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The purpose of this paper is to explore key issues involved with opportunities, challenges, and future developing trends of delivering dynamic and distributed web‐based academic library information resources, services, and instructions for library users in the digital age.

Based on the typical web‐based, three‐tier client/server architecture, this paper explores ten key issues how to leverage quality library user services in the digital age: roles of academic libraries; funding support; information resources; information access; information services; instructions and trainings; impacts of cutting‐edge technologies and emerging technologies; web contents management and knowledge base; assessment and evaluation; and Librarians. Also discussed are the next‐generation web‐based client/server library information architecture and services in the foreseeable future.

With the rapid development of the internet and the world wide web, information exchange and information distribution can be transformed either by disparate formats or by dynamic channels. Knowledge, competence, and skills cannot follow up with the rapid advances of science and technologies. Many library users need assistance to access, locate, convert, synthesize, and evaluate information effectively and efficiently. It is very imperative for libraries and librarians to design, develop, enhance, implement, and deliver high quality user‐centered information services, resources, and instruction at the fingertips of library users.

Target readers who include librarians, instructors, trainers, consultants, managers, IT specialists, executives, and other professionals who are involved with developing and delivering distributed library user services via the internet will find this article of value.

With the explosive growth of information available on the World Wide Web, it has become much more difficult to access relevant information from the Web. One possible approach to solve this problem is web personalization. In this paper, we propose a novel WUL (Web Usage Lattice) based mining approach for mining association access pattern rules for personalized web recommendations. The proposed approach aims to mine a reduced set of effective association pattern rules for enhancing the online performance of web recommendations. We have incorporated the proposed approach into a personalized web recommender system known as AWARS. The performance of the proposed approach is evaluated based on the efficiency and the quality. In the efficiency evaluation, we measure the number of generated rules and the runtime for online recommendations. In the quality evaluation, we measure the quality of the recommendation service based on precision, satisfactory and applicability. This paper will discuss the proposed WUL‐based mining approach, and give the performance of the proposed approach in comparison with the Apriori‐based algorithms.

Web based knowledge management systems have opened new arrays in the present web based world. Because of innumerable features, they have become the first hand choice of every organization. The objective of this paper is to propose a web based knowledge management system for university libraries that will support the creation, organization, storage, dissemination and utilization of the institution's digital knowledge assets. The paper also aims to illustrate the requirements of a web based knowledge management system (WBKMS) for university libraries along with their key advantages.

Existing web based knowledge management systems were surveyed and a model framework was developed keeping in view the prevailing loopholes in the present systems.

The study evolves into a model web based knowledge management system catering for the needs of the users in the present bit and byte world.

Further research can be conducted into designing web based knowledge management systems keeping in view the needs and behavior of the users they serve. Deep log analysis of the academically endeavored web based systems can be carried out for working out a better and productive WBKMS.

The outcome of the research will improve staff professionalism and will help in achieving coordination with other libraries and library users. Knowledge innovation in a web‐based environment will help in the creation of better and enlightened knowledge based society.

The technologies discussed will help in achieving satisfaction levels both on the part of users as well as library professionals. The whole behavior of seeking information and knowledge will change because of generation, sharing and management of information and knowledge in a virtual mode. Such systems will help organizations strategically when their branches are located in different geographical locations and this will give a platform to the members/employees to share best practices, problems, customer interactions, and prevent reinvention of the wheel.

Any computing architecture cannot be designed with complete confidentiality. As a result, at any point, it may leak the information. So, it is important to decide leakage threshold in any computing architecture. To prevent leakage more than the predefined threshold, quantitative analysis is helpful. This paper aims to provide a method to quantify information leakage in service-oriented architecture (SOA)-based Web services.

To visualize the dynamic binding of SOA components, first, the orchestration of components is modeled. The modeling helps to information-theoretically quantify information leakage in SOA-based Web services. Then, the paper considers the non-interference policy in a global way to quantify information leakage. It considers not only variables which interfere with security sensitive content but also other architectural parameters to quantify leakage in Web services. To illustrate the attacker’s ability, a strong threat model has been proposed in the paper.

