Search results

The study aims to analyse library user preferences in the willingness to read and pay for e-books, using a sample of both active readers (users of public library services) and non-users (the general population).

Two empirical surveys were conducted from August to November of 2019; the research sample consisted of 1,334 users from the Municipal Library of Prague and 1,101 non-users from the general Czech population. The research was focussed on e-book user preferences. The willingness to pay (WTP) for e-book services and the determinants that affect this willingness were also examined.

The results show the specific approach of Czech readers, whose main determinant of WTP is not the content, but the price and method of its payment (allocation). Some people prefer a cheaper annual lump sum, whereas others may prefer a charge of small regular fees. The decision to pay depends on their reading or payment habits.

This study also aims to clarify the demand for various types of digital media in Czech libraries and the preferred distribution models. Furthermore, the study determines the dependence of the preferences of library users in their WTP for e-books using different evaluation models. The originality of this study is in the evaluation of the determinants of WTP for e-books, which makes this study unique, and the findings should contribute to the expansion of existing knowledge in the field of information science.

The purpose of this study is to propose a real-time lecture supporting system. The target of this study is on-site classrooms where teachers give lectures and a lot of students listen to teachers’ explanations, conduct exercises, etc.

The proposed system uses an e-learning system and an e-book system to collect teaching and learning activities from a teacher and students in real time. The collected data are immediately analyzed to provide feedback to the teacher just before the lecture starts and during the lecture. For example, the teacher can check which pages were well previewed and which pages were not previewed by students using the preview achievement graph. During the lecture, real-time analytics graphs are shown on the teacher’s PC. The teacher can easily grasp students’ status and whether or not students are following the teacher’s explanation.

Through the case study, the authors first confirmed the effectiveness of each tool developed in this study. Then, the authors conducted a large-scale experiment using a real-time analytics graph and investigated whether the proposed system could improve the teaching and learning in on-site classrooms. The results indicated that teachers could adjust the speed of their lecture based on the real-time feedback system, which also resulted in encouraging students to put bookmarks and highlights on keywords and sentences.

Real-time learning analytics enables teachers and students to enhance their teaching and learning during lectures. Teachers should start considering this new strategy to improve their lectures immediately.

Today’s digital and mobile learning environment has contributed to the increased availability of and interest in e-textbooks, and many school systems are conducting trials to evaluate their effectiveness. The purpose of this paper is to identify and analyze instructors’ levels of use (LoU) of e-textbook features and innovations at a southeastern US community college. This study also evaluated the effectiveness of e-textbooks compared to paper textbooks on student achievement during a pilot period of e-textbook implementation.

Using a survey research design, the LoU of the Innovation framework was applied to identify and analyze instructors’ LoU rankings for eight e-textbook features. The study also used historical data on student demographics and final course grades to evaluate student achievement between text formats. Descriptive and inferential statistics were used to answer the research questions.

Results showed that e-textbook features were used at a low to non-existent level by instructors and that there was no significant difference in grade average between text formats among students. However, interactions between text format, age and gender were found.

This study added to the body of knowledge regarding e-textbook efficacy. While many studies stop with the conclusion that there is no difference in student outcomes between text formats, this study addressed a gap in literature on how to improve student performance with e-textbook technology by using the LoU of an innovation framework.

Although resource sharing between scholars is evolving rapidly, This paper uses paper-based interlibrary lending (ILL) procedures in the service repertoire of academic libraries. However, the current business model of acquiring toll-access journals and e-books does not seem to fit very well with traditional ILL practices. In addition, the new models of peer-to-peer resource sharing between academics seem to be much more effective than ILL. Scholars arrange access to the needed publications by using legal (buying, exchanging) and illegal means (Sci-Hub, etc.). Furthermore, the demands for open access have increased, voiced not only by librarians and science funders but also by politicians. This development might change the scholarly publication ecosystem, even though older publications are still likely to remain closed.

This paper contrasts the ILL and usage statistics of Finnish university libraries with the use of ResearchGate, a popular academic social network, which we treat as an example of a peer-to-peer sharing service.

Based on the data, there seems to be a change of paradigm in the resource sharing: the traditional ILL seems to be decreasing and becoming more like a niche service and the digital use and use of social media peer-to-peer resource sharing applications seem to increase rapidly.

The paper examines current resource sharing trends. The analysis is based on the data of Finnish resource sharing, interlibrary lending and ResearchGate usage.

Science policy and practice for open access (OA) books is a rapidly evolving area in the scholarly domain. However, there is much that remains unknown, including how many OA books there are and to what degree they are included in preservation coverage. The purpose of this study is to contribute towards filling this knowledge gap in order to advance both research and practice in the domain of OA books.

This study utilized open bibliometric data sources to aggregate a harmonized dataset of metadata records for OA books (data sources: the Directory of Open Access Books, OpenAIRE, OpenAlex, Scielo Books, The Lens, and WorldCat). This dataset was then cross-matched based on unique identifiers and book titles to openly available content listings of trusted preservation services (data sources: Cariniana Network, CLOCKSS, Global LOCKSS Network, and Portico). The web domains of the OA books were determined by querying the web addresses or digital object identifiers provided in the metadata of the bibliometric database entries.

