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LibGuides have been used by librarians at Cape Peninsula University of Technology since 2012 as a means of providing subject-based information to students, with quick links to selected resources and information supplementing information literacy training. Lecturers use the resources for preparing lectures and identifying learning materials, while researchers and postgraduate students use research support guides when writing their papers. As the worldwide pandemic caused a major lockdown, academic institutions in South Africa were closed and students sent home. However, students still needed to complete their studies, and librarians at Cape Peninsula University of Technology had to continue providing support to these students. One of the online services available was LibGuides. This article provides insight into the historical developments of LibGuides at Cape Peninsula University of Technology, the use of LibGuides during lockdown, and the experiences of a selected group of students and librarians.

The Republic of Maldives, a small island developing state in the Indian Ocean, has achieved upper-middle-income and high human development category status, and one of the strongest information and communications technology infrastructures in South Asia. However, the country’s library and information science sector, which saw its inception over seven decades ago, has yet to advance beyond the initial development phase. This article traces the emergence of the library and information science sector in the country and draws attention to the myriad challenges faced by it. The article is also an attempt to draw the attention of government decision-makers and motivate them to understand and resolve the difficulties faced by the library and information science sector through engaging library and information science employers, educational institutions, professional trainers, and library and information science professionals. Some concerns are identified and five key action areas with associated action steps are suggested. These may resonate with other small developing countries that are facing similar scenarios.

When the world began to take notice of the growing risks of COVID-19 in early spring 2020, the University of South Florida Libraries–Tampa Special Collections shifted to virtual instruction sessions to provide students with access to rare books and primary-source archival materials. To respond to the need for a quick shift to online instruction, the department formulated a plan to support students with an open-access digital learning experience using ArcGIS StoryMaps. Building on critical digital pedagogy and feminist digital humanities, the sessions provided online teaching resources for faculty who could not schedule students for physical visits. Over the first year of remote work, the department created sessions for 15 course sections. Looking to the future, Special Collections will continue providing the option of virtual sessions as part of its instruction. The digital nature of the courses lends to a recursive pedagogy, allowing for continued adaptation that is complimentary to academic cycles.

This study investigated the copyright issues surrounding the management of e-resources in academic libraries in Ghana. Forty-seven library staff and head librarians from four academic libraries were engaged using questionnaires and qualitative interviews in a sequential mixed-methods approach to generate data for this study. The findings indicate that in all four institutions copyright issues arose with the provision of distance learning, online courses and e-reserves services. All the respondents stated that they or their colleagues had had faculty ask questions on copyright issues. However, the professional librarians indicated that the library was not consulted and the instructors for online courses or distance education programmes did not cooperate with librarians; rather, the department posting the materials made the decisions on copyright regarding the usage of digital resources for distance learning, online courses or e-reserves. This does not augur well for the management of copyright of e-resources in academic libraries in Ghana.

In July 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Monash University Library in Melbourne, Australia, and the Penn State University Libraries in Pennsylvania, USA, leveraged their previously established international sister-library partnership to host a virtual engagement event focused on promoting the partnership and selected special collections at both institutions. The Monash–Penn State Great Rare Books Bake Off, a friendly competition collaboratively developed by the two academic libraries, engaged both institutions’ communities with their collections and resources by inviting participants to bake featured recipes from their collections and post evidence of their experiences on social media platforms. In addition to promoting awareness of the institutions’ international partnership and their respective collections, a primary goal of the collaborative project was to offer their local communities an enjoyable and creative outlet during a difficult time. This illustrative case study describes how the two institutions planned, executed, and assessed the project.

In 2018, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin rehoused over 300 illustrated movie storyboards from the popular and frequently used David O Selznick Collection. Preservation technicians tracked this project from its inception to the survey and design conception, and through to its execution. By creating a new housing model and refining it over the course of a year, the Preservation Unit was able to consider how housing affects an object, which led to new systems and structures to facilitate process management and workflow, and how an object is impacted by its housing.

In March 2020, Michigan’s school library media specialists, along with the entire educational community, found themselves facing unprecedented challenges brought by the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic. As learning shifted online, the roles of school library media specialists shifted as well. Three southeast Michigan school library media specialists were interviewed to obtain their perspectives regarding the adaptation to distance learning, as well as how they predicted educational practices will evolve going forward. The educational practices of learning commons, guided inquiry, co-teaching, and information literacy were found to be particularly valuable during the shift to distance learning. The increased dependence on these practices during the pandemic will likely result in increased implementation of these practices when face-to-face learning resumes.

