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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the archives management practices and needs of corporations that do not employ professional archivists and propose strategies for helping corporations manage and preserve their archives.

An online survey was distributed to non-profit and for-profit corporations located in the XX area, USA.

The majority of surveyed corporations did not have archivists on staff and were not satisfied with their archives management practices. Many of them have unaddressed archives management needs and preferred no-cost or low-cost approaches to address those needs. Most surveyed corporations had digital archives but lacked knowledge about digital archiving. Free archiving resources and services provided by libraries/archives were dramatically less well known than commercial archiving resources and services.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is one of the very few empirical studies on corporate archives not under professional control. Findings from this study inspired thoughts on how archival education programs, professional associations, cultural heritage organizations and other relevant parties could help corporations better manage and preserve their archives.

Online marketplaces, which provide on-demand goods or services through matching providers and consumers, have emerged in many sectors of the society. This paper aims to assess the need and speculate the design features of a specialized, online marketplace for archival services.

Interview data collected for a previous project were reanalyzed, and the websites of some online marketplaces were explored.

Existing general-purpose online marketplaces are useful but limited. Archivists and closely related professionals, including conservators, genealogists and public historians, need a specialized online marketplace to connect with their clients. This specialized online marketplace for archival services could adopt some useful features of existing online marketplaces.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first attempt to assess the need for an online marketplace for archival services.

This paper aims to identify the diffusion patterns, especially the communication channels, in the diffusion and adoption of research data management services (RDMS) among libraries.

Literature about the RDMS in individual libraries was gathered and analyzed. Data relevant to the research questions were extracted and analyzed.

Early adopters conduct much original research to create RDMS and they often serve as change agents in diffusing their RDMS and related innovations to other libraries. In contrast, late adopters usually learn from early adopters and use their innovations for establishing their own RDMS. Communication channels used in diffusing RDMS deviate slightly from those reported in general diffusion of innovations (DOI) theories.

Gathered literature provides incomplete and uneven information for RDMS adopters. This makes it difficult to identify adopter categories and test many generalizations in DOI theories. To overcome these limitations, surveys and interviews will be conducted in the future.

Findings from this project contribute to general DOI theories because RDMS is unique compared with many other innovations. The diffusion of RDMS is a decentralized process that involves a high-degree of reinvention and it involves the generation and diffusion of many relevant innovations. The project also identified scholarly communication and inter-organization networks as new types of communication channels that are not well accounted for in existing DOI theories.

Today, Chinese libraries are in urgent need of a national bibliographic utility resembling the OCLC union catalog for cooperative cataloging and resource sharing. Three options are presently available for Chinese libraries: purchasing bibliographic records from the National Library of China (NLC), joining the China Academic Library and Information System (CALIS) Union Cataloguing Center, and contributing records to OCLC WorldCat. This paper analyzes the problems associated with each option. To implement the third option, Chinese catalogers will have to meet the three requirements set forth by OCLC: adding Pinyin, DDC (Dewey decimal classification) or LCC (Library of Congress classification), and LCSH (Library of Congress subject headings) or MeSH (National Library of Medicine subject headings) data to each contributed record. Impact and implementation are also discussed.

This paper aims to provide a theoretical guide for preserving ancient books in China.

The paper reviews the history of the damage and preservation of ancient books in China, and analyzes the value attributes of ancient books: archaeological value, historical value and artistic value.

The paper proposes a preservation framework for Chinese ancient books. This framework is composed of three layers. The foundation layer is to preserve the physical entity of ancient books so that the archaeological values are preserved. The middle layer is to preserve the intellectual content of ancient books so that the values for historical research are preserved. The top layer is mainly about preserving the productions process of the artistic format of ancient books, so that not only the static artistic formats are preserved, the techniques and procedures to produce the artistic format are preserved as well.

The paper presents a framework that connects the value attributes of ancient books and the strategies to preserve those values, systematizes them and presents them as a whole. The framework can be used to justify government policies and help identify pitfalls in the preservation strategies for ancient books.