The paper finds that information leakage can be quantified in SOA-based Web services by considering parameters that interfere with security sensitive content and information theory. A hypothetical case study scenario of flight ticket booking Web services has been considered in the present paper in which leakage of 18.89 per cent information is calculated.

The paper shows that it is practically possible to quantify information leakage in SOA-based Web services. While modeling the SOA-based Web services, it will be of help to architects to identify parameters which may cause the leakage of secret contents.

The purpose of the paper is to examine the various features and components of web‐based online public access catalogues (OPACs) of IIT libraries in India with the help of a specially designed evaluation checklist.

The various features of the web‐based OPACs in six IIT libraries (IIT Delhi, IIT Bombay, IIT Madras, IIT Kanpur, IIT Guwahati, and IIT Roorkee) are evaluated. The evaluation approach taken was similar to that of Luong and Liew with minor modifications, comprising 122 dichotomous questions with 174 features and categorized as 11 broad categories.

The study explored different features of web‐based OPACs, of which page layout received the highest average scores with 93.33 percent, followed by the general features category with 90 percent. In contrast, session filters was the weakest category with only 40.47 percent. The results indicated that some web‐based OPACs reached the maximum scores for some categories. The results also indicated that VTLS‐based and LibSys‐based OPACs had the higher score on average (74.7 percent) and the iitKlas‐based OPAC of IITK received the lowest score of 44.2 percent. None were rated excellent. Only 50 percent of the web‐based OPACs studied achieved an above average ranking, of which Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (IITM) had the highest total score (131), and the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur (IITK) had the lowest total score (77). Almost all of the web OPACs studied lacked federated search, adjunct thesaurus help and spell check facilities, which seems to raise many questions regarding the facilities provided in the OPAC 2.0 environment of today and hence needs to be addressed as a priority in the subsequent generations of the web‐based OPACs and their development.

It is hoped that the libraries at the IITs will attend to the lacunae and soon develop fully functional web‐based OPACs with Web 2.0 and 3.0 technologies.

The findings of the study will not only guide study librarians and other newly established institutions but also ILMS vendors, so that they can overcome the limitations faced by users and improve their products as OPAC 2.0. This will also help the in‐house web‐based OPACs of IIT Kanpur and IIT Roorkee to compete with other reputed ILMS‐based OPACs.

This purpose of this paper is to present the current state and use of the web by university libraries in India and to examine the web‐based library services offered by some university libraries in different sections via their websites with the help of web‐based library automation software.

A survey was conducted through a structured questionnaire circulated personally among university librarians and the response rate was 100 percent. The responses received from the respondents to 22 questions are presented in the form of tables and figures and analyzed using a simple method of percentages.

The findings show that many of the surveyed university libraries are yet to exploit full potential of the web forms, and are lagging behind in effective use of library website. A few libraries offer innovative web‐based library services in different sections. This study identified specific ways in which the web helps university libraries to improve and develop innovative and creative web‐based library services. Some key improvements and developments are: there is an urgent need to develop dynamic library websites and incorporate relevant Web 2.0 based services including web forms in each web‐based library service; apply semantic technologies and ontologies; adopt next‐generation internet (IPv6); and provide multi‐language support content. This study also examined institutional characteristics and resources dedicated to web‐based services.

The geographical area of the study was restricted to 20 university libraries in India.

The aim of this research is to enable web‐based tracking and guiding by integrating location‐awareness with the Worldwide Web so that the users can use various location‐based applications without installing extra software.

The concept of web‐based tracking and guiding is introduced and the relevant issues are discussed regarding location‐aware web systems, location determination, location‐dependent content query and personalized presentation. The framework of the web‐based tracking and guiding system – the Web‐Based Guide is proposed, and its prototypical implementation is presented. The main design principles are making use of existing web technologies, making use of available and cheap devices, general‐purpose and lightweight client‐side, and good scalability.