In total, 396,995 unique records were identified from the OA book bibliometric sources, of which 19% were found to be included in at least one of the preservation services. The results suggest reason for concern for the long tail of OA books distributed at thousands of different web domains as these include volatile cloud storage or sometimes no longer contained the files at all.

Data quality issues, varying definitions of OA across services and inconsistent implementation of unique identifiers were discovered as key challenges. The study includes recommendations for publishers, libraries, data providers and preservation services for improving monitoring and practices for OA book preservation.

This study provides methodological and empirical findings for advancing the practices of OA book publishing, preservation and research.

The purpose of this paper is to facilitate the spread of accessible e-books, especially ones of STEM much more in developing countries, an efficient/systematic scheme to localize tools for producing/reading them should be established. Furthermore, even in many advanced countries, Print-disabled people still do not have a good tool to write a content including technical notations such as mathematical formulas in their own local language. This work is aimed at giving a practical solution for those problems.

Here, multilingual support in a tool to produce accessible STEM contents and its new localization scheme are discussed.

It is shown that the accessible STEM-document editor can be customized easily for print-disabled people so that they can read and author a material including complicated technical notations in their own local language. The localization for Vietnamese and other various languages actually has been worked on.

The Vietnamese version was completed, and some prototype versions for the other languages were also given. It is expected that the software can contribute to improve STEM accessibility much more in many countries.

As publishers and academia swiftly head towards e-textbooks, it is important to understand how students feel about using e-textbooks as a primary learning tool. This paper discusses results of a small-scale study looking into how a group of language learners view and use e-textbooks as learning tools in ESL classrooms. The paper concludes by offering teaching implications that could ease integrating e-textbooks in language classrooms in a more effective and efficient manner.

This paper aims to show how an illegal repository of literature, the Z-library, relates to and influences its users and how this relation is unique due to the illegal nature of the platform. The paper utilizes the idea of gamification to exemplify how to motivate users to contribute to a large shadow library in order to create the “world's largest e-book library,” sans “librarians.”

The study makes use of an ethnographic approach. It interrogates the functions of the website through intensive use—a close reading of sorts. The data provide a foundation for illustrating how illegal text repositories function at a surface level and how their design appeals to their user-base.

The paper provides a thorough and non-biased overview of how a “black open access” or “shadow library” site provides its users with pirated literature. It suggests that the lynchpin sustaining their functionality is a gamification of piracy designed to motivate a fragmented collective of individuals who work primarily for personal reward, rather than altruistic goals.

Due to the design of the study, the findings are not universal or applicable to all illegal repositories of text. Readers and researchers are encouraged to apply the concept introduced here to other cases.

This paper includes implication on the perception of literature piracy, how pirated literature is distributed and who performs the labor required to sustain illicit text repositories.

This paper provides a novel conceptual basis to study literature piracy.

The current predominant delivery format resulting from digitization is PDF, which is not appropriate for the blind, partially sighted and people who read on mobile devices. To meet the needs of both communities, as well as broader ones, alternative file formats are required. With the findings of the eBooks-On-Demand-Network Opening Publications for European Netizens project research, this study aims to improve access to digitized content for these communities.

In 2022, the authors conducted research on the digitization experiences of 13 EODOPEN partners at their organizations. The authors distributed the same sample of scans in English with different characteristics, and in accordance with Web content accessibility guidelines, the authors created 24 criteria to analyze their digitization workflows, output formats and optical character recognition (OCR) quality.

In this contribution, the authors present the results of a trial implementation among EODOPEN partners regarding their digitization workflows, used delivery file formats and the resulting quality of OCR results, depending on the type of digitization output file format. It was shown that partners using the OCR tool ABBYY FineReader Professional and producing scanning outputs in tagged PDF and PDF/UA formats achieved better results according to set criteria.

The trial implementations were limited to 13 project partners’ organizations only.

This research paper can be a valuable contribution to the field of massive digitization practices, particularly in terms of improving the accessibility of the output delivery file formats.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the needs of potential end-users of a database dedicated to Swedish lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex (LGBTQI) literature (e.g. prose, poetry, drama, graphic novels/comics, and illustrated books), in order to inform the development of a database, search interface functionalities, and an LGBTQI thesaurus for fiction.

A web questionnaire was distributed in autumn 2021 to potential end-users. The questions covered people's reasons for reading LGBTQI fiction, ways of finding LGBTQI fiction, experience of searching for LGBTQI fiction, usual search elements applied, latest search for LGBTQI fiction, desired subjects to search for, and ideal search functionalities.

The 101 completed questionnaires showed that most respondents found relevant literature through social media or friends and that most obtained copies of literature from a library. Regarding desirable search functionalities, most respondents would like to see suggestions for related terms to support broader search results (i.e. higher recall). Many also wanted search support that would enable retrieving more specific results based on narrower terms when too many results are retrieved (i.e. higher precision). Over half would also appreciate the option to browse by hierarchically arranged subjects.

This study is the first to show how readers of LGBTQI fiction in Sweden search for and obtain relevant literature. The authors have identified end-user needs that can inform the development of a new database and a thesaurus dedicated to LGBTQI fiction.