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The article presents the department of early printed and rare books of the University Library on the occasion of making available the special collection of 16th and 17th century books for public use in November 2003. Sixteen of the most valuable books were displayed in the framework of an exhibition at the time of the opening. The history of the University Library dates from 1561 when the first Jesuit monastery including a library was founded in Nagyszombat (Trnava, Slovakia). The University of Nagyszombat was founded in 1635. After the suppression of the Jesuits in 1773, the library became a state-owned entity. It was moved to Budapest in 1777 and occupied its current premises in 1876. The new catalogue of the library, including 11 main themes was completed in that year. In the collection, Hungarian and foreign books were separated, but they were arranged on the shelves by size, in order to save space. The University Library joined the national early printed books program in 1990. In 2000, a separate unit, the Department of Early Printed Books was created in order to select, catalogue, preserve and make available for users all early printed books from the collection of the library. The library comprises 7200 early printed books, which means that this is the second largest such collection after the one at the National Library. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gifts and donations form an integral part of an academic library's existence, whether monetary or physical items. While monetary gifts are greatly valued, gift-in-kind donations of physical items can also contribute rare or unique items to collections. However, gift-in-kind donations also bring many challenges, as processing and evaluating physical materials can be time-consuming and labour-intensive; moreover, these materials may occupy significant amounts of space and ultimately may or may not add value to the library collection. Providing clear, publicly available gift and donation information can mitigate some of these challenges and help to set expectations for donors by giving a clear overview of the evaluation process and letting them know which types of material are of interest. The author reviewed donation-related webpages of twenty-one Canadian academic libraries to determine commonalities regarding library donation webpages. This analysis can provide practical assistance to librarians who are creating or revising gift-in-kind policies and procedures in Canadian academic libraries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the quality assurance in services provided by Arjun Singh Central Library, Periyar Maniammai University, Thanjavur, Tamilnadu. A well structured 125questionnaires were distributed among the library users to find the qualitative services provided by the university library. The questionnaires were checked and out of 115 filled-in questionnaires returned 108(93.98%) were found fit for analysis and out of which 7(6.08%) were considered unusable. The present study demonstrates and elaborates the various aspects of use of information resources and services, physical facilities available and collection of Central Library, Periyar Maniammai University, Thanjavur. It identifies the levels of use of various services provided, and highlights problems faced by the users and satisfaction level of users with the central library collection. Suggestions have been given to make the service more beneficial for the academic community of the university. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An attempt is made to describe the various techniques available for evaluating a document collection in an academic library. A study is made with two engineering college libraries to establish the need for such evaluation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses acquisitions and collection development at French university libraries from 1988 to 2003. Statistics on the collections of books, journals, and databases available at French universities are offered, the finance of French academic libraries is examined, and regional differences in the collections of French academic libraries inside and outside of Paris, France are compared.

Building up new collections for digital libraries is a demanding task. Available data sets have to be extracted which is usually done with the help of software developers as it involves custom data handlers or conversion scripts. In cases where the desired data is only available on the data provider's website custom web scrapers are needed. This may be the case for small to medium-size publishers, research institutes or funding agencies. As data curation is a typical task that is done by people with a library and information science background, these people are usually proficient with XML technologies but are not full-stack programmers. Therefore we would like to present a web scraping tool that does not demand the digital library curators to program custom web scrapers from scratch. We present the open-source tool OXPath, an extension of XPath, that allows the user to define data to be extracted from websites in a declarative way. By taking one of our own use cases as an example, we guide you in more detail through the process of creating an OXPath wrapper for metadata harvesting. We also point out some practical things to consider when creating a web scraper (with OXPath). On top of that, we also present a syntax highlighting plugin for the popular text editor Atom that we developed to further support OXPath users and to simplify the authoring process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides information on the central medical library in Bulgaria at the Medical University of Sofia. It is reported that the library's collections are available to students, doctors, and all faculty of the university. In 2006, the author notes, the institution received nearly 27,000 users and there were 3,000 new subscribers to the library's services. Information on the library's holdings are provided as well as the quality of its staff members.