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This paper continues the reporting of the Unit's work on a method of investigating how often readers fail to find what they are looking for on the shelves, why they fail, and what particular books they fail to find. The method used is a slight modification of the earlier one—readers were asked to record on a slip provided the details of the book or periodical they were looking for, or subject area they were looking in, their academic status, and the date, and then to place the slip in an adjoining box. From analysis of these ‘failure’ slips it was possible to determine the cause of the reader's failure, the individual book the reader was looking for, and the pattern of failure for different groups of volumes. A new development was surveys of samples of readers, carried out during the fortnight of peak demand. Answers to these surveys provided information on the effect of failure on a reader's work, what action he took after failing, whether he found adequate substitutes, how many books he found by browsing, and what proportion of the books he consulted he borrowed. Some of these answers could be checked by a direct count of the books used in, and borrowed from, the library. The investigations were carried out in three University libraries, each with its own characteristic library structure and teaching patterns. These differences were reflected in the results obtained. It is hoped that the methods of investigation used can be employed by librarians to investigate the effectiveness of some of the services in their own libraries.

The new British Library building is being constructed next to St. Pancras railway station in London. The building itself is being constructed for the Department of National Heritage by PSA Projects, their Management Contractors, Laing Management, and a large number of sub‐contractors. By contrast the automation supporting the services in the new building is being managed directly by the British Library. This paper gives an outline of these computer systems and the services that they provide. It concentrates more on what the systems do rather than the technology by which they achieve their results. The main computer systems supporting reader services are readers' admissions, the online catalogue and automatic book request.

In recent years, electronic resources have become the library's important storage of a university library, and the fund purchased electronic resources also increased quickly, year after year. In order to find out the readers' present conditions, difficulties and requirement of using e‐recourses, The Library of Shaanxi University of Science and Technology, carried out sampling, questioning and investigating of all teachers and students at campus. The purpose of this paper is to present the findings of this investigation.

The investigation was carried out in 206.3 at the campus, and the investigative target involves teachers, scientific staff, gadre, graduate students, scientific staff, undergraduate students, and some training students, from 15 institutes in the whole university. It centers on seven subjects, deigns 24 question and 155 selective answers, and everyone is multilateral, 1,000 questionnaires were sent out, 909 reclaimed. The ratio is 90.9 percent.

The investigative result shows that: nearly half of the readers investigated are satisfied with e‐resources of our university. At present, the main way that reader's obtained rebases or literature is from traditional library storage. This illustrated that the printing literature obtained important functions. The e‐book does not substitute the traditional printed book. The construction of library storage should advocate the printed one. Readers selecting the printed and e‐book occupy the greatest majority. This shows that the two type of literature are not completely substituted, only mutually supple. The way readers liked obtaining information is to skim the homepage of the library. This indicated the homepage had become the important window to give publicity and serve the outside. It also shows the use of reading on screen, non‐familiarizing the structure and the retrieval method. Showing that the net condition and computer facilities are the main external factors.

This paper analyses the consciousness of using e‐resources, and the ability of obtaining literature for university readers, by investigating some readers' utility of e‐resources at Shaanxi University of Science and Technology. Therefore the readers' range is limited.

In this paper the result from one side reflects every unit and layer personnel's utilizing condition and difficulty of e‐literature at the whole university. By investigating and analyzing, the work emphasis of the library is defined.

The investigating table does not only look into some teachers and students' utilizing condition, and readers' opinions and proposing to use the library's, but also obtains the disseminated fanfaron to all people using the library. By angling the result, it supplies theoretic foundation of e‐resources' order, storage's construction, readers' serve, etc.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the performance of table type radio frequency identification (RFID) reader and verify the effect of the use of a parasitic element on the table type RFID reader to increase the communication performance and improve the automatic identification of books in the library.

In this study, the authors observe the magnetic field at each point on the reader by using a small probe antenna and evaluate the reading performance of table type RFID reader at each point on the reader by using a RFID tag. Furthermore, to increase the communication performance, they add a parasitic element on the table type RFID reader and evaluate its usefulness.

The power distribution on the table type RFID reader and the communication performance of the table type REID reader were clearly shown. From the experiments of the magnetic field observation, when the coil surface of a tag is put in the parallel with the antenna plane of the reader, the tag can obtain electric power from the reader most effectively. Furthermore, by using a loop coil between the reader and the tag as a parasitic element, the points where communication is enabled with tag increased as the number of turns of coil increased.

In this research work, the author clearly showed the table type RFID reader’s performance by experiment. Moreover, to increase the communication performance, the author proposed to add a parasitic element to the table type RFID leader.

The paper aims to discuss the course of change and development of reader self‐service within public libraries in China.

The paper takes the form of a discussion of the issues.

The paper finds that self‐service has compelled librarians to change from “helping readers” to “helping readers to help themselves”.

The paper examines change and development in the public library service in China and analyses its inevitability and necessity, as well as pointing out some of the inherent problems.

The purpose of the paper is to grope for the scientific research method for the reader's potential discontent information with the analysis of the show form of the reader's potential discontent information and the statistic analysis of the reader's service information in the academic library.

The paper uses the research method of the behavior analysis to study the show form of the reader's potential discontent information, and farther puts forward the research path for the reader's potential discontent information in the academic library by a statistics analytical methodology.

