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This paper aims to focus on academic library managers’ learning practices in the context of cooperative work supported by computational artefacts. Academic library managers’ everyday work is mainly cooperative. Their cooperation is supported predominantly by computational artefacts. Learning how to use the computational artefacts efficiently and effectively involves understanding the changes in everyday work that affect managers and, therefore, it requires deep understanding of their cooperative work practices.

Focused ethnography was conducted through participant observations, interviews and document analysis. Ten managers from a university library in Sweden participated in the research. A thematic method was used to analyse the empirical material. Computer supported cooperative work (CSCW) and work-integrated learning was used as the conceptual lens.

Five learning practices were identified: collaboration, communication, coordination, decision-making processes and computational artefacts’ use. The findings show that learning is embedded in managers’ cooperative work practices, which do not necessarily include sufficient training time. Furthermore, learning was intertwined with cooperating and was situational. Managers learned by reflecting together on their own experiences and through joint cooperation and information sharing while using the computational artefacts.

The main contribution lies in providing insights into how academic library managers learn and cooperate in their everyday work, emphasizing the role of computational artefacts, the importance of the work context and the collective nature of learning. It also highlights the need for continual workplace learning in contemporary knowledge work environments. Thus, the research generates contributions to the informatics field by extending the understanding of managers’ work-integrated learning in their everyday cooperative work practices supported by computational artefacts’ use. It also contributes to the intersection of CSCW and work-integrated learning.

Public libraries play a pivotal role in supporting education and literacy. They provide numerous services, activities, collections and resources for education and leisure. Bibliotheca Alexandrina (BA) is an international renowned public library that provides numerous services for different users worldwide. E-learning is an emergent and promising method for teaching and learning different subjects such as the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). The e-learning educational system is quite novel in Africa and the Middle East; hence, this paper presents the whole concept to the reader. In addition, it demonstrates number of e-courses tackling different domains provided by different educational institutions, national and public libraries worldwide.

In 2017, the BA inaugurated its e-learning services to cope with the new educational trend and to consolidate the lifelong learning concept in the community. The author showed special interest to the case of e-learning in the BA, as it is a regional public library. The main idea of this paper is to attract attention toward public libraries as a promising venue for e-learning implementation for general knowledge, library information sciences, soft skills, elementary and informal STEM education. The paper discusses in details e-learning and its characteristics.

In addition, the paper compares traditional education (face-to-face) with e-learning education, mentions both their pros and cons and recommends blending the two educational methods as they complement each other. Furthermore, the author has selected a sample of different STEM e-courses (203 different e-courses). These e-courses were selected to assert the possibility of presenting STEM topics in the form of e-courses.

This study would be one of the emergent research studies that connect e-learning to both STEM disciplines and public libraries. Additionally, this research highlights the importance of public libraries and all the services they provide. In the mean time, it shed light on the important and unique role of specialized librarians. Briefly, public libraries with all their resources, services and expert librarians could provide an exceptional e-learning experience to their community and be of great help to educational institutions and organizations.

This paper aims to assess whether the current eResearch Knowledge Centre’s (eRKC) research support practices align with researchers’ requirements for achieving their research objectives. The study’s objectives were to assess the current eRKC research support services and to determine which are adequate and which are not in supporting the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) researchers.

This study uses interviews as part of the qualitative approach. The researcher chose to use interviews, as some aspects warranted further explanation during the interview. The interviews were scheduled using Zoom’s scheduling assistant. The interviews were semi-structured, guided by a flexible interview procedure and supplemented by follow-up questions, probes and comments. The research life cycle questions guided the interviews. The data obtained were coded and transcribed using MS Excel. The interview data were analysed, using NVivo, according to the themes identified in the research questions and aligned with the theory behind the study. Pre-determined codes were created in line with the six stages of the research life cycle and applied to group the data and extract meaning from each category. Interviewee responses were assigned to groups in line with the stages of the research life cycle.

The current eRKC research support services are aligned with the needs of HSRC researchers and highlight services that could be expanded or promoted more effectively to HSRC researchers. It proposes a new service, data analysis, and suggests that the eRKC could play a more prominent role in research impact, research data management and fostering collaboration with HSRC research divisions.

This study is limited to assessing the eRKC’s support practices at the HSRC in Pretoria, South Africa. A more comprehensive study is needed for HSRC research services, capabilities and capacity.

Assessment of eRKC followed a comprehensive interviewee schedule that followed Raju and Schoombee’s research life cycle model.

Zoom’s scheduling assistant may have generated Zoom fatigue and reduced productivity. Technical issues, losing time, communication gaps and distant time zones may have affected face-to-face interaction.

eRKC research support practices are rare in South Africa and most parts of the world. This study bridges the gap between theory and practice in assessing eRKC research support practices.

The purpose of this study is to provide quantitative information on the growth of Islamic finance literature. The study focused on publishing trends, countries producing research on Islamic finance, key authors, major contributing organizations, authorship patterns, keywords and articles with the highest citations.

Bibliometric analysis is applied to analyse the growth and publishing trends in Islamic finance literature. The Web of Science (WoS) database was used to extract bibliometric data covering the period 1939–2019 for Islamic finance literature.

The study finds that Islamic finance research has gained remarkable momentum in the literature. However, such growth is largely manifested in Malaysia because of a conducive atmosphere for this type of research. Interestingly, the study finds that the three most productive journals are located in the UK and Malaysia, while Professor M. Kabir Hassan from the University of New Orleans, the USA appears to head the list of authors with 23 publications on Islamic finance.

