ITAL Is Open Access -- All Articles Available

Starting with Volume 31 (2012), Information Technologies and Libraries (ITAL) has been an open-access journal. All articles published since then are freely available to all, no subscription or login required. Many previously subscription-only articles from previous issues are also available through the journal's archive. Those that have not yet been digitized will be in the coming years.

With ITAL an open access publication, this preprint service was discontinued at the end of 2011. Please visit Information Technologies and Libraries to read all of our available articles.

Ken Varnum

Editor, ITAL

University of Michigan

New preprints

We've added two preprints.

• Library Use of Web-based Research Guides by Jimmy Ghaphery and Erin White
• Reference Information Extraction and Processing using Conditional Random Fields by Tudor Groza, Gunnar AAstrand Grimnes and Siegfried Handschuh

 You'll find these and others at http://www.lita.org/ala/mgrps/divs/lita/publications/ital/prepub/index.cfm.

New Preprint

We recently added two preprints.

• Practical Limits to the Scope of Digital Preservation by Mike Kastellec
•  Eclipse Editor for MARC Records by Bojana Dimic Surla, PhD

 You'll find these and others at http://www.lita.org/ala/mgrps/divs/lita/publications/ital/prepub/index.cfm.

New Preprint

We recently added a preprint.

• Mobile Technologies & Academics: Do Students Use Mobile Technology in their Academic Lives and are Librarians Ready to Meet this New Challenge? by Angela Dresselhaus and Flora Shrode

 You'll find this and others at http://www.lita.org/ala/mgrps/divs/lita/publications/ital/prepub/index.cfm.

New preprint

We've just added a new preprint.

•  Resource Discovery: Comparative Survey Results on Two Catalog Interfaces, by Heather Hessel and Janet Fransen

 This and other preprints can be found at http://www.lita.org/ala/mgrps/divs/lita/publications/ital/prepub/index.cfm.

Editorial and Technological Workflow Tools to Promote Website Quality, by Emily G. Morton-Owens

Library websites are an increasingly visible representation of the library as an institution, which makes website quality an important way to communicate competence and trustworthiness to users. A website editorial workflow is one way to enforce a process and ensure quality. In a workflow, users receive roles, like author or editor, and content travels through various stages in which grammar, spelling, tone, and format are checked. One library used a workflow system to involve librarians in the creation of content. This system, implemented in Drupal, an open-source content management system, solved problems of coordination, quality, and comprehensiveness that existed on the library’s earlier, static website.

Factors Affecting University Library Website Design, by Yong-Mi Kim

Existing studies have extensively explored factors that affect users’ intentions to use university library website resources (ULWR); yet little attention has been given to factors affecting university library website design. This paper investigates factors that affect university library website design and assesses the success of the university library website from both designers’ and users’ perspectives.

The findings show that when planning a website, university web designers consider university guidelines, review other websites, and consult with experts and other divisions within the library; however, resources and training for the design process are lacking. While website designers assess their websites as highly successful, user evaluations are somewhat lower. Accordingly, use is low, and users rely heavily on commercial websites. Suggestions for enhancing the usage of ULWR are provided.

Adoption of E-Book Readers among College Students: A Survey, by Nancy M. Foasberg

To learn whether e-book readers have become widely popular among college students, this study surveys students at one large, urban, four-year public college. The survey asked whether the students owned e-book readers and if so, how often they used them and for what purposes. Thus far, uptake is slow; a very small proportion of students use e-readers. These students use them primarily for leisure reading and continue to rely on print for much of their reading. Students reported that price is the greatest barrier to e-reader adoption and had little interest in borrowing e-reader compatible e-books from the library.

Librarians and Technology Skill Acquisition: Issues and Perspective, by Debra A. Riley-Huff and Julia M. Rholes

Libraries are increasingly searching for and employing librarians with significant technology skill sets. This article reports on a study conducted to determine how well prepared librarians are for their positions in academic libraries, how they acquired their skills and how difficult they are to hire and retain. The examination entails a close look at ALA-accredited LIS program technology course offerings and dovetails a dual survey designed to capture experiences and perspectives from practitioners, both library administrators and librarians who have significant technology roles.

Click Analytics: Visualizing Website Use Data, by Tabatha A. Farney

Click analytics is a powerful technique that displays what and where users are clicking on a webpage helping libraries to easily identify areas of high and low usage on a page without having to decipher website use data sets. Click analytics is a subset of web analytics, but there is little research that discusses its potential uses for libraries. This paper introduces three click analytics tools, Google Analytics’ In-Page Analytics, ClickHeat, and Crazy Egg, and evaluates their usefulness in the context of redesigning a library’s homepage.

New preprints

We've recently added three new preprints.