This commentary suggests a (k)new model for the practice of Indigenous librarianship that positions a traditional natural resource management system as a metaphor for library practices. By detailing the experiences of Native Hawaiian librarians working with materials and collections representing Hawaiian knowledge, the article discusses specific Hawaiian natural resource management principles (kapu, kūlana, waiwai, and lele), and explores their possible applications in library contexts. The result is a description of Hawaiian librarianship grounded in Hawaiian values and practices with the goal of best serving Hawaiian communities.

This study maps the domain of indigenous librarianship. It conceives this field as constituted by theoretical, applied, and advocacy components. Indigeneity is theorized as an instrument that advances principles of indigenous rights in professional fields such as librarianship. The study offers the prospect of a revision of the traditional theory of librarianship by applying to this theory a notion of “living knowledge,” which is prominent in indigenous scholarship. It overviews culturally sensitive practices of knowledge organization and management that constitute an applied component of indigenous librarianship.

This bibliometric study investigates the research methodology practices of Master of Arts in Information Studies (MAIS) students at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The study established students’ insufficient understanding and application of research methodology concepts. Survey research was predominant, with purposive and convenience non-probability sampling methods being extensively used. Simple random sampling and stratified sampling were the probability sampling methods highly used. Findings further show advanced qualitative and quantitative data analyses were inadequately applied. In practice, the study findings can help Library and Information Science institutions around the globe improve teaching research methodology to produce quality theses with logical conclusions which can develop new theories. Quality theses can translate into increased quantity and quality of journal articles and growth of the Library and Information Science discipline. Thus, there is a need to strengthen research methodology training for students and lecturers to generate generalizable findings that meet diverse needs.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the status of district-level public libraries in West Bengal, India. The study focused on staff as well as services against the backdrop of collection development policy. It also investigated the problems faced by librarians and suggested measures to overcome these difficulties. The researchers used a mixed-methods approach – quantitative and qualitative methods – to obtain the data. However, the primary means of data collection was a survey method using a structured questionnaire. Additionally, interviews were carried out with librarians in order to bring more subjectivity to the results. The findings suggest that no selection committees have taken place to recruit new staff in different public libraries; hence, libraries have been suffering from a shortage of staff. Due to severe shortage of library staff, book database has not been completed in Libsys library management software in any surveyed library. Public libraries are established to provide a variety of services to their users. Thus, services are the main product of the public library system. The findings reveal that different kinds of services – such as children’s, career guidance and community information services – are provided by the surveyed libraries to benefit their user communities.

This article describes the Purdue University Libraries mandatory co-mentoring program. Surveys with all Purdue University Libraries faculty librarians and select follow-up interviews were conducted. This program supports all faculty librarians and differs from other mentoring programs since it is team-based, includes the supervisor, and advises on promotion. These Faculty Review Committees integrate performance reviews with progress toward promotion and have the responsibility to prepare written annual reviews and evaluations, and represent the candidate at the promotion review. The program is considered very effective at Purdue University Libraries and a unique model. This program is also compared to four other ARL co-mentoring programs using a survey and follow-up interviews.

Library and information science (LIS) professionals often act as default copyright mavens at their institutions and, therefore, must have an awareness of copyright law and practices. Using a quantitative national survey: ‘Copyright Literacy of Bangladeshi LIS Professionals’ which was part of a multinational survey entitled ‘Copyright Literacy of specialists from libraries and other cultural institutions’, the main objective of the Bangladesh part was to illustrate the self-perceived familiarity with, knowledge and awareness of, and opinions about copyright-related issues of LIS professionals in Bangladesh. The survey also explored the existing institutional copyright policies, the need for copyright education for new and existing professionals and suggested topics for inclusion in training activities. The results show that Bangladeshi LIS professionals have conceptual knowledge and awareness of copyright issues, but overall lack an applied approach and hands-on training. This weakness is even more pronounced among LIS professionals who work in non-academic institutions. Based on these findings, it is suggested that relevant workshops, seminars and roundtable meetings focusing on copyright be organized that will pave the way for continued knowledge development around this topic.

