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Given the size of digital library collections and the inconsistencies in their genre‐related bibliographic metadata, as digital libraries grow and their contents are opened for computational analysis, finding materials of interest becomes a major challenge. This challenge increases for sub‐genres and other categories of text data that are less distinct from the whole. This project pilots machine learning methods and word feature analysis for identifying Black Fantastic genre texts within the HathiTrust Digital Library. These texts are sometimes referred to as "Afrofuturism" but more commonly today described as "Black Fantastic," in which African Diaspora artists and creators engage with the intersections of race and technology in their works with a primary focus on world‐building. Black Fantastic texts pose a challenge to genre classification, as they incorporate aspects of science fiction and fantasy with typical characteristics of African Diaspora‐produced literature. This paper presents and reports on results from a pilot predictive modeling process to computationally identify Black Fantastic texts using curated word feature sets for each class of data: general English‐language fiction, Black‐authored fiction, and Black Fantastic fiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Collection development policies for university special collections and archives guide archival appraisal, which is the process by which archivists determine the value of an item. Much has been written about appraisal theory, but little is known about archivists' actual appraisal practice and how collection policy guides such practice. The object of this paper is to explore the appraisal practices of archivists by examining collection development policies. As a preliminary examination, this study analyzed the collection development policies of seven Texas tier‐one institutions. The most common component of the policies was a statement on the types of items collected or excluded. The study also found that the language used for these formats varied considerably with no standardization. The policies themselves also varied widely in detail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Independent business owners often prefer informal information sources to formal ones such as library collections. Part of these preferences is rational because contextual and application‐oriented information is usually available from informal sources, which are theoretically the best matches for this kind of information. This suggests that, in addition to outreach strategies, efforts to integrate informal sources of business‐relevant information can improve public libraries' ability to support independent business owners' information needs. Through interviews with business information providers and users, we explore the multi‐dimensional space of information needs in independent businesses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This submission reports preliminary results of the first stage of a research project that seeks to identify the information organization methods and techniques currently offered in the language data archives and the gaps between the tools and techniques available and the needs of actual and potential users of language data archives. We conducted an exploratory content analysis of the websites of the language archives (LAs) hosted by the institutions located in the United States and several other countries. The focus of our exploratory content analysis is on the information organization, including documentation on metadata standards, displaying of individual metadata records and availability of harvesting sets of metadata records, provision of advanced discovery and navigation options powered by metadata such as availability of adaptive and personalized search or social tagging functionality. Here, we report our preliminary findings and describe our plan for Stage 2 of the. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT The quest for open research data is the driving force behind the development of the whole area of research data management practices. We, as a university library, offer and develop support to researchers and doctoral students. Based on the result of a web survey submitted to all researchers at Malmö University, and the knowledge that doctoral students are on their way of forming their individual research practices, we have made doctoral students our first target group for specific seminars and workshops promoting conscious research data management practices. We will organise these seminars and workshops, which both take into account the general aspects of research data management and the discipline specific practices, so as to develop integrated research data management support in close relation to doctoral students' research practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study analyzed a large urban Canadian public library's data (2013‐2017) from Rakuten OverDrive to identify patterns, trends, and potential implications related to post‐checkout non‐usage (material that is checked out by a user, but subsequently never opened and/or downloaded) of library digital content. It was found that over 12% of the more than 1.1 million checkouts of digital content via OverDrive in 2017 were never opened, causing a waste of over $10,000 USD on metered access eBooks alone; this figure will likely increase in the coming years based on the trends found in this study. Juvenile and non‐fiction eBooks are most likely to be checked out and go unused. These findings may shed light on ways libraries and digital content vendors might improve the efficiency of digital content lending, and serve to inform collection management and user‐targeted marketing and solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emerging technologies have offered libraries and librarians new ways and methods to collect and analyze data in the era of accountability to justify their value and contributions. For example, Gallagher, Bauer and Dollar (2005) analyzed the paper and online journal usage from all possible data sources and discovered that users at the Yale Medical Library preferred the electronic format of articles to the print version. After this discovery, they were able to take necessary steps to adjust their journal subscriptions. Many library professionals advocate such data-driven library management to strengthen and specify library budget proposals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This poster reports on a work-in progress project of building a digital library for metadata records of books published by Sonzogno between 1800 and 1943. Metadata records from seven major libraries that have Sonzogno collections were harvested and used for building a unified collection for this project. Omeka, open-source software for building digital libraries, was used to host, manage, and provide the public with access to the collection. Currently, a sample set of the metadata of books published in 1885 is available from the digital library (http://sonzogno.cci.fsu.edu/). This poster reports on the current status of the project, explaining the process and challenges associated with building a digital library of the metadata collection (metadata harvesting and crosswalk) using Omeka. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]