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New social discovery systems have social‐type Web 2.0 features that allow users to enhance the content of bibliographic records by adding their own tags, ratings, and reviews. One of the primary underlying principles of cataloguing is that catalogue records be designed with the user in mind, i.e. user convenience. The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between the principle of user convenience and social discovery systems.

A review of the literature and codes of ethics of associations of information professions was undertaken to examine: the ethical dimensions of creating catalogue records to reflect user convenience, the relationship between culture and user convenience, and how social discovery tools can facilitate the creation of interactive and flexible catalogue records that reflect the culture(s) and needs of the library communities in which they exist.

Social discovery systems can address the primary barriers to creating catalogue records that meet user convenience: determining and reflecting the needs and cultural warrant of the users, and maintaining the quality and integrity of the catalogue records.

Social discovery systems can serve as a bridge between cataloguers' desire to create accurate catalogue records that conform to accepted cataloguing standards, and their ethical imperative to ensure that these records meet the needs of the clients.

The findings of this study pave the way for further research into how user‐contributed metadata allow clients to express their needs and cultural warrant and to interact with one another and library staff.

This is an attempt to introduce proactive changes when creating and providing intellectual access in order to convince catalogers to become more social catalogers then they have ever been in the past.

Through a brief review and analysis of relevant literature a definition of social cataloging and social cataloger is given.

User contributed content to library catalogs affords informational professionals the opportunity to see directly the users’ perceptions of the usefulness and about-ness of information resources. This is a form of social cataloging especially from the perspective of the information professional seeking to organize information to support knowledge discovery and access.

The user and the cataloger exercise their voice as to what the information resources are about, which in essence is interpreting the intentions of the creator of the resources, how the resource is related to other resources, and perhaps even how the resources can be, or have been, used. Depending on the type of library and information environment, the weight of the work may or may not fall equally on both user and cataloger.

New definitions of social cataloging and social cataloguing are offered and are linked back to Jesse Shera’s idea of social epistemology.

This exploratory study aims to help contribute to the understanding of online information search behaviour of PhD students from different humanities fields, with a focus on subject searching.

The methodology is based on a semi-structured interview within which the participants are asked to conduct both a controlled search task and a free search task. The sample comprises eight PhD students in several humanities disciplines at Linnaeus University, a medium-sized Swedish university from 2020.

Most humanities PhD students in the study have received training in information searching, but it has been too basic. Most rely on web search engines like Google and Google Scholar for publications' search, and university's discovery system for known-item searching. As these systems do not rely on controlled vocabularies, the participants often struggle with too many retrieved documents that are not relevant. Most only rarely or never use disciplinary bibliographic databases. The controlled search task has shown some benefits of using controlled vocabularies in the disciplinary databases, but incomplete synonym or concept coverage as well as user unfriendly search interface present hindrances.

The paper illuminates an often-forgotten but pervasive challenge of subject searching, especially for humanities researchers. It demonstrates difficulties and shows how most PhD students have missed finding an important resource in their research. It calls for the need to reconsider training in information searching and the need to make use of controlled vocabularies implemented in various search systems with usable search and browse user interfaces.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an insight into the use of Web 2.0 and Library 2.0 technologies so that librarians can combine open source software with user‐generated content to create a richer discovery experience for their users.

Following a description of the current state of integrated library systems (ILS) and the developments with Web 2.0 and Library 2.0 technologies, examples are given of library suppliers and libraries which are making use of these technologies.

Libraries are moving away from the traditional, vendor‐sourced library catalogue software in favour of open source software that can be tailored to meet the community's needs by the people who are most familiar with those needs: library staff. Open source products and some vendor products outside the traditional ILS market allow libraries to pool data created by users: tags, reviews, comments. This allows the smallest libraries to harvest richer data than those of their own communities.

The paper provides a “snapshot” of current developments in this fast‐moving area.

Based on the study of overall situation of the tagging function in the provincial public libraries and library of major colleges and universities, this paper aims to examine the difference of tagging behaviour of its users in library and social community sites. The authors also want to understand the causes of a variety of annotation behavior in social community sites and libraries.

The authors collected all system log data of tags, comments and ratings users added in Wuhan University library, and then found the tags, comments and rating of corresponding books in Douban. Then, the authors did questionnaire survey to the Wuhan University students.

The authors found that the annotation service in the library is not perfect as that in social community site. Enthusiasm of users annotating books in the library is far less high than that on the social community sites. Lack of understanding of the annotation service is the main reason why users are not concerned or do not use the tagging service. But users have the needs of the organization of personal information in the library using tags.