The study is an attempt to understand the trends in LIS research by analyzing published literature on the topic. The study identifies and analyses 39 research papers on LIS research trends in various countries, three papers on LIS research trends in regional countries and 13 papers on LIS research trends with an international perspective. The findings of the study reveal that there is a similarity among various countries as far as the LIS research topics are concerned but with a different focus at different periods. While understanding international research trends in LIS, it was interesting to note that the research trend in China was similar to the worldwide research trend while the pattern in other countries differed.

Περιέχει το πλήρες κείμενο. In the era of radical socio-economic-technological developments, the Library and Information Science sector in Greece is undergoing a series of changes in a dialectic relation with technological changes. Libraries in Greece have a long history, from the Academy of Plato and the Lyceum of Aristotle in the 5th century BC to the transition of the National Library of Greece at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Centre. This paper aims to provide an overview and record the milestones signifying the beginning of the changes happening in every aspect of the Greek LIS landscape. In addition, it aims to highlight the changes in the Greek library scene, extending from synergies and networks to new library buildings, as well as the role of LIS education and lifelong learning.

This study identified the influential factors for adoption of OSILS in university libraries in Bangladesh. The survey was carried out among 196 library professionals from 14 private and seven public university libraries by a structured questionnaire which was adapted cautiously as per local arrangements after conducting a pilot survey. Factors for adoption of OSILS were analyzed by multiple regressions where overall satisfaction was used as dependent variable, and 14 factors for adoption of OSILS were applied as the independent variables. The entire model of regression analysis was established to be significant and revealed that cost-effectiveness, open source code, supporting community, backup and restore systems, easy to integrate with other software, and freedom from licensing fee significantly influenced library professionals to adopt OSILS. Moreover, an effort has been made for the first time to evaluate significant factors for adoption of OSILS in university libraries of Bangladesh that will prompt future research on OSILS.

The study aims at defining the requirements of applying open-book management and showing the stages and steps to apply this new management methodology in different types of libraries. The researcher selected Bibliotheca Alexandrina as a great culture minaret to measure the degree of practicing open-book management from the point of view of its employees in order to identify the constraints that limit the full application of open-book management in the library.

Traditional librarian ethics protect privacy and promote information access. The right to be forgotten and delisting have the potential to create a new online information ecosystem that disrupts ethical norms and redefines the role of librarians. Along with Internet filtering, the right to be forgotten and delisting are the harbingers of coming changes to content regulation and information access online. Librarians should engage with right to be forgotten F and delisting issues now to prepare for possible future disruptions of information flow in the library and shifts in information policies and laws around the world. This paper articulates the legal and ethical issues associated with delisting, lays the foundation for an international dialogue on delisting, and signals the need for future research. The international librarianship community needs a larger discussion about the issues related to the right to be forgotten and delisting, particularly on laws and policies on free speech and privacy.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the development of a digital archive for the Min Family Correspondence Collection of the University of Toronto Libraries, the first Korean historical manuscript collection in Canada. This strategic digitization project between the University of Toronto Libraries and the National Library of Korea accomplished the following: content analysis and annotation of manuscripts, metadata creation, and enhanced access to the resources. The results from this paper show that one of the crucial factors in successful digitization projects is building bridges between the two organizations as a partnership. Our main aim in this paper was to build a deeper understanding of how to develop a digital archive for Asian historical manuscripts and to explore how to improve the accessibility of rare historical records.

This research examines the experiences of librarians in Bluefields, Nicaragua. Semi-structured interviews and photovoice activities were used to investigate librarians’ professional development, daily operations, and ways of meeting the information needs of Costeños—or, Miskitu, Rama, and Sumu indigenous groups as well as African-descending Creoles. The findings suggest that librarians’ accounts coincide with established knowledge on Nicaragua's library landscape: libraries are predominantly formal and education-related; Nicaraguan society values oral knowledge or word-of-mouth information; and when compared with academic libraries, Nicaraguan public libraries are fewer and lack resources. Libraries on the Atlantic coast can strengthen their services through collaborations as well as culturally-based services. Additionally, the photovoice technique was found to be an effective tool for conducting research involving multicultural communities.

This article reports original research conducted at a US university exploring how incoming first-year international graduate students transition to a new academic environment, learn to conduct research, and utilize library resources and spaces.

