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The purpose of this study is to understand the role and impact of gender on reading habits. It is an attempt to explore the probable reason why or why not gender differences take place concerning reading time, reading purpose, reading resources and digital devices among undergraduate students in the digital environment.

For this study, the researcher used a survey-based approach. To accomplish the study’s goals, a meticulously designed questionnaire has been disseminated among undergraduate students in selected colleges located in the western district of Tripura, a northeastern state in India.

The study found that female respondents have a slightly higher level of liking for reading than males. For both genders, the major purpose of reading is to enhance their knowledge unvaryingly. Furthermore, it has been observed that female respondents read electronic and print reading material more frequently compared to their male counterparts. Female respondents read fiction more frequently than males in print form. Both genders have more ease in reading print resources than digital resources. Among all digital devices, respondents are most competent at using mobile devices and prefer them for digital reading.

As part of the pilot study, investigators surveyed a limited sample population, where the participation of students was further lower because of the unavailability of students.

The gender-based level of competency with digital devices is studied as a variable among the adult population to measure its correlation with reading habits.

Recent archiving and curatorial practices took advantage of the advancement in digital technologies, creating immersive and interactive experiences to emphasize the plurality of memory materials, encourage personalized sense-making and extract, manage and share the ever-growing surrounding knowledge. Audiovisual (AV) content, with its growing importance and popularity, is less explored on that end than texts and images. This paper examines the trend of datafication in AV archives and answers the critical question, “What to extract from AV materials and why?”.

This study roots in a comprehensive state-of-the-art review of digital methods and curatorial practices in AV archives. The thinking model for mapping AV archive data to purposes is based on pre-existing models for understanding multimedia content and metadata standards.

The thinking model connects AV content descriptors (data perspective) and purposes (curatorial perspective) and provides a theoretical map of how information extracted from AV archives should be fused and embedded for memory institutions. The model is constructed by looking into the three broad dimensions of audiovisual content – archival, affective and aesthetic, social and historical.

This paper contributes uniquely to the intersection of computational archives, audiovisual content and public sense-making experiences. It provides updates and insights to work towards datafied AV archives and cope with the increasing needs in the sense-making end using AV archives.

Despite ongoing research into archival metadata standards, digital archives are unable to effectively represent records in their appropriate contexts. This study aims to propose a knowledge graph that depicts the diverse relationships between heterogeneous digital archive entities.

This study introduces and describes a method for applying knowledge graphs to digital archives in a step-by-step manner. It examines archival metadata standards, such as Records in Context Ontology (RiC-O), for characterising digital records; explains the process of data refinement, enrichment and reconciliation with examples; and demonstrates the use of knowledge graphs constructed using semantic queries.

This study introduced the 97imf.kr archive as a knowledge graph, enabling meaningful exploration of relationships within the archive’s records. This approach facilitated comprehensive record descriptions about different record entities. Applying archival ontologies with general-purpose vocabularies to digital records was advised to enhance metadata coherence and semantic search.

Most digital archives serviced in Korea are limited in the proper use of archival metadata standards. The contribution of this study is to propose a practical application of knowledge graph technology for linking and exploring digital records. This study details the process of collecting raw data on archives, data preprocessing and data enrichment, and demonstrates how to build a knowledge graph connected to external data. In particular, the knowledge graph of RiC-O vocabulary, Wikidata and Schema.org vocabulary and the semantic query using it can be applied to supplement keyword search in conventional digital archives.

Starting from the status quo, the paper outlines perspectives and challenges for the connection and interlinking of digitised and digital archival data. The following topics are addressed: Where are fields of action and what are the means of archives? Which functional and technical requirements are to be considered, and what is the role of portal infrastructures linking together various different institutions?

Considering needs of users and general framework conditions, the paper examines new approaches emerging in Germany. It outlines recent projects and considerations aiming to improve services and visibility of archives within the national data infrastructure in Germany.

Cross-connections are no new phenomenon, but change their appearance significantly in a digital context. In this respect, both smaller and bigger archives profit from participation in larger digital networks. Furthermore, archives need to keep in mind to reflect the quality of their digital (meta)data regularly and to offer or join systems that functionally and technically support cross-connection and interlinking of data.

The paper endeavours to show the importance of digital cross-connections and the role of portal infrastructures for visibility, online-distribution and use of digital archival metadata and data.

In describing these projects, the authors hope to encourage academic librarians and archivists to participate in, and even facilitate, similar work at their own institutions. Although both of these projects began in the library and included readings and discussions related to library and archival practices, the most generative conversations rapidly shifted from “how should the library handle these materials?” to “what might this institution do to reckon with its history?” When traditional library practices were de-centered and community perspectives were sought on the college archive, the authors were able to have more inclusive, authentic conversations about the college's history and future.

This case study explores two projects undertaken at a liberal arts college: a working group and a credit-bearing course intended to reckon with racist, xenophobic or otherwise harmful materials in the college archive. Both projects were informed by the authors' engagement with Tema Okun's White Supremacy Culture and guided by inclusive pedagogies and practices that participants had explored in workshops and within the context of the college's Engaged Pluralism Initiative.

The working group and the course underscore the centrality of relationships, trust-building and time to the work of addressing difficult histories. The “campus-wide conversations” the authors had hoped to have about the college archive evolved into smaller spaces developed with intention and care. The diverse perspectives of working group members and students in the course demonstrate the value of bringing together viewpoints from outside the library and beyond institutional or disciplinary silos, to consider far-reaching systemic issues.

