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This study aims to provide an overview of the dimension of stored collections displayed in visible storage and to indicate the main factors which hinder their accessibility.

This study is based on quantitative analysis: a survey was conducted through the offices of International Council of Museums and direct invitations to 2,558 museums located worldwide.

The study estimated 32% on average the share of stored collections displayed in visible storage. The analysis provides a picture of how many stored items are made accessible in visible storage across the continents, according to the collection’s type and size and the museums’ legal status. In addition, several aspects of visible storage are investigated to highlight whether or not it truly enables museums to achieve accessibility of their stored collections and which factors might hinder the accessibility. Amid them, the foremost factors involve the inadequacy of resources, such as the lack of staff (71%) and poor budget (68%). Because of it, museums are prone to setting up offsite storage (37%), often 16 km far from the city centre, thereby questioning the concept of accessibility itself.

One major limitation of this study is that it does not consider people’s standpoints. Therefore, the author recommends that future studies focus on what people opine on visible storage, such as their appreciation of the display format, the behind-the-scenes, their need for interpretation and the degree of satisfaction with their information needs, as well as their perception of the size of stored collections.

These findings suggest that museums could take action in areas whereby the data demonstrated weaknesses in terms of accessibility. For instance, museums could set up a shuttle service or arrange public transportation service to allow people to visit offsite storage. Additionally, financial accessibility might be achieved by not charging some groups (elderly, students, etc.).

The topic of stored collections and their accessibility has crucial social implications because not displaying collections triggers inequality amid social groups of excluded people and a small elite.

This study focuses on visible storage as a possible solution to enhance the accessibility of collections and indicates to what extent visible storage provides this accessibility. On the contrary, previous research did not estimate how much visible storage impacts the accessibility of stored collections.

The academic library’s physical capacity and its service obligations to local users structured the traditional print collection. Largely freed of these constraints, the digital collection manager enjoys unprecedented freedoms but now contends with a collection susceptible to resource sprawl and scope ambiguity. This exploratory study aims to consider the possibility that intra-field social processes help to structure and routinize digital collection practice.

Lacking the constraints to which print collections are subject, electronic resource and digital library collections are more likely to reflect idiosyncratic institutional interests and therefore, to demonstrate significant variation. Evidence of homogeneity may suggest the influence of heretofore underexplored social structures. To determine the extent of such homogeneity, the author performed exploratory/descriptive content analyses on ten electronic resource collection development policies and six digital library collection development policies.

The data reveal among both the electronic resource and digital library collection policies significant uniformity. Content analyses demonstrate consistent themes (e.g. media, audience, selection priorities, etc.) and rhetoric. These findings lend support to the study’s central hypothesis regarding latent social structures. Analyses also reveal a set of unanticipated constraints unique to digital collection management.

Despite the breadth and maturity of literature addressing the Digital Turn in academic librarianship, relatively little attention has been paid to the social dimensions of collection management. This work represents an important corrective and suggests new theoretical approaches to the study of digital collection practice.

The purpose of this study was to determine the extent to which teaching staff cooperated with librarians in collection development, specifically in relation to electronic resources, and to identify barriers they encountered while performing collection development activities.

A mixed methods approach was adopted for the study. Quantitative and qualitative techniques of data collection and analysis were used to obtain a comprehensive understanding of the research topic. Data were gathered through a self-administered questionnaire and interviews. A total of 149 faculty members completed the questionnaire, yielding a response rate of 51.2%, while 16 library staff members were interviewed to obtain qualitative data.

The majority of the teaching staff who participated in the study affirmed that they had cooperated with subject librarians in collection development. A high percentage (62.4%) of the faculty members had collaborated with subject librarians in collection development activities. Only 37.6% of the faculty members had not participated in collection development activities with subject librarians to acquire library electronic resources. According to faculty members, some of the main challenges affecting collection development at the University of Namibia were a lack of catalogues for electronic resources and a lack of lists of titles from vendors. Moreover, librarians were not always available to assist faculty members. It is recommended that faculty members be part of the process of selecting materials and that a good relationship be fostered between librarians and faculty members to bring value to collection development activities.

Collection development in respect of electronic resources is a complex process to be undertaken by a single entity and, therefore, requires the collaboration of all stakeholders involved. In the case of institutions of higher learning, these stakeholders include faculty, librarians and vendors. The emergence of a variety of e-resources demands a meticulous strategy on the part of libraries to ensure they can offer a wide range of up-to-date and accurate resources that meet the evolving needs of their users. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, studies that are similar to this one have not been conducted in Namibia before. This case study presents useful findings and lessons on faculty–librarian cooperation for effective collection development, not only at the University of Namibia library but also at other academic libraries in economies with similar characteristics.

