The development of online digital libraries has enhanced the availability of printed materials. By implementing these systems, this ensures the access of material to universities, students, and bibliophiles. Digitizing the Modern Library and the Transition from Print to Electronic is a pivotal reference source for the latest techniques and initiatives needed to transition libraries into the digital age. Featuring extensive coverage on relevant areas such as electronic resource management, library management software, and semantic web, this publication is an ideal resource for faculty members, research scholars, students, information specialists, and librarians in universities and in academic, public, and special libraries.

Hardbound. Change has always been characteristic of serials, and now the nature and speed of that change have altered with the development of electronic technology. Inflation, automation, and changes in publishers' practices and vendors' services all make their mark on serials librarianship. Advances in Serials Management presents essays on current issues in various topics, emphasizing the response to change and clear communication among those who work with serials as producers, processors and users.

Using database-driven web pages or web content management (WCM) systems to manage increasingly diverse web content and to streamline workflows is a commonly practiced solution recognized in libraries to-day. However, limited library web content management models and funding constraints prevent many libraries from purchasing commercially available WCM systems. And, the lack of much needed technical expertise in building in-house WCM systems presents a great challenge for libraries of all types. Content and Workflow Management for Library Websites: Case Studies provides practical and applicable web content management solutions through case studies. It contains successful database-to-web applications as employed in a variety of academic libraries. The applications vary in scope and cover a range of practical how-to-do-it examples from database-driven web development, locally created web content management systems, systems for distributing content management responsibilities, dynamic content delivery, to open source tools, such as MySQL and PHP to manage the content. Issues and challenges associated with the development process are discussed. Authors will also discuss detours, sand traps, and missteps necessary to a real learning process.

This book is a must for librarians with international interest in access to knowledge. It includes a collection of 15 chapters written by authors from all over the world and covers different approaches to the vital role of libraries driving access to knowledge. There are chapters that offer solutions and ideas to enable libraries to become the knowledge engine in society. Other chapters discuss the conceptual part of the subject and related services. The book was compiled as part of the presidential theme of Ellen Tise, IFLA President 2009-2011, with the aim of offering the reader a good portrait of the opportunities and challenges that libraries have in driving access to knowledge.

The case studies presented in this volume help illuminate the rationale for the founding of libraries in an age when books were handwritten, thus contributing to the comparative history of libraries. They focus on examples ranging from the seventh to the seventeenth century emanating from the Muslim World, East Asia, Byzantium and Western Europe. Accumulation and preservation are the key motivations for the development of libraries. Rulers, scholars and men of religion were clearly dedicated to collecting books and sought to protect these fragile objects against the various hazards that threatened their survival. Many of these treasured books are long gone, but there remain hosts of evidence enabling one to reconstruct the collections to which they belonged, found in ancient buildings, literary accounts, archival documentation and, most crucially, catalogues. With such material at hand or, in some cases, the manuscripts of a certain library which have come down to us, it is possible to reflect on the nature of these libraries of the past, the interests of their owners, and their role in the intellectual history of the manuscript age.

This comprehensive manual of operations for managing local history material within the administrative framework of a library covers issues of administration, acquisitions, access, and use of all formats of material. Information on continually changing areas such as preservation, copyright and other legal concerns, computer applications, and national databases is also addressed, along with public relations roles and outreach activities for local history collections. Guidelines for administration of nontraditional library material (e.g., manuscripts) will be especially helpful to librarians. Archivists will value the manual as one of continuing practical education and theoretical development as exemplified by the Society of American Archivists' Basic Manual Series and Archival Fundamental Series. Manuscript curators, students, and administrators will also benefit from this book.

This book gives a unique view of the current hot topic of continuing professional development/lifelong learning in the information services environment. It aims to provide the reader with guidelines for conceptualising, designing and measuring successful programmes for professional learning, staff development and professional growth in the organization.

This volume of Advances in Library Administration and Organization takes as its underpinning theme the whole subject of innovation in Library and Information Services. It considers the various types of innovation through case studies and exemplars both from within the LIS sector and other cognate industries and environments. It will look at both the last and the next thirty years by charting major technology developments and the ways in which they have not only been adopted and adapted by library services but also how the resulting improvements and enhancements have impacted upon key user communities. But more importantly, the volume projects these developments forward and in addition forecasts and analyses likely future inventions and innovations and how LIS leaders and managers should not only respond but actually help to create and shape our future world.Written and edited by Professor David Baker and Wendy Evans, the volume will include contributions from: Dr Chris Batt; Dr Masanori Koizumi; Dr Tibor Koltay; Professor Derek Law; Dr Mike McGrath; Dr Bruce Massis; Chloe Mills; John Robinson; Dr Lara Skelly; Professor Jo Smedley; Dr Evgenia Vassilakaki; Dr Graham Walton.

