Search results

This paper describes the creation and work of a collaborative learning community, consisting of library staff from a variety of library departments. The purpose of this paper is to build proficiency in using tablet devices and to explore the potential application of tablets to various types of library work.

Data were collected from discussion sessions, journals, and a survey, which documented participants’ experiences in learning how to use tablets and how they applied them to work-related tasks.

The project helped increase participants’ awareness of different types of work across the library, encouraged inter-departmental communication, and provided an open environment for asking questions, trouble-shooting, and sharing tips about using tablets. Participants mastered basic functions and navigation and explored ways to use tablets in their work. Portability was the top advantage of the tablet.

Although participants found tablets to be convenient and portable for some tasks, they are not ready to entirely replace office computers for library work. Laptops remain a more flexible and powerful option at this time.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the collection development practices regarding e-books among librarians who manage French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish (Romance) materials. The authors aim to describe factors that influence acquisition of e-books for Romance language collections to confirm librarians’ perception that humanities researchers prefer print and library administrators’ attitudes toward e-books.

This study collected data using a mixed-method approach of a survey and focus groups.

This study confirms that user preference is the primary consideration of Romance librarians in selecting e-books. Contrary to librarians’ perceptions, this study found that humanities faculty and students are not averse to using e-books for specific purposes such as searching, targeted reading and course materials. While restrictions on lending e-books are a concern, Romance librarians are focused primarily on serving the needs of their core constituencies.

The practice of adding call numbers to individual e-books varies among institutions. Individual e-book titles in large packages do not necessarily get added to the catalog, thus making it very difficult to compare e-book collections between institutions.

This study endeavors to unify the anecdotal narratives and factors that influence the acquisition of e-books by Romance librarians.

The purpose of this paper is to determine whether librarians at the University of Kansas are providing instruction through chat in order to develop best practices for training purposes.

The authors analyzed a sample of chat transcripts using the “ACRL Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education” to determine whether librarians were utilizing opportunities for instruction in the chat medium. Using this analysis, they selected the best examples of instructional techniques.

Students were open to receiving instruction through chat. Librarians who were most successful in providing assistance to students demonstrated persistency and approachability in their interactions.

The authors developed a list of top ten practices for instruction through chat which can be used for training purposes.

Librarians need to continue to develop instructional techniques to create more opportunities for teaching moments in chat. The paper raises awareness of the impact of librarians' demeanor in the online environment.

The purpose of this paper is to determine undergraduate students' information‐seeking behavior and their thought processes involved in, criteria applied to, and methods of, evaluating the results of their searches, in determining which information to apply to their research.

The paper observed, recorded and analyzed the processes and sources used by undergraduate students when seeking information on a given topic.

Students did not use as many of the criteria necessary for evaluating sources for a research paper as the authors had hoped to observe; therefore, the students identified relatively few scholarly sources.

Even though many of the students had had a course‐integrated library instruction session before participating in the study, it did not seem to increase their evaluative skills, leading the authors to think that research skills need to be integrated in the curriculum in more meaningful ways by teaching faculty.

The paper raises awareness of the search strategies and criteria that undergraduate students use to find information for their research papers.

A year ago Devlin warned that Britain could be left behind in the EEC food lobbying stakes

This paper aims to manage the word gap in information retrieval (IR) especially for long documents belonging to specific domains. In fact, with the continuous growth of text data that modern IR systems have to manage, existing solutions are needed to efficiently find the best set of documents for a given request. The words used to describe a query can differ from those used in related documents. Despite meaning closeness, nonoverlapping words are challenging for IR systems. This word gap becomes significant for long documents from specific domains.

To generate new words for a document, a deep learning (DL) masked language model is used to infer related words. Used DL models are pretrained on massive text data and carry common or specific domain knowledge to propose a better document representation.

The authors evaluate the approach of this study on specific IR domains with long documents to show the genericity of the proposed model and achieve encouraging results.

In this paper, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, an original unsupervised and modular IR system based on recent DL methods is introduced.

Although services, in general, have increased in significance worldwide, financial services face a less encouraging future. Market saturation has led to a search for growth opportunities. One approach has been to utilize traditional marketing techniques such as advertising. Another approach has been to expand into international markets. Managing the international advertising efforts of financial service firms is incredibly complex. This nine country study looks at consistency between advertising content and points of emphasis from financial strategy research. The comparison yields similarities and differences between critical managerial dimensions and themes in international financial service advertisements. Discussion of these findings and implications are provided.