The purpose of this study is to determine which metadata schemas are used in the museums and university collections of the main universities in Spain and other European countries. Although libraries and archives are also university memory institutions (according to a Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums perspective), their collections are not included in this study because their metadata systems are highly standardized and their inclusion would, therefore, skew our understanding of the diverse realities that the study aims to capture.

The analysis has three components. The first is a bibliographic review based on Web of Science. The second is a direct survey of the individuals responsible for university collections to understand their internal work and documentation systems. Finally, the results obtained are complemented by an analysis of collective university heritage portals in Europe.

The results of this study confirmed the hypothesis that isolation and a lack of resources are still major issues in many cases. Increasing digitalization and the desire to participate in content aggregation systems are forcing change, although the responsibility for that change at universities is still vague.

Universities, particularly those with a long history, have an important heritage whose parts are often scattered or hidden. Although many contemporary academic publications have focused on the dissemination of university collections, this study focuses on the representation of information based on the conviction that good metadata are essential for dissemination.

This study aims to provide an overview of the usage of stored collections in museums located worldwide. To achieve this purpose, some results gathered across five continents through a survey conducted between December 2020 and January 2021 are set out.

Museums hold collections so that people can benefit from them. Items need to be preserved as well. To achieve this purpose, a considerable portion of museum collections is kept in storage. Consequently, museums that can show a significant part of their whole collections are few and far between. This scenario implies collections, the “very heart” of museums, are not accessible to the general public. In addition, the lack of space and the poor documentation exacerbate the scenario in terms of accessibility. This study aims to provide an overview of the usage of stored collections in museums located worldwide. In order to achieve this purpose, some results gathered across five continents through a survey conducted between December 2020 and January 2021 are set out. The research figures show that only 5% of museum stored collections are accessible to the general public. To enhance the accessibility of stored collections, museums have been adopting some strategies. Amongst them, some museums have opened up visible storage, lent or exchanged their items. Despite their contribution to overcoming the burning issue related to the accessibility of stored collections, these strategies imply a physical presence of visitors so as to enjoy collections. Digitization of collections is one alternative strategy adopted by a plethora of museums to increase the accessibility of collections. This solution boasts many advantages inasmuch as it overcomes many of the typical disadvantages of the other strategies, such as geographical constraints. Moreover, people can enjoy collections, and museums can ensure the adequate preservation of them. Thus, the digitization of items is the epitome of accessibility since, potentially, all collections can be made accessible, and museums can take care of them simultaneously. The study highlights the benefits of digital access and compares it with physical access. In addition, the research sheds light on how documentation supports collection management and increases accessibility.

The research figures show that only 5% of museum stored collections are accessible to the general public. To enhance the accessibility of stored collections, museums have been adopting some strategies. Amongst them, some museums have opened up visible storage, lent or exchanged their items. Despite their contribution to overcoming the burning issue related to the accessibility of stored collections, these strategies imply a physical presence of visitors so to enjoy collections.

The findings of this study are based on quantitative analysis. Therefore, this study might be integrated with interviews' with visitors. It would be interesting to shed light on people's opinions concerning what museums are doing in the digital realm, such as the digital content in terms of the number of items, quality of images and ease of searching.

This study might provide practical implications for museums and people. One important contribution is the awareness of how the appropriateness of collections management plays a crucial role in preserving collections and making them accessible to the public. Another possible implication is that museums can enlarge their visibility through digital content, both because they have not digitized and due to the dimension of their digital content. This goal might be achieved by sharing the staff with specific expertise with other institutions or recruiting volunteers and involving local communities in common tasks (so that professionals could dedicate themselves to more skilled undertakings). An alternative might be to network with local universities so as to benefit from practitioners in the digital field. Last but not least, these findings could raise the awareness that museums are facing the problem of making stored collections accessible, thereby increasing the trust in museums from the general public.

Digitization of collections is one alternative strategy adopted by a plethora of museums so to increase the accessibility of collections. This solution boasts many advantages inasmuch as it overcomes many of the typical disadvantages of the other strategies, such as geographical constraints. Moreover, people can enjoy collections and museums can ensure the adequate preservation of them. Thus, the digitization of items is the epitome of accessibility since, potentially, all collections can be made accessible, and museums can take care of them simultaneously.

The study highlights the benefits of digital access and compares it with physical access. In addition, the research sheds light on how documentation supports collection management and increases accessibility.

The purpose of this study is to survey the landscape of online collections of digital games.

First, the study identifies existing sites hosting collections and criteria that make a collection valuable for research, then it reports on sites that fit the criteria and analyzes trends.

Most sites provide simple binary downloads, but some choose encapsulation. Common metadata terms consistently include genre, year of release and publisher. Most sites claim the right to provide their collections as “abandonware,” but remove games if they are asked to.

This study was conducted using a very limited subcategory of digital games, which could be expanded in other studies. Future research may require a multilingual team to account for collections based in non–English-speaking countries. Direct communication with sites’ management may be valuable in the future as well, but was not conducted in this study.