As the population continues to age, gerontological research will become increasingly important and library holdings in gerontology and geriatrics will be in great demand. This valuable reference discusses the history of gerontology and geriatrics libraries in the United States and Canada and profiles their holdings. The study is based on a questionnaire distributed to public and private gerontology and geriatrics libraries. Data from the questionnaire are presented in brief but informative profiles. Each profile lists the type of library, its chief administrator, the date of its founding, the hours during which it is open, and its holdings, services, and facilities. The result is an illuminating overview of information centers available for the study of geriatrics and gerontology.

Joyce A. Post begins with an extensive discussion that traces the history of library collections in gerontology and geriatrics, including the impact and importance of federal assistance and the creation of geriatric education centers. The next section discusses the author's research methodology and offers an analytical summary of her findings. The directory that follows is arranged alphabetically by state and then by towns within each state. The appendixes present the questionnaire used to obtain the data and a listing of the library holdings of 18 major gerontology and geriatrics periodicals. The useful and varied indexes make this work an indispensable and easy to use reference for gerontologists, librarians, and all those interested in research on the elderly.

Ethnic minority groups in the United States suffer and die from disease at rates much higher than the general population. Such groups include African-Americans, Alaska Natives, Native Americans, Hispanics, and Pacific Asian Americans. To understand the nature of the deplorable rates, the health history of the ethnic groups must be understood. This book describes the contents of libraries nationwide which house health and medically related materials on ethnic minority populations. The book covers information about catalogs, books, articles, biographies, and autobiographies, primary source materials, cassette tapes of speeches, video tapes and films, and medical artifacts.

The repositories covered are in various stages of cataloguing these materials but indicate an interest in having researchers use the collections. This book is the most comprehensive guide to ethnic medical health materials, their location, state of completion, and the contents of collections.

This diverse collection of American folktales and true stories showcases the history and lore of the western states. Capturing the spirit of legendary figures like Jim Bridger and Kit Carson and events like the Gold Rush, stories animate American history. Experiencing these tales allows students to enjoy a vibrant aspect of history that is rarely represented and communicated: the hopes, fears, joys, and trials of the people who came before us. The United States of Storytelling: Folktales and True Stories from the Western States contains lore about early pioneers and settlers, Native Americans, and later immigrants of the states west of the Mississippi as well as the Commonwealths and Territories. Each chapter focuses on an individual state and includes approximately six folktales or true stories from that state, plus the date it entered the union. Appropriate for students in third through eighth grade, this guide is specifically suited for children studying the states in grades four through six, serving as a valuable storytime resource as well as a research springboard for these age groups. Features folklore presented by four noted storytellers and scholars Each chapter/state includes a sub-bibliography that lists sources by title; there is also a general bibliography in the back of the book Each chapter/state has its own glossary of terms

This volume addresses an eclectic mix of topics that adapt theoretical concepts relating to the management of libraries to stretch the boundary of practice. The nine contributions include a definition of knowledge management and an outline of a curriculum designed to train knowledge managers developed in Australia, a case study of the application of change management at SMU, and a discussion of how ebooks fit into collection management policies. It also includes two pieces on research on the Internet, one that focuses on student use of this tool and the other on the ethical implications of Internet research. Other contributions include a study of how effective managers work and a discussion of quality assessment in libraries and in American higher education. The volume concludes with discussions of consortia that are developing in Ohio and in Taiwan. While each of these articles are quite different in focus, each deals with an issue that we who are charged with leading libraries must address, and each contributes to the discussions that are likely to clarify our visions of where libraries are going and how we might adapt them to meet the future needs of our clientele. As a result, this volume should take its place beside others in the series as a significant contribution to the literature of management within librarianship.

Knowledge Management was the theme of the Standing Conference of Eastern, Central and Southern African Library and Information Associations (SCECSAL XVII) in 2006. This selection of conference papers provides a cross-disciplinary approach to knowledge, information and development and how the three together can mould a new and more informed society. The challenge is to make our libraries more people-centered and Afro-centric, not simply serving the interests of the elite and paying little attention to the plight of the less well off. This needs to change, with libraries becoming more inclusive and serving the needs of all. These papers raise provocative questions, and provide an insight into the struggle of information services in this part of Africa to be part of an emerging information and knowledge society.

Intended for librarians and library managers in academic institutions, this series aims to cover advances in library administration and organization. The collected articles draw upon practical situations to illustrate administrative principles.

Extracting content from text continues to be an important research problem for information processing and management. Approaches to capture the semantics of text-based document collections may be based on Bayesian models, probability theory, vector space models, statistical models, or even graph theory. As the volume of digitized textual media continues to grow, so does the need for designing robust, scalable indexing and search strategies (software) to meet a variety of user needs. Knowledge extraction or creation from text requires systematic yet reliable processing that can be codified and adapted for changing needs and environments. This book will draw upon experts in both academia and industry to recommend practical approaches to the purification, indexing, and mining of textual information. It will address document identification, clustering and categorizing documents, cleaning text, and visualizing semantic models of text.

