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In order to support innovative scholarship, digital library development must be informed by an understanding of new modes of scholarly production. This paper considers an emergent genre of scholarly publication in the humanities: the digital thematic research collection. While thematic research collections have grown in number and academic significance over the past decade, and this is reflected in the literature on scholarly practice, we do not have a definitive grasp on this exciting phenomenon. What significant features distinguish thematic research collections as a mode of scholarly production? This paper describes a pilot study conducted as part of a project investigating the significant features of thematic research collections. A stronger understanding of thematic research collections will contribute to evolving scholarly evaluation processes for tenure and promotion and the advancement of digital libraries to support new modes of research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT This paper gives a summary of the activities of Watson Davis (1896-1967) during the first half of the 20th century in the area of information organisation and dissemination. Starting from Davis's views on the purpose of information, the paper subsequently describes his projects for the establishment of 'one big library', the Auxiliary Publication Service, 'one big journal', and the 'world brain'. Considering Davis as a member of the Special Libraries and Documentation Movement, his connections with its other members are explored. Subsequently, Davis's ideas are analysed and his legacy to Information Science investigated. The paper argues that Davis is an important link between Information Science and its predecessor Documentation, and therefore that he deserves to be subject of deeper research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Application of the results of an information behavior study and domain analysis of Classics scholars of Latin, graduate students, and high school teachers are presented. The study was conducted to inform the design of the Digital Latin Library. Interviews and task demonstrations were conducted with 16 participants. An in depth domain analysis was also conducted to help researchers and system developers further understand the discipline of Classics and the unique system needs of this community. This paper outlines the detailed work analysis of one aspect of the Classical scholars' scholarly work, development of a critical edit ion, and shows how we modeled this process within the system design. We also illustrate how the rich findings produced from information behavior studies and domain analysis can be used in information representation design of complex, discipline specific systems. Further, it shows how the two methodological approaches within LIS can be used together. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT This paper reports on how LIS authors depict the concept of sustainability of digital archives, repositories and libraries in English language texts from 2000- 2015 indexed in three major LIS databases. Our results show that sustainability is not as popular a topic as one might expect. Results show that most authors discuss sustainability at a superficial level rather than in-depth. Sustainability is a multi-faceted concept, and we explore the prevalence of nine codes, representing different facets of sustainability, in the texts. We found most authors discussed sustainability in terms of technology, management, relationships or revenue. Fewer described assessment, disaster planning or policy facets. We also describe the range and variation in subthemes we encountered within each code. We conclude with suggestions for advancing conversation about organizational sustainability in the LIS literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT This paper describes a case study investigation of a city-wide digital storytelling initiative led by two libraries and one municipal cultural department in Hamilton, Canada. Data collection involved one-on-one interviews, document review, and participant observations with governance stakeholders from the two libraries and municipal cultural department involved in the case study. Using activity theory as a conceptual framework, data were analyzed using grounded theory techniques. A variety of factors - motivations, goals, actions, tools, rules, divisions of labour, tensions and contradictions - were found to influence the implementation of the digital storytelling initiative under investigation. Importantly, activity theory provided a robust, holistic framework for understanding and describing the phenomenon of digital storytelling initiatives led by memory institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Considering the value of dates in the life cycle of the digital resource, capturing and storing dates metadata in a structured way can have a significant impact on information retrieval. There are a number of format conventions in common use for encoding the date and time values; the Extended Date/Time Format (EDTF) is one of the most expressive. This paper presents results of an exploratory analysis of representation of dates in over 8 million metadata records from one of the largest digital aggregators, Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), and compares it to EDTF specifications. This benchmark study provides empirical data - at both the individual provider level and the group level (content hubs or service hubs) - about the overall level and patterns of application of date metadata in DPLA metadata records in relation to EDTF. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports preliminary results of a comparative study of metadata change over time in two different environments - digital repository and bibliographic utility used for cooperative cataloging -- and with two different metadata schemes - a local version of Dublin Core and Machine Readable Cataloging (MARC). The findings with regards to metadata change types and subtypes observed, as well as the most frequently occurring change categories and metadata fields in which the change occurs most frequently are presented, and the implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT This panel brings together experts in bibliometrics and information retrieval to discuss how each of these two important areas of information science can help to inform the research of the other. There is a growing body of literature that capitalizes on the synergies created by combining methodological approaches of each to solve research problems and practical issues related to how information is created, stored, organized, retrieved and used. The session will begin with an overview of the common threads that exist between IR and metrics, followed by a summary of findings from the BIR workshops and examples of research projects that combine aspects of each area to benefit IR or metrics research areas, including search results ranking, semantic indexing and visualization. The panel will conclude with an engaging discussion with the audience to identify future areas of research and collaboration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Globalization places people in a multilingual environment. There is a growing number of users to access and share information in several languages for public or private purpose. In order to deliver relevant information in different languages, efficient multilingual documents management is worthy of study. Generally, classification and clustering are two typical methods for documents management. However, lack of training data and high efforts for corpus annotation will increase the cost for