The evolution of legal deposit shows changes and challenges in collecting, access to and use of documentary heritage. Legal deposit emerged in New Zealand at the beginning of the 20th century with the aim of preserving print publications mainly for the use of a privileged part of society. In the 21st century legal deposit has evolved to include the safeguarding of electronic resources and providing access to the documentary heritage for all New Zealanders. The National Library of New Zealand has acquired new functions for a proper stewardship of digital heritage. E-deposit and web harvesting are two new mechanisms for collecting New Zealand publications. The article proposes that legal deposit through human rights and multiculturalism should involve different communities of heritage in web curation.

Information literacy instruction is of value to the educational process and is an important contributor to the academic library’s efforts to communicate its value. Similarly, Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) is an important contributor to development. Recognizing the value in information literacy instruction and STEM, the University of the West Indies Mona, Science Branch Library delivers embedded STEM information literacy instruction to students. An assessment of this is instructive on many levels; consequently, this paper seeks to determine undergraduates’ perception of (a) the curriculum delivered and the extent to which it provided the opportunity to learn new information and skills and (b) the facilitators’ performance. A self-reported measure (survey) was used to capture these perceptions. A direct testing measure (test) was administered to add value to students’ reported perception. This paper reveals students have a positive perception of the facilitators’ performance, the STEM information literacy instruction curriculum and the opportunities it provided for learning new information and skills. The findings also provide recommendations for improvement. The paper does not seek to measure the effectiveness of STEM information literacy instruction nor does it seek to measure whether learning has occurred. This paper is of value as assessment provides useful information for monitoring the effectiveness of what is being taught, how it is being delivered, for improving performance and providing benchmarking. Given STEM’s and information literacy instruction’s importance to higher education, its assessment can direct the success of future sessions and ultimately impact the quality of higher education. Additionally, given STEM is a bourgeoning concept in Jamaica and that the resultant literature on STEM in Jamaica is in a developing stage, any documented work on STEM-related activities has value and this paper is the first of its kind in Jamaica.

The present paper dwells upon the importance of raw data for the development of science and research. The study includes an interview of 40 researchers and faculty members to understand their perception towards the raw data. It has suggested that the libraries can play a pivotal role in extending support to the researchers for organizing, archiving and preserving raw data for future use. Libraries may evolve a system at the university level wherein the researchers and faculty members be encouraged to deposit their raw research data in the institutional repositories, which most of the university libraries have developed.

This paper describes a collaborative approach taken by librarians at five small, regional liberal arts colleges to developing/enhancing research data management services on their campuses. The five colleges collectively belong to a consortium known as the Northwest Five Consortium. Over 10 months, librarians from the five schools collaborated to plan a data management and curation workshop with the goals of developing relationships with researchers working with data, developing their own research data management skills and services, and building a model for future training and outreach around institutional research data management services. This workshop brought together research teams including faculty, students, and librarians, and incorporated active learning modules as well as in-depth pre-workshop discussion. This article will discuss the context and background for this workshop, the model itself, and the outcomes and possibilities for future developments.

The paper reports on an exploratory study of researchers’ needs for effective research data management at two Swedish universities, conducted in order to inform the ongoing development of research data services. Twelve researchers from diverse fields have been interviewed, including biology, cultural studies, economics, environmental studies, geography, history, linguistics, media and psychology. The interviews were structured, guided by the Data Curation Profiles Toolkit developed at Purdue University, with added questions regarding subject metadata. The preliminary analysis indicates that the research data management practices vary greatly among the respondents, and therefore so do the implications for research data services. The added questions on subject metadata indicate needs of services guiding researchers in describing their datasets with adequate metadata.

The management of research data throughout its life-cycle is both a key prerequisite for effective data sharing and efficient long-term preservation of data. This article summarizes the data services and the overall approach to data management as currently practised at ETH-Bibliothek, the main library of ETH Zürich, the largest technical university in Switzerland. The services offered by service providers within ETH Zürich cover the entirety of the data life-cycle. The library provides support regarding conceptual questions, offers training and services concerning data publication and long-term preservation. As research data management continues to play a steadily more prominent part in both the requirements of researchers and funders as well as curricula and good scientific practice, ETH-Bibliothek is establishing close collaborations with researchers, in order to promote a mutual learning process and tackle new challenges.

