In today s digital environment the workplace is characterised by individuals creating information perhaps independently of formal systems, or establishing new systems without knowledge of information management requirements. This book explains and explores the concept of organisational culture, specifically within the domain of information management. It draws on the author's wide-ranging practical experience in different workplaces and uses research findings from cross-cultural studies of information management.
Uses research findings from cross-cultural studies of information managementProvides tools to develop practical and realistic solutions to real-world problemsDraws on the author s wide-ranging practical experience in different workplaces."

This book explores issues surrounding all aspects of visual collection management, taken from real-world experience in creating management systems and digitizing core content. Readers will gain the knowledge to manage the digitization process from beginning to end, assess and define the needs of their particular project, and evaluate digitization options. Additionally, they will select strategies which best meet current and future needs, acquire the knowledge to select the best images for digitization, and understand the legal issues surrounding digitization of visual collections.
Offers practical information for the busy information professionalConcentrates solely on image managementFocuses on unique needs of born digital and digitized images

iPhone application development is explained here in an accessible treatment for the generalist Library and Information Science (LIS) practitioner. Future information-seeking practices by users will take place across a diverse array of ubiquitous computing devices. iPhone applications represent one of the most compelling new platforms for which to remediate and re-engineer library service. Strategies of efficient mobile design and delivery include adapting computing best practices of data independence and adhering to web standards as articulated by the W3C. These best practices apply across the diverse range of handheld devices and accompanying software development tools. This book is essentially a how-to guide for application development, laying out foundational principles and then moving toward practical implementations.
Overview and step-by-step development guide with Web Based Applications (the Dash code application)Overview and step-by-step development guide using the Native Application Developer (the Xcode application)Explaining principles of portability and transferability of systems

This book addresses the question of how knowledge is currently documented, and may soon be documented in the context of what it calls semantic publishing . This takes two forms: a more narrowly and technically defined semantic web; as well as a broader notion of semantic publishing. This book examines the ways in which knowledge is represented in journal articles and books. By contrast, it goes on to explore the potential impacts of semantic publishing on academic research and authorship. It sets this in the context of changing knowledge ecologies: the way research is done; the way knowledge is represented and; the modes of knowledge access used by researchers, students and the general public.
Provides an introduction to the semantic web and semantic publishing for readers outside the field of computer scienceDiscusses the relevance of the semantic web and semantic publishing more broadly, and its application to academic researchExamines the changing ecologies of knowledge production"

As librarians move into the middle of their careers, they are more ready than ever to take on new leadership opportunities. Literature on leadership is expanding in the field of library and information sciences, and more and more seminars and workshops are being offered for new and seasoned leaders. This book asks the questions: What about us? and, Where is the leadership advice and training for those who are no longer new librarians, but are also not yet seasoned leaders? The title illustrates how to work the middle, from being in the sophomore slump progressing to the next leaders in the field, to look for perspectives from others who are in the middle of their career, and how they have developed into leaders, ways to develop one s own style of leadership and grow one s career and future as a librarian and information professional.
Perspectives on leadership from mid-career information professionalsTips and tools on how to become a leader from the middle of your careerA how-to guide on making changes from the middle"

Written from the perspective of a librarian, this book offers a comprehensive overview of the impact of e-books on academic libraries. The author discusses advantages to both researchers and librarians and provides current examples of innovative uses of e-books in academic contexts. This book reviews the current situation in e-book publishing, and describes problems in managing e-books in libraries caused by the variety of purchase models and varying formats available, and the lack of standardisation. It discusses solutions for providing access and maintaining bibliographic control, looks at various initiatives to publicise and promote e-books, and compares e-book usage surveys to track changes in user preferences and behaviour over the last decade. E-books have already had a huge impact on academic libraries, and major advances in technology will bring further changes. There is a need for collaboration between libraries and publishers. The book concludes with reflections on the future of e-books in academic libraries.
Describes how e-books have changed library services and how they have enabled academic libraries to align with the e-learning initiatives of their universitiesDiscusses problems with e-book collection development and management and lists examples of solutionsExamines trends in user behaviour and acceptance of e-books

Many modern technologies give the impression that they somehow work by magic, particularly when they operate automatically and their mechanisms are invisible. A technology called RFID (Radio Frequency Identification), which is relatively new, has exactly this characteristic. Librarians everywhere are closely watching RFID technology. Advances over using bar codes on library materials, RFID tags are being touted as a way to radically redesign how library materials are handled. But it is expensive. The tags are vulnerable to wear and tear and the technology is not fully developed. It's unclear what sort of return on investment (ROI) it provides. While it is common for libraries to now have information technology expertise within their organizations, RFID may appear unfamiliar. RFID for Libraries: A practical guide examines what RFID technology is and how it works. The book reviews the development of computer technology and its effects on library operations over the last couple of decades. Further examination features the applications of RFID technology in libraries. An assessment of current implementations in libraries and the lessons learnt provides suggestions to overcome the issues faced. Concluding chapters look into the future to see what developments might be possible with RFID in libraries. Benefiting from the rich experience the author has gained during recent implementation of RFID based system for his library and the important title aids the library and information community in understanding RFID technology from a library perspective.
Written by a librarian who has recently implemented the RFID system for his libraryComprehensive review of available RFID systems for librariesStep by step guidelines for successful implementation of RFID systems in the library