Digital collections are becoming more commonplace at libraries, archives and museums around the world, creating potential for improved accessibility to information that may otherwise remain hidden and further support for intellectual exploration. As a result of the growing potential for digital collections to inform and influence, the conversation surrounding ethics and digital collections needs to be continually examined and adapted as technologies evolve, user expectations change and digital information plays an increasing role in our everyday lives. In this context, this paper presents an overview of multifaceted ethical realities that impact the how, why and what digital information is created, accessed and preserved.

Written from the perspective of a digital collections librarian, this paper relies on existing research in presenting ethical considerations and complements that research with professional observations in providing subsequent reflections on addressing challenges in the age of digital information.

There are and should be considerations given to not only what information is contained in a given collection, but also how that information is selected, accessed and consumed by the public. The conclusions offered are designed to provoke reflection on the evolving and interconnected nature of information and ethics in the context of digital collections.

Information ethics is multifaceted, with one of those facets relating directly to digital collections. This paper demonstrates that digital collections are more complex than simply a collection of digitized documents and photographs. As the field of information management continually evolves and adapts, so, too, do the ethical realizations identified in this paper, all of which go beyond the (virtual) walls of a library, archive or museum, and carry the potential to have a long-term impact concerning information and its integrity, equity and access.

Recently, increasing importance has been given to electronic records in China, despite the lack of understanding that institutions and organizations have regarding the security status of electronic records preservation. Wuhan, the largest city in central China, serves as a case to investigate the preservation security of electronic records. Challenges to security are summarized, and solutions are proposed to support policy-developing and operational guidance. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The Delphi method is applied to analyze the advice of nine experts, select survey items and design questionnaires. Data are collected from 34 archives in Wuhan through field surveys, oral interviews and e-mails, which are analyzed and illustrated with three representative cases.

Main achievements of electronic records preservation are concluded in the electronic records management system, carrier types and storage formats, and data backup. Problems are summarized as a lack of awareness and capability of defending against security risks, disaster recovery capability, and understanding of electronic record characteristics. Solutions are proposed as follows: carrying out regular security risk evaluation, adopting new technologies, implementing application-level backup, strengthening technology-related education and attracting more IT talent to join the archive discipline. In addition, it is critical to promote an understanding of the characteristics of electronic records.

This paper investigates the security status of electronic records in central China by surveys and case studies. Critical problems and corresponding solutions are raised to support policy-developing and operational guidance for the research and practice of all kinds of institutions that implement electronic records preservation.

The purpose of this paper is to numerically investigate the effect of guide vane unsteady passing wake on the rotor blade tip aerothermal performance with different tip clearances.

The geometry and flow conditions of the first stage of GE-E3 high-pressure turbine have been used to obtain the blade tip three-dimensional heat transfer characteristics. The first stage of GE-E3 high-pressure turbine has 46 guide vanes and 76 rotor blades, and the ratio of the vane to the blade is simplified to 38:76 to compromise the computational resources and accuracy. Namely, each computational domain comprises of one guide vane passage and two rotor blade passages. The investigations are conducted at three different tip gaps of 1.0, 1.5 and 2.0 per cent of the average blade span.

The results show that the overall discrepancy of the heat transfer coefficient between steady results and unsteady time-averaged results is quite small, but the dramatic growth of the instantaneous heat transfer coefficient along the pressure side is in excess of 20 per cent. The change of the aerothermal performance is mainly driven by turbulence-level fluctuations of the unsteady flow field within gap regions. In addition, the gap size expansion has a marginal impact on the variation ratio of tip unsteady aerothermal performances, even though it has a huge influence on the leakage flow state within the tip region.

This paper emphasizes the change ratio of unsteady instantaneous heat transfer characteristics and detailed the mechanism of blade tip unsteady heat transfer coefficient fluctuations, which provide some guidance for the future blade tip design and optimization.