This paper was accepted for publication in the journal IFLA Journal and the definitive published version is available at https://doi.org/10.1177/0340035218789601

The paper aims to investigate the generation and management of scholarly content at universities in Nigeria using quantitative and qualitative approaches with a total of 120 academic staff from the three universities randomly selected for the study. The study found that the majority of the academic departments had no academic journals, while the academics generated just two out of 12 scholarly contents in their scholarly activities. It was discovered that neither the universities nor the academic departments had digital archives for the effective preservation and management of scholarly content. The study revealed the challenges of scholarly content generation and management to include the absence of institutional repositories and reliable institutional websites owing to poor infrastructure. The contribution of this paper is that it investigated the generation and management of scholarly content at universities in Kano State, Nigeria, and no such study exists in the literature.

Library instruction programs for students are still in developmental stages at many Turkish universities. English-language resources are available to teach information literacy skills to students majoring in English Language and Literature. This study surveyed students majoring in English Language and Literature about their attitudes towards library usage and sources. Approximately two-thirds of students had received online information literacy training in English. Student attitudes revealed a distinct preference for Internet sources over library sources and a belief that Internet sources are more likely than library sources to provide them with the information they need for their major classes. However, students that had received information literacy training showed a statistically significant increase in preference for library usage and sources over students that did not receive this training.

In 2004, Library and Archives Canada became one of the first organizations in the world to integrate the services and functions of a national library and a national archives. The vision behind it was the creation of a new kind of knowledge organization, fully integrated, and able to respond to the information needs of the 21st century. Library and Archives Canada has been undergoing steady redefinition ever since.

Not only is ETH Zurich one of the world’s leading technical universities, with its major collections and archives it also makes key contributions towards the preservation and mediation of national and international cultural assets. The Thomas Mann Archive at ETH-Library is one of these archives. It houses the majority of the written personal papers of the famous German author and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature Thomas Mann. Under the ambitious project TMA_Online, the roughly 35,000 manuscripts and letters and more than 80,000 newspaper articles from the Thomas Mann Archive were described and digitised fully in less than two years. The new web service Thomas Mann Archive Online is now available for searches. This project report outlines the concrete procedure in the various sub-projects, the challenges involved and the results achieved.

This article presents an overview of the American library landscape and explains the trends and challenges American libraries are facing. US libraries provide people of all ages and backgrounds with access to information and technology. They are community and campus hubs, relied upon to provide the services and support that people need for study, research and lifelong learning. They continue to reinvent themselves to meet the emerging demands in the digital age while retaining their core values of cooperation, sharing and service.

The present study examines the development of open access repositories in India. Institutional repositories development in India dates back to the development of Eprints @IISc by TB Rajasekhar in 2002. Since then considerable development of institutional repositories has occurred. The data for the study were collected from OpenDOAR (Directory of Open Access Repositories) in January 2015. OpenDOAR provides a quality-assured listing of open access repositories around the world. The findings of the study show that the Indian repositories are also represented in the Ranking of Web Repositories. It also indicates that the trends towards the development of open access repositories are increasing among higher education and research institutions. It serves as a means for the dissemination of the intellectual output of the institutions that may be a research organization or university to communities and to the public at large. It is the prime responsibility of public funded organizations to reveal the results of the research to the public.

The article covers the history of the development of academic libraries in the State of Kuwait, a member of the Gulf Cooperation Council. The establishment of a private higher education system only began in the second millennium, and therefore new private academic libraries were established only a decade ago. Prior to that, academic librarianship in Kuwait was represented by the state-owned Kuwait University libraries. The evolution of new academic libraries in Kuwait has enriched the research sphere, created new opportunities, and fostered a competitive environment for academic librarians, each working in his/her respective institution. This article examines the development of new private university libraries and their progress in comparison with public institutional libraries. It reviews key studies on academic librarianship in Kuwait and sheds light on new libraries in the private sector, their services, facilities, and their level of involvement with the Kuwaiti community. It also identifies common constraints faced by those institutions’ libraries and possible solutions.

The potential which open access offers to Caribbean scholarly communication in general, and science and technology specifically, is an opportunity to shift the focus from one which has been publisher driven to one which is research driven. However, for this to become a reality, both the university and faculty will need to break free of the practices surrounding traditional publishing, tenure and promotion. In an attempt to assess readiness among science faculty at The University of the West Indies to make this transition, this exploratory study analyses their perceptions, knowledge and use of open access. The results revealed significant gaps in knowledge about, and minimal engagement with open access as a publication modality among this cohort.

