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The purpose of this paper is to highlight the web-archiving as a tool for possible collection development in a research level academic library. The paper highlights the web-archiving project that dealt with the contemporary Ukraine conflict. Currently, as the conflict in Ukraine drags on, the need for collecting and preserving the information from various web-based resources with different ideological orientations acquires a special importance. The demise of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the emergence of independent republics were heralded by some as a peaceful transition to the “free-market” style economies. This transition was nevertheless nuanced and not seamless. Besides the incomplete market liberalization, rent-seeking behaviors of different sort, it was also accompanied by the almost ubiquitous use of and access to the internet and the internet communication technologies. Now 24 years later, the ongoing conflict in Ukraine also appears to be unfolding on the World Wide Web. With the Russian annexation of Crimea and its unification to the Russian Federation, the governmental and non-governmental websites of the Ukrainian Crimea suddenly came to represent a sort of “an endangered archive”.

The main purpose of this project was to make the information that is contained in Ukrainian and Russia websites available to the wider body of scholars and students over the longer period of time in a web archive. The author does not take any ideological stance on the legal status of Crimea or on the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. There are currently several projects that are devoted to the preservation of these websites. This article also focuses on providing a survey of the landscape of these projects and highlights the ongoing web-archiving project that is entitled, “the Ukraine Crisis: 2014-2015” at the UC Berkeley Library.

The UC Berkeley’s Ukraine Conflict Archive was made available to public in March of 2015 after enough materials were archived. The initial purpose of the archive was to selectively harvest, and archive those websites that are bound to either disappear or change significantly during the evolution of Crimea’s accession to Russia. However, in the aftermath of the Crimean conflict, the ensuing of military conflict in Ukraine had forced to reevaluate the web-archiving strategy. The project was never envisioned to be a competing project to the Ukraine Conflict project. Instead, it was supposed to capture complimentary data that could have been missed by other similar projects. This web archive has been made public to provide a glimpse of what was happening and what is happening in Ukraine.

Now 24 years later, the ongoing conflict in Ukraine also appears to be unfolding on the World Wide Web. With the Russian annexation of Crimea and its unification to the Russian Federation, the governmental and non-governmental websites of the Ukrainian Crimea suddenly came to represent a sort of “an endangered archive”. The impetus for archiving the selected Ukrainian websites came as a result of the changing geopolitical realities of Crimea. The daily changes to the websites and also loss of information that is contained within them is one of the many problems faced by the users of these websites. In some cases, the likelihood of these websites is relatively high. This in turn was followed by the author’s desire to preserve the information about the daily lives in Ukraine’s east in light of the unfolding violent armed conflict.

Upon close survey of the Library and Information Sciences currently published articles on Ukraine Conflict, no articles that are currently dedicated to archiving the Crimean and Ukrainian situations were found.

The access to the rare originals of the early Spanish colonial imprints of the Philippines remains problematic. The reference librarians often are restricted to directing the students and scholars to the secondary resources that are available both in print and as a part of the digital assets within the North American academic libraries. This paper aims to focus on the select primary source editions including select Spanish language colonial imprints that are available electronically on the Web along the Open Access. These Web-based resources serve as the reference tools for the early history of the Philippines and Southeast Asia. As many of these publications are rare and extremely expensive for most libraries, the Open Access resources serve as an aid to building a virtual collection of these items.

The author had to create a data set of the early imprints of the Spanish Philippines using several bibliographic resources. The data set will be submitted as an Appendix for this research paper. The author did both qualitative and quantitative analysis of the data set along with the voyant-based digital humanities approach for topic modeling.

The goals of this paper were to not only survey the early Spanish printing of the Philippines but also provide the reader with a somewhat complete picture of how the printing began in the Spanish Philippines, what kind of the first books were printed and how one can access them given their rarity and fragility. The collection building paradigms are undergoing significant shifts, and the focus of many academic libraries is shifting toward providing access to these items. As these items high-value low-use items continue to be part of the Special Collections, the access to these is problematic. The virtual collections thus serve as a viable alternative that enables further research and access. While the creators of these works are long gone, the legacy of the Spanish colonial domination, printing and the religious orders in the Philippines remain alive through these works.

As this is an introductory paper, the author focused on the critical editions rather than providing a comprehensive bibliographic landscape of the presses that produced these editions. He also did not take into consideration many pamphlets that were published in the same period. He also did not consider the Chinese language publications of the Islands. The Chinese had been block printing since medieval times (Little, 1996). In the context of the Spanish Philippines, the Chinese migration and trade have been studied in detail by Chia (2006), Bjork (1998) and Gebhardt (2017). The scope of this paper also was centered toward building a virtual collection of these rare books.

Rare books are often expensive and out-of-reach for many libraries; the virtual collection of the same along the Open Access model represents an alternative to collect and curate these collections. The stewardship of these collections also acquires a new meaning in the digital milieu.

This research paper will allow scholars to see past the analog editions and help them focus on curating a virtual collection. The questions of electronic access are often ignored when it comes to visiting and using them in a controlled environment of the reading room in the Special Collections. The author argues that one way to enable access to these rare and expensive books is to provide access to their digital counterparts. These digital/virtual surrogates of the originals will facilitate further research.

The author could not find similar research on the publications of the early Spanish colony of the Philippines.

The purpose of this study is to examine the importance of libraries in higher education institutes located in Azerbaijan, mainly in the capital city of Baku. Various university libraries have been examined in terms of information services, physical environments and technical equipment support issues.

Questionnaires were completed by students and staff at several universities in Azerbaijan to examine how libraries affect people's academic achievement. The results of this study were comparatively described using multiple tables and graphs.

University library usage is positively associated with academic achievement. Studies have shown that students who use libraries are more likely to succeed academically, as measured by their responses. The role of libraries in academic achievement is not limited to traditional academic tasks such as research and writing.

The results of this study suggest that there is a positive relationship between library usage and academic achievement in some universities in Azerbaijan, and it is necessary to continue the topic in further studies in a wide range to develop relationships between academic library services and success in higher education, either personal or student.

This study is the first to examine the significance of academic libraries in higher education in Azerbaijan, providing a general overview and analysis of the separate correlations among these variables. Researchers interested in Azerbaijani education and libraries may find this to be practical.