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This paper aims to show how an illegal repository of literature, the Z-library, relates to and influences its users and how this relation is unique due to the illegal nature of the platform. The paper utilizes the idea of gamification to exemplify how to motivate users to contribute to a large shadow library in order to create the “world's largest e-book library,” sans “librarians.”

The study makes use of an ethnographic approach. It interrogates the functions of the website through intensive use—a close reading of sorts. The data provide a foundation for illustrating how illegal text repositories function at a surface level and how their design appeals to their user-base.

The paper provides a thorough and non-biased overview of how a “black open access” or “shadow library” site provides its users with pirated literature. It suggests that the lynchpin sustaining their functionality is a gamification of piracy designed to motivate a fragmented collective of individuals who work primarily for personal reward, rather than altruistic goals.

Due to the design of the study, the findings are not universal or applicable to all illegal repositories of text. Readers and researchers are encouraged to apply the concept introduced here to other cases.

This paper includes implication on the perception of literature piracy, how pirated literature is distributed and who performs the labor required to sustain illicit text repositories.

This paper provides a novel conceptual basis to study literature piracy.

Aims to present an overview of the implementation of library services to a distinct user population.

Presents a review of the decision‐making process behind the development of services to support a new remote campus at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Provides the rationale behind the decisions that were made regarding the branch library web page. Recognizes the need for continuous assessment and revision of procedures and the web page.

This paper provides a practical look at creating a virtual library in a paperless environment.

In 2016, Bohannon published an article analyzing the download rate of the top ten countries using the illegal Sci-Hub website. Four years later, this study approaches the search behavior of these ten countries as they query about Sci-Hub in Google's search engine, the world's most widely used search engine. The authors also tracked the possible consequences of using Sci-Hub, such as plagiarism.

The search terms “Sci-Hub”, “Plagiarism” and “Plagiarism Checker” were explored with Google Trends. The queries were performed globally and individually for the ten target countries, all categories and web searches. The time range was limited between 1/1/2016 (after the date of publication of Bohannon's work) and 29/03/2020. Data were extracted from Google Trends and the findings were mapped.

Searching for the word Sci-Hub on Google has increased nearly eightfold worldwide in the last four years, with China, Ethiopia and Tunisia having the most searches. Sci-Hub's search trends increased for most of the T10C, with Brazil and Iran having the highest and lowest average searches, respectively.

Access to the research literature is required to the progress of research, but it should not be obtained illegally. Given the increasing incidence of these problems in countries at any level of development, it is important to pay attention to ethics education in research and establish ethics committees. A comprehensive review of the research process is required to reduce the urge to circumvent copyright laws and includes training and educating research stakeholders in copyright literacy. To address these goals, national and international seriousness and enthusiasm are essential.

RETROSPECT is natural at the beginning of a new library year. All over the world of libraries of all kinds the shadow of the general depression has fallen; more heavily perhaps in the United States than here. It is a testing time which has made the enemies of libraries vocal and has also fortunately roused their advocates. On balance, optimism may prevail; and in that faith we wish our readers a happy new year.

A LIBRARIAN not very long ago made the pertinent suggestion that public libraries were run upside‐down. In brief, his point was that a library assistant's life was something like that of a monk or a nun, in that as he passed successive grades in his qualifications, so he became more and more remote from the outer world, until he eventually was finally and completely immured behind a door marked private, there to commune in silence with the Times Literary Supplement and the 13th edition of Dewey. The idea was, of course,—and it had ingenuity and great truth,—that in fact the more knowledge and experience he accumulated, the more he was required to be at the vital point of contact between the public and their reading matter.

Considering the shortage of minority representation in the library profession, this paper aims to examine minority students' awareness of librarianship and investigates the impact of marketing academic librarianship to students at the campus' cultural centers as a recruitment method.

The paper analyses previous studies and provides results from a survey distributed to minority students at two of the cultural centers and at the Summer Research Opportunities Program, a program that prepares minority students for graduate studies.

Results indicate a connection between presentations to students about academic librarianship and their interest in pursuing the profession. Findings highlight students' lack of awareness of librarian job responsibilities and the findings also highlight students' preferred methods for continued mentorship and support.

More qualitative research would prove valuable to gain in‐depth feedback from students about their understanding of the library profession and what factors are most and least likely to attract them to the profession. A second paper is planned to investigate the number of students who pursued a library degree that attended one of these sessions.

The paper highlights a simple, affordable and replicable alternative to time‐intensive and heavily subsidized recruitment programs.

As the population becomes more diverse and patron needs change, the library profession, which is predominantly white, will need to diversify to reflect patrons' increasingly diverse needs.

Many large‐scale recruitment initiatives recruit minority students to academic librarianship. This paper describes a small‐scale and effective approach to minority student recruitment.

The aim of this paper is to introduce the second part of the theme issue on “user research and technology” and to discuss testing online digital library resources using methods from ethnography and cultural anthropology.

This editorial reviews the literature and research design methods.

Library and information science as a field is changing and the requirements for top quality research are growing more stringent. This is typical of the experience of other professional fields as they have moved from practitioners advising practitioners to researchers building on past results.

The results of current research need not merely be interesting, but in so far as possible, testable and reproducible.

[In view of the approaching Conference of the Library Association at Perth, the following note on the Leighton Library may not be inopportune. Dunblane is within an hour's railway journey from Perth and has a magnificent cathedral, founded in the twelfth century, which is well worthy of a visit.]

The purpose of this column is to review several recent library partnerships and highlight the benefit of such endeavors for the libraries and their partner institutions.

This is a literature review and commentary on this topic that has been addressed by professionals, researchers and practitioners.

Visibility and access to the library in some unexpected locations, thanks to a number of creative partnerships, can serve as greater a function to the library as to its partner and the community. The vitality of the library can be at least partially sustained by its partnerships and can serve as a model for other public/private and public/public associations where both sides of the partnership benefit in the estimation of the public.

The value in addressing this issue is to examine the creative public/private and public/public partnerships of which libraries can avail themselves in an effort to best serve their patrons.

This study aims to seek the causative relationship between the library budget and research output with the ranking of 20 leading medial institutes in India. More so, the study also attempts to find out whether the libraries associated with academic and research institutes in general and medical institutes in particular have turned redundant or irrelevant, or have become more relevant in the changing times by embracing technology in its every new form.

The study is based on the secondary data retrieved from the official website of the Ministry of Education, Government of India and research output against each institution under study has been retrieved from Scopus. The study is limited to Indian medical institutions that participated in the 2019 National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF), conducted by the Ministry of Education, India each year. The findings of the study can be generalized to all the medical institutions of the country.

On average, INR 160.90m were spent by each medical institute on the procurement of library resources at an average of INR 0.104m on procurement of resources against each individual published research article. Of the total research articles published by medical institutes under study, 26.39% of research articles were published by researchers from AIIMS, New Delhi, alone.

Financial aid or funding is very vital for the survival, sustenance and excellence of research institutions, and this funding becomes more important when the investigation is aimed toward the furtherance of medical advances. Any medical advancement is hell-bent to influence the overall welfare and betterment of society at large, whereby the benefit of any investment made in medical science is bound to be reaped by one and all alike.

In India, a good number of studies have been undertaken on the NIRF data to dive deeper to assess the role and importance of libraries in the overall ranking of institutions like universities, management institutes, engineering and technology institutes, but no major study has been so far conducted covering leading medical institutes in India. The study is the original and first of its kind undertaken in India.