The paper presents the general‐purpose and modular framework of the Web‐Based Guide, which consists of the Location Server, the Content Server, the Guiding Web Server and the clients which are standard web browsers extended with the Location Control. With such a framework, location‐based applications can offer the services on the web.

The performance of the system should be evaluated and improved, such as the number of the concurrent sessions that the system can sustain, and the workload on the system when in the tracking mode.

The paper proposes a framework for personalized tracking and guiding systems on the web, which can be used in campuses, museums, national parks and so on.

Summarization of an entire web site with diverse content may lead to a summary heavily biased towards the site's dominant topics. The purpose of this paper is to present a novel topic‐based framework to address this problem.

A two‐stage framework is proposed. The first stage identifies the main topics covered in a web site via clustering and the second stage summarizes each topic separately. The proposed system is evaluated by a user study and compared with the single‐topic summarization approach.

The user study demonstrates that the clustering‐summarization approach statistically significantly outperforms the plain summarization approach in the multi‐topic web site summarization task. Text‐based clustering based on selecting features with high variance over web pages is reliable; outgoing links are useful if a rich set of cross links is available.

More sophisticated clustering methods than those used in this study are worth investigating. The proposed method should be tested on web content that is less structured than organizational web sites, for example blogs.

The proposed summarization framework can be applied to the effective organization of search engine results and faceted or topical browsing of large web sites.

Several key components are integrated for web site summarization for the first time, including feature selection and link analysis, key phrase and key sentence extraction. Insight into the contributions of links and content to topic‐based summarization was gained. A classification approach is used to minimize the number of parameters.

This paper explores the endeavours of five small firms to develop Web‐based commerce capabilities within their existing operations. The focus is on the strategic acquisition and exploitation of knowledge which underpins new value creating activities related to Web‐based commerce. A normative Web‐based commerce adoption model developed from a review of the extant literature related to electronic marketing, entrepreneurship, and the diffusion of new innovations was empirically tested. A multiple case study design enabled the exploration of contemporary marketing and entrepreneurship issues within the real life context of five small firms. The model aimed to emphasis best‐practice adoption methods emphasizing the value of a firm’s market orientation and entrepreneurial capabilities. A preliminary test of the model’s theoretical contentions lent support to its overall focus, but found that the firm’s existing learning capabilities were diminished during the adoption of Web‐based commerce, and that a lack of vision and prior knowledge produced sub‐optimal adoption outcomes.

Universities across the globe are spending an increasing amount of their budgets to offer web-based services to cater information need especially off-campus students. However, the success of web-based services depends on how well the target users are satisfied with the use of the web services. The purpose of this paper is to assess students’ satisfaction with the use of the Allama Iqbal Open University (AIOU) web-based services.

Pilot tested questionnaire-based survey was administered to collect data from a sample of 388; selected through systematic sampling technique from the study’s population consisted of master level students belonged to 11 different academic departments of the Faculty of Social Science and Humanities at the AIOU from all over Pakistan.

Based on 318 useful questionnaires, response rate 82 percent, the results show that majority of the students were satisfied with the use of at the AIOU web-based services except for online mailing books tracking system, library web OPAC and web radio service. However, t-test analysis shows that no difference was found in the opinion of male and female respondents in terms of their satisfaction with the use of the web services. ANOVA results indicate that there was no significant difference depicted in satisfaction with the use of the web services among the respondents enrolled in different disciplines of the faculty. Similarly, no significant difference was found among different age groups. Moreover, the respondents belonging to all five provinces; Punjab, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Sindh, Baluchistan, Gilgit Baltistan, and Federal Capital territory showed the same level of satisfaction with the use of the services. The results of regression analysis (R²=0.226) denote that both perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use significantly predicted, 22.6 percent, in students’ satisfaction with the use the web services.

The study provides valuable recommendations which may be helpful for web administration of the university to improve AIOU web-based services.

To the best knowledge, this is the first study conducted to investigate the satisfaction with the use of the university web-based services in distance education’s perspective of Pakistan.