This study provides up-to-date literature on the current state of Islamic finance in the world; as a result, it supports the development of policies by the Islamic finance industry. The findings of the study also serve as a reference point for Islamic finance training and educational institutions.

Islamic finance is an emerging financial discipline; as such, there is a need for more awareness of this financial system in the world. Muslim-majority countries, especially Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Indonesia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Pakistan and Bahrain, have to include Islamic finance in their curriculum and establish research institutions and research journals. In addition, Arabic language journals should be indexed in WoS and/or Scopus to provide a high-quality publication platform. This study provides a more comprehensive bibliometric analysis on the growth of Islamic finance literature (1939–2019) in the WoS database; most of the prior studies have covered relatively few areas of focus and a lower range of years in some cases.

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.

This paper aims to describe the development of a knowledge management system (KMS) for the Nadir and Occultation for Mars Discovery (NOMAD) instrument on board the ESA/Roscosmos 2016 ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) spacecraft. The KMS collects knowledge acquired during the engineering process that involved over 30 project partners. In addition to the documentation and technical data (explicit knowledge), a dedicated effort was made to collect the gained experience (tacit knowledge) that is crucial for the operational phase of the TGO mission and also for future projects. The system is now in service and provides valuable information for the scientists and engineers working with NOMAD.

The NOMAD KMS was built around six areas: official documentation, technical specifications and test results, lessons learned, management data (proposals, deliverables, progress reports and minutes of meetings), picture files and movie files. Today, the KMS contains 110 GB of data spread over 11,000 documents and more than 13,000 media files. A computer-aided design (CAD) library contains a model of the full instrument as well as exported sub-parts in different formats. A context search engine for both documents and media files was implemented.

The conceived KMS design is basic, flexible and very robust. It can be adapted to future projects of a similar size.

The paper provides practical guidelines on how to retain the knowledge from a larger aerospace project. The KMS tool presented here works offline, requires no maintenance and conforms to data protection standards.

This paper shows how knowledge management requirements for space missions can be fulfilled. The paper demonstrates how to transform the large collection of project data into a useful tool and how to address usability aspects.

In this study, the authors report visitors' and personnel's safety experiences and concerns in order to understand the safety conditions of a library.

The analysis is based on answers from a small sample survey of library visitors, interviews with the personnel and incidents recorded in a library in Stockholm the capital of Sweden.

Dealing with visitors under influence of drugs/alcohol or feeling intimidated by groups of young individuals are examples of situations in which the staff feel most unsafe. Visitors declare witnessing problems of public disturbance and disorderly conduct, fights and other types of aggression. Although the vast majority of visitors declare feeling safe in the library, their perceptions vary according to the library's environment and their individual characteristics, including their previous victimization.

The study is novel because it indicates the importance of the environment to ensure the safety conditions of the library for both visitors and staff. Finally, research on safety in libraries is often from North America and Western European contexts, while this study contributes to the international literature by illustrating libraries in a Nordic European context.

The study indicates that more social control, both formal and informal, is at the top of the list of recommendations for visitors. Among personnel, recommendations include the need for cooperation with other local actors to solve problems in surrounding areas as well as better education for librarians in dealing with the current safety challenges of libraries as multifunctional public facilities.

Combine visitors' and personnel's safety experiences to better understand the safety conditions of a public library.

Low read rates are a general problem in library inventories. The purpose of this study is to examine the factors that contribute to the success of library inventory by means of a radio-frequency identification (RFID) inventory taker. The factors investigated were tag position, tag orientation, book thickness, tag density (related to thickness of a sequence of books) and position on the shelf.

A total of 210 books were placed in eight random permutations on three fixed book shelves. For each configuration, the RFID tags were read forty times. The resulting data were analysed by means of a generalized linear model, relating the combined contribution of tag position, tag orientation, book thickness and position on the bookshelf to the read rate.

The tags positioned directly next to the spine were always read, but those near the opening of the book (far from the spine and inventory reader) were not always read. Considering only books with tags near the opening, tag orientation and position on the shelf appeared not to be related to the read rate, while book thickness, thickness over three books and spine tag density appeared to have a small positive contribution to the read rate.

Low read rates during a library inventory can be prevented by placing the tags near the book spine – the other book specific factors (listed in the previous paragraph) are of little influence. When not scanned during a first sweep, repeated scanning can increase the read rate with 0.15.

This paper is one of the first to analyse the influence of tag location and book specific factors on the read rate of RFID tags in library books. The experimental approach sets an example for future work.

The study aims to investigate the utilisation of open research data repositories (RDRs) for storing and sharing research data in higher learning institutions (HLIs) in Tanzania.

A survey research design was employed to collect data from postgraduate students at the Nelson Mandela African Institution of Science and Technology (NM-AIST) in Arusha, Tanzania. The data were collected and analysed quantitatively and qualitatively. A census sampling technique was employed to select the sample size for this study. The quantitative data were analysed using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS), whilst the qualitative data were analysed thematically.

Less than half of the respondents were aware of and were using open RDRs, including Zenodo, DataVerse, Dryad, OMERO, GitHub and Mendeley data repositories. More than half of the respondents were not willing to share research data and cited a lack of ownership after storing their research data in most of the open RDRs and data security. HILs need to conduct training on using trusted repositories and motivate postgraduate students to utilise open repositories (ORs). The challenges for underutilisation of open RDRs were a lack of policies governing the storage and sharing of research data and grant constraints.

Research data storage and sharing are of great interest to researchers in HILs to inform them to implement open RDRs to support these researchers. Open RDRs increase visibility within HILs and reduce research data loss, and research works will be cited and used publicly. This paper identifies the potential for additional studies focussed on this area.