classifying multilingual documents which needs to bridge language gaps as well. Clustering is more suitable to implement in such practical applications. There are two main factors involved in documents clustering, document representation method and clustering algorithm. In this paper, we focus on document representation method and demonstrate that the choice of representation methods has impacts on quality of clustering results. In our experiment, we use parallel corpora (English-Chinese documents on topic of technology information) and comparable corpora (English and Chinese documents on topics of mobile technology and wind energy) as dataset. We compare four different types of document representation methods: Vector Space Model, Latent Semantic Indexing, Latent Dirichlet Allocation and Doc2Vec. Experimental results show that, accuracy of Vector Space Model were not competitive with other methods in all clustering tasks. Latent Semantic Indexing is overly sensitive to corpora itself, for it behaved differently when clustering two different topics of comparable corpora. Latent Dirichlet Allocation behaves best when clustering documents in small size of comparable corpora while Doc2Vec behaves best for large documents set of parallel corpora. Accordingly, characteristics of corpora should be under considerations for rational utilization of document representation methods to have better performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT In this poster we describe the Linked Open Data (LOD) for Digital Special Collections project at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and describe some of the particular challenges that legacy metadata poses for representation in LOD formats. LOD formats are primarily based on the World Wide Web Consortium's Resource Description Framework standard which demands both that entities be named by opaque universal identifiers whenever possible but also that metadata descriptions for entities be as unambiguous as possible. The challenges for disambiguating those descriptions are illustrated through examples drawn from digital special collections based at four different digital libraries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The data landscape study at Virginia Tech addresses the changing modes of faculty scholarship increasingly driven by data and supports the development of a user-centric data infrastructure, management, and curation system. The study investigates faculty researchers' current practices in organizing, describing, sharing, reusing, and preserving data and the emerging needs for data services and education. The results determine the different dimensions of data-related activities, challenges, and opportunities and the changing nature of faculty demands regarding data documentation, storage, and archiving. Asking faculty researchers to self-reflect data sharing and reuse from both data producers' and data users' perspectives, the study reveals a significant gap between the rather localized and sporadic data management and sharing activities and the highly perceived reuse values of data that often get lost right after the original work is done. With expertise in data, information, and archive fields, libraries have great values to offer in bridging the gap and building a data-driven, shared-access research enterprise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What interface features of academic digital libraries (DLs) do scholars use when engaging in an exploratory search task? We compare social scientists' and computer scientists' use of interface features in domain-specific DLs to demonstrate what features may lead to useful and unexpected findings of information. Applying a search user interface framework, we found social scientists were more likely than computer scientists to use control features (e.g., filter options) during exploration. Both sets of scholars found useful information during exploration, but social scientists more frequently reported they also found something unexpected. Findings suggest differences may be due to variances in the interface features used by the two groups. We discuss future research including further examination of the experiences that the use of interface features may elicit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We often interact with digital information environments to find useful information. But sometimes useful information finds us unexpectedly, propelling us in new and exciting directions. We might come across information serendipitously when looking for information on something else, or when we are not looking for anything in particular. In previous studies, people have self-reported that they come across information serendipitously. However, there has been limited success in directly observing people doing so. To see if we could have more success, we conducted naturalistic observations of 45 users interacting with different types of digital information environments. Without priming them about serendipity, we asked the users to conduct self-chosen naturalistic information tasks, which varied from broad tasks such as browsing online news to narrow tasks such as finding a particular product to buy. We noted several examples where users either 1) stated they were looking for information on a particular topic or product and unexpectedly found useful/potentially useful information about something else or 2) unexpectedly found useful/potentially useful information when not looking for anything in particular. Our findings suggest that, with a carefully-considered approach, serendipity-related information interaction behaviour can be directly observed. Direct observation allows designers of digital information environments to better understand this behaviour and use this understanding to reason about ways of designing new or improving existing support for serendipity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As information literacy is a key competence of the information society, information literacy instruction in public as well as academic libraries is crucial. Today, librarians do not only act as providers of information but also as educators of the information society's citizens. This study aims to assess the perceived quality of information literacy instruction in libraries of Canada's informational cities: Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver. Therefore, librarians were interviewed by means of a questionnaire inspired by the SERVQUAL diagnostic tool. The questionnaire comprises of two parts: The first part consists of questions regarding information literacy instruction, in the second part the focus is on the seven competence areas of information literacy. Based on the difference between the librarians' "Expectation" and "Experience" scores, gap scores for all questionnaire items were calculated and are now being presented and discussed. At the same time, results of public and academic libraries are compared to show the differences in information literacy instruction and the perceived value of the different information literacy competence areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Initial results of an information behavior study of Classics scholars of Latin, graduate students, and high school teachers are presented. The study was conducted to inform the design of the Digital Latin Library. Interviews and task demonstrations were conducted with 16 participants. Findings indicate user groups use a variety of specialized print and digital resources, with a preference for print manuscripts, and that they employ basic and advanced searching techniques but also require domain-specific tools to conduct their scholarly work activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]