• "Selecting a Web Content Management System for an Academic Library Web Site" by Elizabeth L. Black
•  "Cataloging Theory in Search of Graph Theory and Other Ivory Towers. Object: Cultural Heritage Resource Description Networks" by Ronald J. Murray and Barbara B. Tillett
• "Public Library Computer Waiting Queues: Alternatives to the First-Come-First-Served Strategy" by  Stuart Williamson

You'll find these and other preprints at http://www.lita.org/ala/mgrps/divs/lita/publications/ital/prepub/index.cfm.

Management and Support of Shared Integrated Library Systems, by Jason Vaughan and Kristen Costello

The University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) University Libraries has hosted and managed a shared integrated library system (ILS) since 1989. The system and the number of partner libraries sharing the system has grown significantly over the past two decades. Spurred by the level of involvement and support contributed by the host institution, the authors administered a comprehensive survey to current Innovative Interfaces libraries. Research findings are combined with a description of UNLV’s local practices to provide substantial insights into shared funding, support, and management activities associated with shared systems.

Benign Neglect: Developing Life Rafts for Digital Content, by Jody L. DeRidder

In his keynote speech at the Archiving 2009 Conference in Arlington, Virginia, Clifford Lynch called for the development of a benign neglect model for digital preservation, one in which as much content as possible is stored in whatever manner available in hopes of there someday being enough resources to more properly preserve it. This is an acknowledgment of current resource limitations relative to the burgeoning quantities of digital content that need to be preserved.

Seeing the Wood for the Trees: Enhancing Metadata Subject Elements with Weights, by Hong Zhang, Linda C. Smith, Michael Twidale, and Fang Huang Gao

Subject indexing has been conducted in a dichotomous way in terms of what the information object is primarily about/of or not, corresponding to the presence or absence of a particular subject term, respectively. With more subject terms brought into information systems via social tagging, manual cataloging, or automated indexing, many more partially relevant results can be retrieved. Using examples from digital image collections and online library catalog systems, we explore the problem and advocate for adding a weighting mechanism to subject indexing and tagging to make web search and navigation more effective and efficient. We argue that the weighting of subject terms is more important than ever in today’s world of growing collections, more federated searching, and expansion of social tagging. Such a weighting mechanism needs to be considered and applied not only by indexers, catalogers, and taggers, but also needs to be incorporated into system functionality and metadata schemas.

Building an Open Source Institutional Repository at a Small Law School Library:,Is it Realistic or Unattainable? by Fang Wang

Digital preservation activities among law libraries have largely been limited by a lack of funding, staffing and expertise. Most law school libraries that have already implemented an Institutional Repository (IR) chose proprietary platforms because they are easy to set up, customize, and maintain with the technical and development support they provide. The Texas Tech University School of Law Digital Repository is one of the few law school repositories in the nation that is built on the DSpace open source platform.1 The repository is the law school’s first institutional repository in history. It was designed to collect, preserve, share and promote the law school’s digital materials, including research and scholarship of the law faculty and students, institutional history, and law-related resources. In addition, the repository also serves as a dark archive to house internal records.

New preprint

A new preprint.

• "Click Analytics: Visualizing Web Site Use Data" by Tabatha A. Farney
  

New preprints

Two new preprints were recently added.

• "Adoption of E-Book Readers among College Students: A Survey" by Nancy M. Foasberg

• "Editorial and technological workflow tools to promote website quality" by Emily G. Morton-Owens
  (Originally presented at the 2010 LITA National Forum)

New preprints

Two new preprints have been added to the ITAL Web site today.
http://www.lita.org/ala/mgrps/divs/lita/ital/prepub/index.cfm

"Investigations into Library Web Scale Discovery Services" by Jason Vaughan

 "Graphs in Libraries: A Primer" by James E. Powell, Daniel Alcazar, Matthew Hopkins, Robert Olendorf, Tamara M. McMahon, Amber Wu, Linn Collins

A Simple Scheme for Book Classification Using Wikipedia, by Andromeda Yelton

Editor’s note: This article is the winner of the LITA/Ex Libris Student Writing Award, 2010.

Because the rate at which documents are being generated outstrips librarians’ ability to catalog them, an accurate, automated scheme of subject classification is desirable. However, simplistic word-counting schemes miss many important concepts; librarians must enrich algorithms with background knowledge to escape basic problems such as polysemy and synonymy. I have developed a script that uses Wikipedia as context for analyzing the subjects of nonfiction books. Though a simple method built quickly from freely available parts, it is partially successful, suggesting the promise of such an approach for future research.

The Internet Public Library (IPL): An Exploratory Case Study on User Perceptions, by Monica Maceli, Susan Wiedenbeck, and Eileen Abels

The Internet Public Library (IPL), now known as ipl2, was created in 1995 with the mission of serving the public by providing librarian-recommended Internet resources and reference help. We present an exploratory case study on public perceptions of an “Internet public library,” based on qualitative analysis of interviews with ten college student participants: some current users and others unfamiliar with the IPL. The exploratory interviews revealed some confusion around the IPL’s name and the types of resources and services that would be offered. Participants made many positive comments about the IPL’s resource quality, credibility, and personal help.