This book discusses the development of library and information services in China and the effect of the nation's political and social conditions on that develpment. The author briefly reviews the history of Chinese libraries and librarianship, then describes Chinese library services in the first half of the 20th century. The remarkable consequences of the ideological change after the Communist takeover are described in a concise manner, but the focus of this book is the massive modernization movement that has taken place since 1978. This unique book has been prepared based on data collected directly from Chinese professional journals. In addition, it provides unusual detailed information from sources obtained during the author's extensive official visits to libraries and library schools in China. For the first time, these details are now easily accessible in one comprehensive volume.

Countries around the globe are grappling with issues of archive legislation -- both in established societies where old laws no longer respond to modern realities and in the growing number of new states seeking to establish their own legal framework.

These two volumes outline the progress and procedures developed by nations grappling with issues such as:
-- How to provide access while protecting privacy
-- How to craft legislation that will survive the rapid advances of technology -- and reflect the changing relationship between public and private sectors

The reports presented here reveal common elements that may be fruitfully addressed by international effort and will act as a sourcebook of ideas and action.

Searching Multimedia Databases by Content bridges the gap between the database and signal processing communities by providing the necessary background information for the reader and presenting it along with the intuition and mechanics of the best existing tools in each area. The first half of Searching Multimedia Databases by Content reviews the most successful database access methods, in increasing complexity, reaching up to spatial access methods and text retrieval. In all cases, the emphasis is on practical approaches that have been incorporated in commercial systems, or that seem very promising. The second half of the book uses the above access methods to achieve fast searching in a database of signals. A general methodology is presented, which suggests extracting a few good features from each multimedia object, thus mapping objects into points in a metric space. Finally, the book concludes by presenting some recent successful applications of the methodology on time series and color images. Searching Multimedia Databases by Content is targeted towards researchers and developers of multimedia systems. The book can also serve as a textbook for a graduate course on multimedia searching, covering both access methods as well as the basics of signal processing.

Ernst Mach (1838-1916) was a seminal philosopher-scientist and a deserving member of the canon of major twentieth-century thinkers. Yet, despite a healthy resurgence in Mach studies, he is still widely thought to represent a simplistic positivist, even sensationalist, position that does not at all reflect the depth of Mach's interests and subtlety as a philosopher. By exploring Mach's views on science as well as philosophy, this book attempts to wrest him free from his customary association with logical positivism and to reinterpret him on his own terms as a natural philosopher and naturalist about human knowledge. Mach's development and his influences from 19th century German philosophy and science are probed in great conceptual and historical detail, and attention is paid to his unpublished Nachlass as well as to the affinities between Mach's thought and that of other major philosopher-scientists such as Einstein, Bertrand Russell, William James, Helmholtz, Riemann, Herbart and Kant. In particular, the book strives to set forth the true nature of Mach's sensation-elements, the motivations for his critique of the concepts of space and time in physics, and the real meaning of his famous critique of metaphysics. The author's work has appeared in Synthese, Kant-Studien, Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics and the Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, but here these inquiries are gathered into a unified historico-critical treatment that follows Mach's conceptual development and the culmination of his work in a unique and intriguing natural philosophy. Physicists, psychologists, philosophers of science, historians of twentieth-century thought and culture, and educators will find this volume a valuable help in interpreting Mach's ideas in a context that includes philosophy and science and the bridge between them."

This book is the culmination of three years of study of information and referral activity in U.S. public libraries. Information and referal (I&R) is defined broadly as facilitating the link between a people and the resource or resources outside the library that can meet their needs. The book helps to define what I&R is, how some libraries have approached it, and what major problems have been associated with its adoption. It serves as a guide on the role of public libraries in I&R, managing I&R in a library environment, appropriate skills and training, the performance of libraries where I&R has been tried, the impact of library-based I&R on the client group, and how library-based I&R compares with non-library I&R.

The techniques of time management explained in this handbook provide a framework from which professional librarians in academic, public, and special libraries can benefit. Included are time management techniques for one's personal work habits, techniques for work routines involving other staff members, and techniques for library administrators. Cochran, a law library administrator focuses on effectiveness (doing the right job) rather than efficiency (doing a job right). The major topics include setting goals and objectives for one's personal and professional life that support one's values, planning and scheduling work each day, fighting procrastination, limiting interruptions, planning effective meetings, delegating effectively, building morale, and cultivating creativity. Other chapters cover time management techniques for special situations including travel and lunch time, balancing a career and personal life, and implementing a time management training program in a library. Appendices include worksheet forms.