The study identifies practices that have developed organically in this field without any guiding standards. Understanding these may aid in Humanities research into digital games, as well as potential collection development in the future.

Digital games are increasingly important as cultural artifacts, and there is a growing effort to preserve them for the future, but there are no standards for collecting and providing them. Understanding how this is currently done can help in providing access into the future for both casual and analytical use.

While game preservation is a growing and active field of research, no study has been published in recent years on this particular subject. It will be valuable for the development of future collections and for research using current ones.

Medical research requires biological material and data collected through biobanks in reliable processes with quality assurance. Medical studies based on data with unknown or questionable quality are useless or even dangerous, as evidenced by recent examples of withdrawn studies. Medical data sets consist of highly sensitive personal data, which has to be protected carefully and is available for research only after the approval of ethics committees. The purpose of this research is to propose an architecture to support researchers to efficiently and effectively identify relevant collections of material and data with documented quality for their research projects while observing strict privacy rules.

Following a design science approach, this paper develops a conceptual model for capturing and relating metadata of medical data in biobanks to support medical research.

This study describes the landscape of biobanks as federated medical data lakes such as the collections of samples and their annotations in the European federation of biobanks (Biobanking and Biomolecular Resources Research Infrastructure – European Research Infrastructure Consortium, BBMRI-ERIC) and develops a conceptual model capturing schema information with quality annotation. This paper discusses the quality dimensions for data sets for medical research in-depth and proposes representations of both the metadata and data quality documentation with the aim to support researchers to effectively and efficiently identify suitable data sets for medical studies.

This novel conceptual model for metadata for medical data lakes has a unique focus on the high privacy requirements of the data sets contained in medical data lakes and also stands out in the detailed representation of data quality and metadata quality of medical data sets.

The monetary valuation of cultural heritage of a selection of 16 major public, not-for-profit Australian cultural institutions is examined over a period of almost three decades (1992–2019) to understand how they have responded to the paradoxical tensions of heritage valuation for financial reporting purposes.

Accounting for cultural heritage is an intrinsically paradoxical practice; it involves a conflict of two opposite ways of attributing value: the traditional accounting and the heritage professionals (or curatorial) approaches. In analysing the annual reports and other documentary sources through qualitative content analysis, the study explores how different actors responded to the conceptual and technical contradictions posed by the monetary valuation of “heritage assets”, the accounting phraseology of accounting standards.

Four phases emerge from the analysis undertaken of the empirical material, each characterised by a distinctive nature of the paradox, the institutional responses discerned and the outcomes. Although a persisting heterogeneity in the practice of accounting for cultural heritage is evident, responses by cultural institutions are shown to have minimised, so far, the negative impacts of monetary valuation in terms of commercialisation of deaccessioning decisions and distorted accountability.

In applying the theoretical lens of paradox theory in the context of the financial reporting of heritage, as assets, the study enhances an understanding of the challenges and responses by major public cultural institutions in a country that has led this development globally, providing insights to accounting standard setters arising from the accounting practices observed.

The paper examines academic historians' information interactions with material from digital historical-newspaper collections as the research process unfolds.

The study employed qualitative analysis from in-depth interviews with Finnish history scholars who use digitised historical newspapers as primary sources for their research. A model for task-based information interaction guided the collection and analysis of data.

The study revealed numerous information interactions within activities related to task-planning, the search process, selecting and working with the items and synthesis and reporting. The information interactions differ with the activities involved, which call for system support mechanisms specific to each activity type. Various activities feature information search, which is an essential research method for those using digital collections in the compilation and analysis of data. Furthermore, application of quantitative methods and multidisciplinary collaboration may be shaping culture in history research toward convergence with the research culture of the natural sciences.

For sustainable digital humanities infrastructure and digital collections, it is of great importance that system designers understand how the collections are accessed, why and their use in the real-world context. The study enriches understanding of the collections' utilisation and advances a theoretical framework for explicating task-based information interaction.

This study aims to identify user perception of different qualities of optical character recognition (OCR) in texts. The purpose of this paper is to study the effect of different quality OCR on users' subjective perception through an interactive information retrieval task with a collection of one digitized historical Finnish newspaper.

This study is based on the simulated work task model used in interactive information retrieval. Thirty-two users made searches to an article collection of Finnish newspaper Uusi Suometar 1869–1918 which consists of ca. 1.45 million autosegmented articles. The article search database had two versions of each article with different quality OCR. Each user performed six pre-formulated and six self-formulated short queries and evaluated subjectively the top 10 results using a graded relevance scale of 0–3. Users were not informed about the OCR quality differences of the otherwise identical articles.

The main result of the study is that improved OCR quality affects subjective user perception of historical newspaper articles positively: higher relevance scores are given to better-quality texts.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this simulated interactive work task experiment is the first one showing empirically that users' subjective relevance assessments are affected by a change in the quality of an optically read text.