The paper finds that the reader's potential discontent information is very important but not easy ascertained information source in the library service work estimate. Library supervisor must understand that not only the behavior analysis but also statistics analytical method can develop the scientific analysis and research to obtain the information for the improvement of the library service.

There is an important value for using the behavior analysis and statistics method to develop a further research.

The paper shows that it is very important value to obtain the reader's potential discontent information for improvement of the library service.

The paper offers some important information collection outlet and method to design the service mode and improve the service work for the academic library.

Librarianship’s dominant conception of the freedom to read is governed by a liberal principle of noninterference, wherein free readers are those who face no intentional intervention in their choice of materials. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how this account fails to adequately capture systemic threats that impoverish people’s reading lives.

This conceptual paper deploys informal argumentation to expose a flaw in the dominant account of the freedom to read. The author uses a case study of comparative titles or comps, an editorial decision-making and justificatory convention that reproduces racial inequality in Anglophone trade publishing.

Comps present one example of how everyday norms and practices of literary production render people’s reading lives pervasively unfree, even absent some intent to interfere in them. The going account of the freedom to read calls, at best, for a greater diversity of book-commodities from which consumers may choose. However, the comp case suggests that this distributive remedy will be insufficient without relevant changes to the institutional arrangements that condition readers' choices in the first place.

This paper draws together insights from Library and Information Science, political philosophy and print culture studies to illuminate limitations in librarianship’s standard conception of the freedom to read. This reveals the need for an alternative, structural account of that freedom with significant implications for practice.

The purpose is to explore the essential reasons for the differences between book awakening phenomena, to develop the critical factors in awakening the slumbering collections and to provide a reliable basis for maximizing book value and optimizing collection allocation.

The research employs the integrated learning algorithm XGBoost to measure driving factors. In the process of book circulation, the characteristics of collections and readers are worthy of attention. Therefore, this study also carries out feature selection and model construction from the two dimensions of books and readers.

The results show that reader features have a stronger impetus for the collection awakening phenomenon than collection features. Among reader features, education level, gender and major subject are the main factors, which are followed closely by the activity level; among collection features, publication date and price are the main driving factors. The indicators of book popularity are not significant, whose effect on the phenomenon of collection awakening is almost negligible.

This study aims to augment the theory of zero circulation from the theoretical level and, for the first time, seeks to define the phenomenon of collection awakening. This study attempts to present novel ideas for research in the field of libraries and to provide references for optimizing collection and maximizing the value of books.

Readers articulate mood in deeply subjective ways, yet the underlying structure of users' understanding of the media they consume has important implications for retrieval and access. User articulations might at first seem too idiosyncratic, but organizing them meaningfully has considerable potential to provide a better searching experience for all involved. The current study develops mood categories inductively for fiction organization and retrieval in information systems.

The authors developed and distributed an open-ended survey to 76 fiction readers to understand their preferences with regard to the affective elements in fiction. From the fiction reader responses, the research team identified 161 mood terms and used them for further categorization.

The inductive approach resulted in 30 categories, including angry, cozy, dark and nostalgic. Results include three overlapping mood families: Emotion, Tone/Narrative, and Atmosphere/Setting, which in turn relate to structures that connect reader-generated data with conceptual frameworks in previous studies.

The inherent complexity of “mood” should not dissuade researchers from carefully investigating users' preferences in this regard. Adding to the existing efforts of classifying moods conducted by experts, the current study presents mood terms provided by actual end-users when describing different moods in fiction. This study offers a useful roadmap for creating taxonomies for retrieval and description, as well as structures derived from user-provided terms that ultimately have the potential to improve user experience.

Attentive to task-related information is the prerequisite for task completion. Comparing the cognition between attentive readers (AR) and inattentive readers (IAR) is of great value for improving reading services which has seldom been studied. To explore their cognitive differences, this study investigates the effectiveness, efficiency and cognitive resource allocation strategy by eye-tracking technology.

A controlled user study of two types of task, fact-finding (FF) and content understanding (CU) tasks was conducted to collect data including answer for task, fixation duration (FD), fixation count (FC), fixation duration proportion (FDP), and fixation count proportion (FCP). 24 participants were placed into AR or IAR group according to their fixation duration on paragraphs related to task.

Two types of cognitive resource allocation strategies, question-oriented (QO) and navigation-assistant (NA) were identified according to the differences in FDP and FCP. In FF task, although QO strategy was applied by the two groups, AR group was significantly more effective and efficient. In CU task, although the two groups were similar in effectiveness and efficiency, AR group promoted their strategies to NA while IAR group sticked to applying QO strategy. Furthermore, an interesting phenomenon “win by uncertainty”, which implies IAR group may get correct answer through uncertain means, such as clue, domain knowledge or guess, rather than task-related information, was observed.

This study takes a deep insight into cognition from the prospect of attentive and inattentive to task-related information. Identifying indicators about cognition helps to distinguish attentive and inattentive readers in various tasks automatically. The cognitive resource allocation strategy applied by readers sheds new light on reading skill training. A typical reading phenomenon “win by uncertainty” was found and defined. Understanding the phenomenon is of great value for satisfying reader information need and enhancing their deep learning.