Since 2011, the academic libraries at Linnaeus University, Sweden and University of Colorado Denver, USA have collaboratively created a programmatic approach for staff exchanges and associated projects. This initiative occurred within the larger framework of university internationalization goals and cultural competency requirements. In addition, both libraries were experiencing significant workplace changes, including newly designed facilities, programs, and services, which required that staff members learn to see their organizations and understand their roles in new ways. As the exchange program evolved, formal comparison studies complemented informal exchange observations about similarities and differences between the two library organizations. Resulting insights altered traditional worldviews and professional assumptions of both host and exchange participants. In addition, cultural competencies were further exercised through collaborative projects that benefit the increasingly diverse faculty and student constituencies at both home institutions. Concluding reflections suggest considerations for organizations considering international exchanges for staff members “at home in the world.”

The value of internship as a form of experiential learning in library and information science education has been debated for many years in North America. To gain a global perspective, the current research examines whether such an experience is required and for what reasons and whether placements can be done internationally or virtually. Participants include national libraries, associations, and academic library and information science programs from 69 different countries around the world. Results indicate that outside of American Library Association accredited institutions, internship is more often required and that when it is not, participation rates are low. Further, there was much stronger support for international experiences. Despite the increasing use of online tools to deliver library and information science education, there is a decided lack of institutional support for virtual internships. Suggestions for further research are proposed that address the interdisciplinary, intentional, interconnected, and international model for an internship in 21st-century library and information science education.

This study explores the relationship between reading habits and reading materials, and academic success of primary school students in the Ontulili community of Kenya. The study revealed high levels of satisfaction and contentment among the participants with respect to the availability of resources, reading abilities, educational performance, and overall preparedness for further education; yet, the data pointed to severe scarcity of learning materials, low reading skills, poor infrastructure, below average educational performance, and low preparedness for further education. It was concluded that lack of exposure to relevant reading materials, educational resources, and opportunities leads to subtle contentment alongside individual inability to excel as manifested by low test scores in the national examinations. In order to realize academic success in the study area and other comparable communities, well-designed interventions such as promotion of reading across the school curriculum and establishment of fully equipped libraries consistent with the rigors of modern academic demands, must be created.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze public librarians’ perspectives on the future of public libraries in Turkey. The research is arranged under six headings as follows: the state of overall change in public libraries; services; lifelong learning and information literacy; technology; administration and collection; building, librarian, user and other elements including finance. Every aspect of the study which entails literature review, findings, discussion and conclusion were examined within the scope of these six subjects. A descriptive method of research was used; the data was collected through an online survey technique that consisted of 62 questions in the form of a three-point Likert scale. Survey questions were also constructed within the frame of the six research headings, and the questions in each group were presented in a mixed order. The questionnaire was sent to 481 librarians working in public libraries in Turkey in 2014. Of these 201 librarians responded, and 185 survey answers out of these responses were found to be valid. The response rate was 38.5%. The results show that public librarians in Turkey are optimistic about the survival and development of public libraries in the future. According to them, public libraries will undergo significant changes in the sense of structural makeup, services, technology and administration by preserving their fundamental composition and functions.

Traditional library practice focuses on print collections and developing collections of materials that have been published, which means the documents have gone through some kind of review or vetting process. This practice leaves a wide swath of potential knowledge out of the collection. For example, indigenous knowledge, beliefs, and experience are different, in that they do not undergo the same review or vetting process; we might refer to these types of content as wisdom. Non-print collections, such as collections of recorded oral histories, represent less traditional forms of knowledge. Human libraries push the boundaries further in the quest to integrate wisdom and lived experience into library collections. This paper delineates the relationship between wisdom and knowledge that arose during a phenomenological study of the everyday information practices of Kenyan university women. The women were asked to photograph everyday events from their life and describe what they saw. One finding was a divergent presentation of wisdom and knowledge. Because the women were describing this in relation to their education, we assert that this demonstrates a need to reconsider positivist assumptions in library science, bringing what the women called wisdom into the stacks. How, though, can wisdom be stored and shared?