This paper investigated the library users’ behavior in the using library OPAC course and compared the difference of annotation behavior between library and social community site.

This paper aims to investigate the quality of access to translated fiction published between 2007 and 2011 in six large Canadian public libraries, answering the question about what public libraries can do to help acquaint their readers with international translated fiction.

The article uses the method of bibliographic data analysis based on 2,100 catalog records.

As the results demonstrate, enhanced bibliographic catalog records deliver a wealth of information about translated fiction titles and facilitate meaningful subject access to their contents. At the same time, promotional activities related to translated fiction have room for improvement.

Despite the fact that the study focuses on public libraries, its findings will be of interest not only to public but also academic librarians, any librarian tasked with the selection and acquisition of translated fiction, reference and readers’ advisory librarians in any type of library, Library and Information Science students and anyone interested in access to translated fiction.

While many recent studies have turned their attention to enhanced catalog records and their role in access, discovery and collection promotion, there are no studies dealing with translated fiction specifically. The article also contributes to seeing an in-depth understanding of bibliographic records and cataloging as part and parcel of reference librarians’ knowledge and skill set, which improves retrieval practices and access provision.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the main strategic considerations facing the libraries of national museums over the next decade, and to examine anticipated future service and resource development priorities.

An explanatory sequential mixed-methods study was undertaken, consisting of a quantitative research phase followed by a qualitative phase. An online survey was sent to the head librarians of two hundred national museum libraries for the quantitative phase. Semi-structured interviews were undertaken with the head librarians at seven national museum libraries for the qualitative phase. The survey data were analysed using descriptive statistics and the interview data were analysed through use of recursive abstraction. Mixing of the data occurred following the qualitative phase.

National museum libraries are facing a complex array of future challenges and opportunities as a result of a rapidly changing socio-technical landscape, evolving organisational needs and priorities and ongoing operational constraints. The main strategic considerations for many national museum libraries relate to their preparedness for these issues, and their ability to deliver services and resources that are relevant, required, and responsive to the future research needs of internal and external users. It seems likely that development priorities will focus on consolidating high impact services and resources, whilst also expanding provision into new areas that have the greatest potential for growth.

This study identifies issues of strategic importance for national museum libraries and examines the main priority areas being considered by museum librarians as they prepare to develop their libraries into the third decade of the twenty-first century.

The purpose of this article is to make public librarians aware of the wealth of information about translators that is contained in bibliographic records of their own library catalogs so they could use this information for the benefit of readers’ advisory (RA) work involving translated titles.

The article uses the method of bibliographic data analysis based on 350 selected translated fiction titles (and 2,100 corresponding catalog records) from six large Canadian public libraries.

As the results demonstrate, enhanced bibliographic catalog records deliver a wide spectrum of information about translators, which can be used by public libraries to provide more informed and insightful reading advice and to make more sensible purchasing decisions with regard to translated fiction.

The study shows how the most readily available tool – a library catalog with its enhanced bibliographic records – can be utilized by public librarians for improving RA practices. It focuses on the rarely discussed translated fiction, demonstrates a sample methodological approach and makes suggestions for implementing this approach by busy public librarians in real-life situations.

No recent studies that have investigated enhanced catalog records have dealt with translated fiction. Moreover, while authors/writers are often in the focus of RA studies, translators are often left behind the scenes, despite their crucial role in bringing international fiction to English-speaking readers.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate users' knowledge and use of social networking sites and folksonomies to discover if social tagging and folksonomies, within the area of independent music, aid in its information retrieval and discovery. The sites examined in this project are MySpace, Lastfm, Pandora and Allmusic. In addition, the ways in which independent record labels utilise social networking sites for promotion are investigated.

Three groups of participants were surveyed using questionnaires. These groups were music concert attendees, people who responded to online postings to social networking sites, and independent record companies. In addition interviews were held with digital music experts.

The results suggest that respondents use social networking sites for music discovery but are not generally aware of folksonomic approaches to music discovery. When users do use and contribute to the folksonomy, most respondents were found to tag for personal retrieval purposes rather than attempting to aid the retrieval purposes of the population of site users as a whole. The four record labels unanimously agreed that social networking sites are having a major impact on independent music discovery. Digital distribution has a major impact on independent record labels. It facilitates discovery but at the same time digital distribution creates new promotional dilemmas.

The project is small scale but the research area is a relatively novel one, and the results are interesting enough to share more generally in the hope that this project will stimulate further research activity in this area.