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Increasingly, e-books are becoming alternatives to print books in academic libraries, thus providing opportunities to assess how well the use of e-books meets the requirements of academics. This study uses the task-technology fit ( TTF) model to explore the interrelationships of e-books, the affordances offered by smart readers, the information needs of academics, and the 'fit' of technology to tasks as well as performance. We propose that the adoption of e-books will be dependent on how academics perceive the fit of this new medium to the tasks they undertake as well as what added-value functionality is delivered by the information technology that delivers the content. The study used content analysis and an online survey, administered to the faculty in Medicine, Science and Engineering at the University of New South Wales, to identify the attributes of a TTF construct of e-books in academic settings. Using exploratory factor analysis, preliminary findings confirmed annotation, navigation, and output as the core dimensions of the TTF construct. The results of confirmatory factor analysis using partial least squares path modeling supported the overall TTF model in reflecting significant positive impact of task, technology, and individual characteristics on TTF for e-books in academic settings; it also confirmed significant positive impact of TTF on individuals' performance and use, and impact of using e-books on individual performance. Our research makes two contributions: the development of an e-book TTF construct and the testing of that construct in a model validating the efficacy of the TTF framework in measuring perceived fit of e-books to academic tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bibliometric measures for evaluating research units in the book-oriented humanities and social sciences are underdeveloped relative to those available for journal-oriented science and technology. We therefore present a new measure designed for book-oriented fields: the “libcitation count.” This is a count of the libraries holding a given book, as reported in a national or international union catalog. As librarians decide what to acquire for the audiences they serve, they jointly constitute an instrument for gauging the cultural impact of books. Their decisions are informed by knowledge not only of audiences but also of the book world (e.g., the reputations of authors and the prestige of publishers). From libcitation counts, measures can be derived for comparing research units. Here, we imagine a match-up between the departments of history, philosophy, and political science at the University of New South Wales and the University of Sydney in Australia. We chose the 12 books from each department that had the highest libcitation counts in the Libraries Australia union catalog during 2000 to 2006. We present each book's raw libcitation count, its rank within its Library of Congress (LC) class, and its LC-class normalized libcitation score. The latter is patterned on the item-oriented field normalized citation score used in evaluative bibliometrics. Summary statistics based on these measures allow the departments to be compared for cultural impact. Our work has implications for programs such as Excellence in Research for Australia and the Research Assessment Exercise in the United Kingdom. It also has implications for data mining in OCLC's WorldCat. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study assessed the intermix of local citation analysis and survey of journal use and reading patterns for evaluating an academic library's research collection. Journal articles and their cited references from faculties at the University of New South Wales were downloaded from the Web of Science (WoS) and journal impact factors from the Journal Citation Reports. The survey of the University of New South Wales (UNSW) academic staff asked both reader-related and reading-related questions. Both methods showed that academics in medicine published more and had more coauthors per paper than academics in the other faculties; however, when correlated with the number of students and academic staff, science published more and engineering published in higher impact journals. When “recalled” numbers of articles published were compared to “actual” numbers, all faculties over-estimated their productivity by nearly two-fold. The distribution of cited serial references was highly skewed with over half of the titles cited only once. The survey results corresponded with U.S. university surveys with one exception: Engineering academics reported the highest number of article readings and read mostly for research related activities. Citation analysis data showed that the UNSW library provided the majority of journals in which researchers published and cited, mostly in electronic formats. However, the availability of non-journal cited sources was low. The joint methods provided both confirmatory and contradictory results and proved useful in evaluating library research collections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the use of the World Wide Web for international travel by integrating the construct of uncertainty in information seeking and the Task-Technology Fit Model. The author states that the evaluation and measurement of information provision through traditional media has been the domain of information science. Concepts of "information need" and "information seeking behavior" have been seminal in evaluating information services and user behavior when interfacing with traditional media. These two disciplines have now converged through Web technologies that utilize information and communication technologies to meet the information needs of the population at large. Evaluation of Web technologies as an information resource should bring together these two perspectives. In this article a model integrating information systems models of success and information science concepts of information seeking and uncertainty reduction is proposed. Specifically, the concept of "uncertainty" is integrated into the task-technology fit model to evaluate Web usage within the non-work domain of personal travel.

Bibliographic databases contain surrogates to a particular subset of the complete set of literature; some databases are very narrow in their scope, while others are multidisciplinary. These databases overlap in their coverage of the literature to a greater or lesser extent. The topic of Fuzzy Set Theory is examined to determine the overlap of coverage in the databases that index this topic. It was found that about 63% of records in the data set are unique to only one database, and the remaining 37% are duplicated in from two to 12 different databases. The overlap distribution is found to conform to a Lotka-type plot. The records with maximum overlap are identified; however, further work is needed to determine the significance of the high level of overlap in these records. The unique records are plotted using a Bradford-type form of data presentation and are found to conform (visually) to a hyperbolic distribution. The extent and causes of intra-database duplication (records duplicated in the one database) are also examined. Finally, the overlap in the top databases in the dataset were examined, and a high correlation was found between overlapping records, and overlapping DIALOG OneSearch categories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]