The digitization of the Freimann Collection, unique works belonging to the Wissenschaft des Judentums (Academic Study of Judaism), was a collaborative, international initiative to virtually reconstruct a cultural Jewish heritage collection that suffered losses during World War II. These works comprised the first engagement with pre-modern Jewish religious texts using modern research methods of academia. Building off a pre-war published catalog, the project brought together remnants of the original library collection in Germany and collections that were gathered in one of the main exile locations of German-speaking Jews in the United States. The freely accessible texts ensure the enhancement of scholarship by providing long-term discovery to an unlimited audience. Digitization and virtual reconstruction are not only crucial from a digital preservation standpoint, but also allow researchers to envision the works in the context of their intellectual and historical significance. The project also generated models for international collaboration and large-scale digitization workflows.

Currently, the Algerian National Library is striving to digitize Algerian cultural heritage. This exercise became imperative due to physical damage to manuscripts when they were handled during reading. This case study aims to shed light on the challenges of manuscripts and rare books digitization in the Algerian context. In addition, this paper clarifies the Algerian National Library’s aspirations and plans to make manuscripts and rare books digitization a thriving endeavor.

India has the distinction of having one of the most ancient, richest and largest collections of manuscripts in the world. These manuscripts which are available in different forms, languages, scripts and cover a wide range of subjects are a powerful medium for the preservation of Indian cultural heritage. But the preservation of these manuscripts is a serious problem for the custodians of manuscripts because of the hot and humid climate of the country. In this context the present paper gives an account of the commendable efforts rendered by the National Mission for Manuscripts since its inception in 2003 by establishing and strengthening 57 manuscript resource centres, 50 manuscript conservation centres and developing a National Database of Manuscripts. It also presents the current status of digitization of Indian cultural heritage in the form of manuscripts starting from its collection to the development of a Digital Manuscript Library for global access.

African digital libraries have evolved beyond the ‘preservation or access’ debate of the 1990s, and the concomitant compulsion to (un-)systematically convert cultural heritage collections from analogue to digital formats. The challenge now lies in the agility to respond to user needs, to match the selection for digitisation with a more strategic approach towards research relevance and potential research outputs. This paper will examine the symbiotic relationship between preservation, cultural heritage and scholarship in a case study on the description and documentation of extinct African languages. It proposes that the new point of focus lies in digital scholarship, enabling both technical innovation and more intellectual engagement in revisiting the digital library to review, correct and augment transitory records through a new scholarly interpretation of African cultural heritage.

Since the establishment of the first public library in 1818, the South African library and information services landscape has also been a reflection of the socio-political order and developments in the country. This article presents an historical perspective as well as an overview of libraries in South Africa since 1994, the context within which libraries function, library governance and legislative framework, government funding for redress, library technologies, library and information services education and the professional association. The article further highlights the importance of libraries in meeting the goals of the national development agenda towards entrenching a strong democracy and an educated and informed nation.

In recent years open access models have transcended traditional modes of publishing, thus enabling freer access to research. This paper takes a trans-regional approach to open access publishing in the Asia and Oceania region focussing on individual institutions in three countries – Charles Darwin University (Australia), University of Hong Kong and the University of Malaya, reflecting on how each one is rising, in its own individual way, to meet the range of challenges that its research communities are facing. Specifically, it focuses on open access and institutional repository development, and traces their development at each of the aforementioned institutions. This paper is based on interviews conducted with staff involved with the development of the repository, and the open access collection in particular, at each of the three institutions. It synthesises open access developments and reviews the role the library has played in each institution in the development of open access across the academic and research community; and the success that has been achieved to date. It highlights any common factors between the approaches taken by each institution, as well as any significant differences of note. The findings reveal that each of the three institutions is at a different stage of development with the University of Hong Kong repository ranked at the top within Asia. Each has used a slightly different approach toward open access, and used different software to develop their repository. The authors have collated the overall experiences of each institution in open access publishing and repository development. They have highlighted the successes and failures that each has experienced and formulated a set of guidelines that may help those embarking on establishing an open access repository.

Teenagers do better at reading when they are motivated to read. The Programme for International Student Assessment assesses reading literacy for 15-year-olds in over 70 countries worldwide, and also includes questions that explore the relationships between motivation and reading. Country-level results indicate that developing countries have lower reading scores than developed countries. However, they also indicate that students in many developing countries are more motivated to read and spend more time reading than students in developed countries. These results suggest that the ideal role for libraries is to ensure students’ motivation to read through the provision of a variety of materials, a supportive environment for literacy and reading conversations, and encouraging student autonomy in making their reading choices.