Search

Crowdsourcing means the separation of one organization area and putting it into the hands of the crowd – an organized community in the form of an open call. This community can be created from both high class professionals and amateurs. Currently, crowdsourcing is implemented primarily in companies and NGOs. Since the implementation of solutions based on crowdsourcing is quite straight forward, it is also made use of in civic and social activities, including ventures initiated by archives, museums and libraries. This article brings the idea of crowdsourcing and examples of its mechanisms in libraries.

According to the analyses made by the Interdepartmental Group for Forecasting the Demand for Work existing by the Governmental Center for Strategic Studies in Poland, by 2020 the number of people employed in the agricultural, mining, transport and fuel sectors will have dramatically fallen. The fastest-developing branches will be computer science, telecommunication, the Internet and information technologies. Thus, the profession of information broker — a specialist commissioned to look for information and make it available — will belong to the group of jobs with the so-called "positive increasing trend". Meeting the requirements of the changing labor market, Polish universities and colleges offer courses for those who are interested in getting new qualifications and running their own commercial information activity. The article presents the educational offer in this field for the academic year 2010/2011 . Apart from the offer and general characteristics of the syllabus of courses for information brokers, the article discusses the results of the evaluation carried out among students — future information brokers — in Torun.

When in 1947 the communist regime have taken the action to control the book market and to subordinate the private sector to the central communistic headquarters, so after that many publishing houses clearly limited or suspended their activities. Such a fate shared Fable and the Fairy Tales Publishing House (Wydawnictwo Bajek i Baśni) from Krakow, which had been published “Kukuryku” series of books for children. Even though in some editorial respect their items did not belong to the model one, they played the educational function and promote reading as well. They became the perfect archive material that documenting the effort of running a private publishing house in post-war era and the restrictions caused by the policy makers.

On January 12th 2010 the 16th conference on Digitization took place in Warsaw. Its organizer was the Center for Computer Studies Promotion of Warsaw. The conference was aimed primarily at libraries and archives as well as all cultural heritage institutions interested in digitization their collections. The leading topic were legal and technological aspects of digitization of writing. The article summarizes issues discussed during the conference.

The article presents results of a bibliometric analysis of the scientific output made by researchers from Institute of Information Science and Book Studies at Nicolas Copernicus University in Toruń during 1976-2007. The research material includes set of 873 items, especially: books and their editions, articles published in journals and collective works, literature reviews, interviews and translations. Authors of this article make a qualitative analysis of the material within the wide spectrum of subjects.

The article presents results of a bibliometric analysis of the scientific output made by researchers from Institute of Information Science and Book Studies at Nicolas Copernicus University in Torun during 1976-2007. The research material includes set of 873 items, especially: books and their editions, articles published in journals and collective works, literature reviews, interviews and translations. Authors of this article make a quantitative analysis of the material, take into account dynamic of publications' growth, organizational and employment status of Institute, during the 32-year period of its activity.

The development of technology and in particular easy access to information technology have made the task of making one‘s own webpage comparatively simple. It does not require great knowledge or much money. However, as it has become easy to publish materials electronically, the Internet abounds in imprecise, misleading, untrue or falsified information. The escalating phenomenon in the recent years as well as the awareness of the fact that the condition of education and the knowledge of society depend on the quality of information acquired have given rise to the discussion about the quality, attributes and evaluation methods of electronic information. The activities have entailed a series of researches, which cover also libraries‘ WWW services. Depending on the fact by whom, for whom and at what level the analysis was made, different methods and criteria were used to examine the quality of the Internet libraries. One of the research methods was benchmarking (also known as the comparative analysis), which involves multifaceted observation of the information in reference to its form and content, measuring the services offered and identifying the best practices. The benchmarking evaluation of the quality of library websites has become the subject of this analysis. The research has been conducted in the Internet websites of private colleges and universities in Kuyavia-Pomerania Province. Apart from discussing the methodology of benchmarking, the article characterizes the catalogue of the evaluation criteria for content and functionality of services. It includes the analysis of each attribute in reference with the websites examined from the point of view of their potential user. Individual data have served to define the intensity of various features and to make the conclusions about the Internet information offer of private colleges and universities in Kuyavia-Pomerania Province.