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The purpose of this paper is to explore stress among reference library staff in academic and public libraries in one of the European countries. The study has been conducted to ascertain whether members of the reference staff undergo stress, whether they consider the reference work stressful, how often they are exposed to stress, which situations are most stressful and how they cope with stress in the workplace and in their private lives.

A semi-structured interview is applied as a data collection technique so that interviewees are able to express their opinions on stress and to describe stress as an individual experience. A convenience sample of members of the reference library staff in ten academic and ten public libraries is prepared.

The reference library staff in the academic and public libraries is aware of stress causing damage to one’s health and work performance. The reference staff in the public libraries is more frequently exposed to stress than those in the academic libraries. The users are considered the main stressor owing to their complex reference questions, vague information needs and requests, wanting information and materials immediately, not following the library rules, etc.

The sample is small and not representative, including only two types of libraries. The research may serve as a preliminary study, as it offers insights into the work-related stress among the reference staff in the academic and public libraries.

This is the first research on the stress of the reference library staff in the academic and public libraries in the country. It contributes to the understanding of the work-related stress in the libraries. Identifying stressful situations can help the reference staff and employers take appropriate strategies to cope with stress.

The purpose of this paper is to present an investigation of bibliographic families in COBIB especially relationships among their members.

The entity‐relationship model is a convenient tool for analysing bibliographic records in library catalogues regarding a distinction between data on intellectual and/or artistic content and on the physical carrier.

Bibliographic relationships are an important part of the catalogue although they are not always identified and expressed explicitly. So, users have troubles in searching as they have to figure out if and how similar records are connected.

Incorporation of information on bibliographic relationships into the catalogue would make retrieval improved, more precise and easier implying also efficient exploitation of recorded knowledge.

Images can be seen in a different way by different users. The purpose of this paper is to examine how users describe images and to ascertain whether differences exist between users and librarians in creating metadata on images.

The paper compares metadata on digital images generated by users to metadata generated by librarians. A sample of images taken from Digital Library of Slovenia and Flickr is presented to students to assign tags. The tags are grouped into categories and classes of attributes and compared to keywords added by Slovene librarians and to tags created by Flickr visitors.

The number of assigned tags differs greatly among survey participants, librarians and Flickr users, the participants being the most productive. A majority of tags reflect perceptual attributes and tagging is mostly done for personal benefit. The matching rate for all images is 41.4 percent; matching is a little higher with the Flickr images.

Social tagging can be used to develop control vocabularies reflecting users' language and to provide access to digital images.

The paper presents quantitative data on image attributes used by users in describing images.

The purpose of this research is to provide information about derivative bibliographic relationships in the online catalogue COBIB, to investigate size and complexity of bibliographic families and to determine whether bibliographic characteristics are associated with the extent of derivations.

A bibliographic entity consisting of a work and item is represented by bibliographic records. A random sample of records is converted into a sample of progenitor works and bibliographic families for each progenitor are constructed.

25.75 per cent of progenitor works are derivative; successive derivations with 67.02 per cent appear most frequently. The size of bibliographic families ranges from 1 to 16; older progenitors have larger families. The majority of families have one type of relationship; there is one case with four types. A large proportion, 59.06 per cent, of derivative relationships is not expressed explicitly by catalogue.

Research of bibliographic records representing more than one work is needed. It is also important to find out what catalogue users are looking for: a work or an item?

A model for COBIB is suggested; it enables an equal identification of works, items and relationships. A cataloguer must create an authority record for each work and link it with corresponding bibliographic records for items.

Information about relationships should be incorporated into the catalogue and corresponding records linked. Explicit control of derivative relationships would be of great help to catalogue users and would make information retrieval improved and more precise; it would also allow more efficient use of knowledge and library materials.