Many US colleges and universities have begun, or will begin, to investigate the myriad ways in which racism, racial exclusion, or racial violence have marked their institutions and how these troubled legacies persist in the present day. This case study proposes possible approaches that academic libraries and librarians may take to contribute to this essential work.

These two projects propose that work that typically happens solely within libraries and archives (cataloging and description of potentially harmful materials) or within institutional or disciplinary silos (reckoning with legacies of racism and bias) can be discussed, debated, and shared among the campus community. All of the participants in the working group and the course, regardless of their title, role, or academic credentials, bring necessary expertise and experience to these projects. Inclusive practices, when paired with grassroots energy, suggest ways in which a college archive can be used as a site of evidence, reflection, interrogation, and repair.

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.

With the rapid advancement of generative artificial intelligence (AI), it is important to consider how young people are making sense of these tools in their everyday lives. Drawing on critical postdigital approaches to learning and literacy, this study aims to center the experiences and perspectives of young people who encounter and experiment with generative AI in their daily writing practices.

This critical case study of one digital platform – Character.ai – brings together an adolescent and adult authorship team to inquire about the intertwining of young people’s playful and critical perspectives when writing on/with digital platforms. Drawing on critical walkthrough methodology (Light et al., 2018), the authors engage digital methods to study how the creative and “fun” uses of AI in youths’ writing lives are situated in broader platform ecologies.

The findings suggest experimentation and pleasure are key aspects of young people’s engagement with generative AI. The authors demonstrate how one platform works to capitalize on these dimensions, even as youth users engage critically and artfully with the platform and develop their digital writing practices.

This study highlights how playful experimentation with generative AI can engage young people both in pleasurable digital writing and in exploration and contemplation of platforms dynamics and structures that shape their and others’ literate activities. Educators can consider young people’s creative uses of these evolving technologies as potential opportunities to develop a critical awareness of how commercial platforms seek to benefit from their users.

This study contributes to the development of a critical and humanist research agenda around generative AI by centering the experiences, perspectives and practices of young people who are underrepresented in the burgeoning research devoted to AI and literacies.

Food sustainability is a world-acknowledged issue that requires urgent integrated solutions at multi-levels. This study aims to explore how food firms can improve their sustainability performance through digital traceability practices, considering the mediating effect of sustainability-oriented innovation (SOI) and the moderating effect of supply chain learning (SCL) for the food supply chain therein.

Hierarchical regression with a moderated mediation model is used to test the proposed hypotheses with a sample of 359 food firms from four provinces in China.

Digital traceability has a significant positive impact on the three pillars of sustainability performances among food firms. SOI (product innovation, process innovation and organisational innovation) mediates the relationship between digital traceability and sustainability performance. SCL plays moderating roles in the linkage between digital traceability and both product and process innovation, respectively.

This paper contributes as one of the first studies to develop digital traceability practices and their sustainability-related improvements for Chinese food firms; it extends studies on supply chain traceability to a typical emerging market. This finding can support food sustainability practice in terms of where and how to invest in sustainability innovation and how to improve economic, environmental and social performance.

In the digital age, public libraries are facing numerous challenges, and the Balochistan public libraries are no exception. This study aimed to identify current digital trends adopted by the public libraries in Balochistan and to find out about challenges and potential solutions regarding digital trends from library users.

A quantitative study was carried out and data were collected through the survey method, employing a structured questionnaire. The target population consisted of 17,953 users of 17 public libraries in Balochistan. A sample of 510 users both male and female was selected by using random sampling technique from the target population.

The analysis revealed that patrons of public libraries are dissatisfied with the services offered, as they now require access to new digital trends such as fast Internet, download facilities, unlimited content on numerous resources, Wi-Fi, online reference services, universal accessibility and user-friendly interfaces. Unfortunately, public libraries in Balochistan are still lagging in terms of development. The study recommended that public libraries in Balochistan should develop and implement digital services, increase access to digital resources, hire professional librarians, professional development and collaborate with other libraries.

The study’s findings can assist in improving public library services and granting patrons access to current information and resources in Balochisthan and other developing countries. This study’s originality stems from its use of a quantitative survey approach to gather data from 17 public libraries in Balochisthan and provide a comprehensive view of the digital challenges they face. The study’s focus on digital tendencies is relevant in today’s world, where technology is rapidly changing the way, we access and consume information.

This study examines the critical elements that contribute to the effective adoption of educational digital resources (EDRs) in schools, with a focus on school principals and their leadership, from a strategic pedagogical standpoint.

Using survey data from 200 school principals, measurement and structure models are tested through structural equation modeling to quantify the impact between constructs.

The findings indicate that the most important factor influencing how effectively schools are transforming digitally is how beneficial school principals believe EDRs to be. Other important elements include the environment of the school, the technical assistance and service provided for the EDRs, and the professional and personal background of the principal.

Principals should be a fundamental component of educational plans for digital transformation, considering things like their age, leadership and teaching experience. Other components include contextual elements like school size, complexity and digital culture. A school principal's ability to promote an open dialogue – that enables educational communities to view the integration of EDRs into pedagogical models as an opportunity to improve outcomes – can assist a digital culture transition, rather than via the principal's authority or bureaucratic influence.

This research is among the pioneer to study the role of school principals in the UAE towards understanding the direction for digital transformation.