strategic planning process. Survey results were used in combination with branch statistics, postal code circulation statistics, neighbourhood demographics and other data sources to document the in-library use of the two facilities.

Questionnaires were administered to library users 15 years of age or older at the exits of the central and community branches. The survey collected data on their activities and services used during their current visit. Additional sources such as branch-level statistics, furniture tally sheets, photographs, Canada Census data and circulation analysis by patron postal code and lending branch were used during the analysis stage.

Both branches are heavily used but in different ways. Branch circulation and gate count per square foot of floor space were high relative to other Canadian libraries. Patron visits to the community branch were short in duration, in line with previous public library studies. User visit duration and in-library activities within the main branch somewhat resembled those of the central branch of a larger library system but likely for different reasons.

The study was exploratory. Data were collected during two coinciding days of library operation, a Thursday and a Saturday, and may not be representative of the underlying population. The study was limited in scope as it was a community service project for undergraduate university students.

Branch library use surveys, in combination with library statistics and demographics, can provide useful insights concerning in-library patron behaviour when the use of ethnographic techniques is not feasible.

The study explored differences and similarities in user behaviour in two types of library facilities, a central and a community branch. Few published studies make such a direct comparison. The study explored the perceived benefits received by patrons from public library use and incorporated branch statistics, circulation analysis and Census data.

Aggressive weeding in academic libraries is becoming more commonplace as colleges seek to create student-centered environments and space is at a premium. For one community college in the Southwest United States, several factors required the library to proactively weed its collection within three years. At the same time, the library sought to maintain the circulation of its physical books.

Updating the library’s collection development policy to include robust selection and weeding criteria allowed the library to embark on a revitalization project to remove thousands of outdated or unused items, resulting in a net loss of nearly 32,000 books.

The loss of more than half of the general collection had an unforeseen consequence – a 70% increase in circulation statistics during the three-year deselection project. The case study's results highlight the need for continual maintenance of academic library collections.

The case study is original and not published elsewhere.

The study compares the quality of indexing in library and information science databases (Library Literature (LL), Library and Information Science Abstracts (LISA), and Information Science Abstracts (ISA)). An alternative method to traditional retrieval effectiveness tests, suggested by White and Griffith in their paper ‘Quality of indexing in online databases’ [13], is adopted to measure the quality of the controlled vocabulary of each database. The method involves identifying clusters of documents that are similar in content, searching for each document from a given cluster in a database, identifying the terms used by the databases to index each document, and calculating certain measures to determine the quality of indexing. Problems found with the White and Griffith discrimination index led the authors to propose an alternative discrimination index which takes into consideration the collection size of a database. Our analysis shows that LISA has the best quality of indexing out of the three databases.