The originality of this book, which deals with such a new subject matter, lies in the application of methods and concepts never used before - such as ontologies and taxonomies, as well as thesauri - to the ordering of knowledge based on primary information. Chapters in the book also examine the study of ontologies, taxonomies and thesauri from the perspective of systematics and general systems theory. Ontologies, Taxonomies and Thesauri in Systems Science and Systematics will be extremely useful to those operating within the network of related fields, which includes documentation and information science.
Ontologies and TaxonomyKnowledge classification SystemsThesauri

This book is about news search and monitoring. Aimed at professionals with a strategic need of monitoring the surrounding world, users with a need to find the best news sources, monitoring services and news search strategies and techniques will benefit from reading this book. The main purpose is to present a practical handbook with an analysis of readily available tools, blending with passages of a theoretical nature. It is also useful for students at LIS programmes and related information programmes and for librarians and information professionals. The authors aim to aid the reader in reaching a greater understanding of the core in news search and monitoring.
Presents effective tools to evaluate news search engines and databasesHarness the power of RSS (Real Simple Syndication) feeds in online news search and monitoringLearn how to navigate and critically question the news found in the blogosphere

Aimed at academic library practitioners, this book describes how e-reserve services can evolve and adapt to the changing virtual learning environment of higher education. New approaches discussed include: the integration of subscribed, free, and copyrighted resources within course management systems; innovative employment of open URL link resolvers to connect e-reserve with library e-resources and services; video streaming within course documents; and the creative use of bibliographic software to produce customized reading lists. New Approaches to E-Reserve includes detailed descriptions and extensive step-by-step illustrations in order to provide readers with the tools needed to implement the techniques covered within. These combine to offer practical insight into common issues faced by academic institutions worldwide. In addition to an overview of practices and an update on new developments in e-reserve, a discussion of strategy, policy and organizational change extends this book s relevance to a much broader theme: the strategic management of current and future technological changes in tertiary education.
Provides practical how to advice, with appropriate illustrationsOffers realistic suggestions for strategic moves to integrate services, respond to user needs, and collaborate with potential stakeholders within and outside the institutionThe authors possess wide-ranging skills in audio, visual and information services in academic libraries, administrative experience with organization change and up-to-date knowledge of technologies relevant to the academic library"

Libraries/information centres are continuously evolving to keep up with rapid changes in information gathering, processing, and distribution. Corporate and non-profit special libraries face special challenges in revitalizing their physical space and providing efficient access to digital content. This book provides solo-librarians or special library managers with practical advice as to revitalize their libraries both in the physical space and the digital space. The book uses case studies, surveys and literature review to provide practical, innovative and evidence-based information to help special librarians develop information centres that will remain relevant to their organizations.
Written from an evidence-based perspectiveEach section includes case studies, interviews or examples from libraries and librariansWritten specifically for special librarians

Transforming Research Libraries for the Global Knowledge Society explores critical aspects of research library transformation needed for successful transition into the 21st century multicultural environment. The book is written by leaders in the field who have real world experience with transformational change and thought-provoking ideas for the future of research libraries, academic librarianship, research collections, and the changing nature of global scholarship within a higher education context.
Authors are leaders in the research libraries field from a variety of countriesThought provoking chapters will help guide research library transformation globallyContains a diversity of thinking on research librarianship in the 21st century

Making a Collection Count connects the various pieces of library collection management, such as selection, cataloguing, shelving, circulation and weeding, and teaches readers how to gather and analyze data from each point in a collection s life cycle. Relationships between collections and other library services, such as reference, programming, and technology, are also explored. The result is a quality collection that is clean, current, relevant, and useful, and which connects and highlights various library services.
Offers practical applications for collection librarians and managers who are practitioners in the field. It is more than just a theoretical discussion of collection quality and collection management because useful, realistic advice is offeredThis is not a book about collection development. It is unique in that the focus is on collection quality: making the most of a library collection budget, performing physical inventory, and gathering/using data and statistics about collectionsBroad, international appeal to various library types: public, academic, school, and special"

From the 494 B.C. plebeians' march out of Rome to gain improved status, to Gandhi's nonviolent campaigns in India, to the liberation of Poland and the Baltic nations, and the revolutions in North Africa, nonviolent struggles have played pivotal roles in world events for centuries. Sharp'sDictionary of Power and Struggle is a groundbreaking reference work on this topic by the "godfather of nonviolent resistance." In nearly 1,000 entries, the Dictionary defines those ideologies, political systems, strategies, methods, and concepts that form the core of nonviolent action as it has occurred throughout history and across the globe, providing much-needed clarification of language that is often mired in confusion. Entries discuss everything from militarization to censorship, guerrilla theater, pacifism, secret agents, and protest songs. In addition, the dictionary features a foreword by Sir Adam Roberts, President of the British Academy; an introduction by Gene Sharp; an essay on power and realism; case studies of conflicts in Serbia and Tunisia; and a guide for further reading. Sharp's Dictionary of Power and Struggle is an invaluable resource for activists, educators and anyone else curious about nonviolent alternatives to both passivity and violent conflict.
"Gene Sharp is perhaps the most influential proponent of nonviolent action alive."--The Progressive
"Sharp has had broad influence on international events over the past two decades, helping to advance a global democratic awakening."--The Wall Street Journal
" Sharp's] work has served as the template for taking on authoritarian regimes from Burma to Belgrade."--The Christian Science Monitor

This book tackles online social networks by navigating these systems from the birth to the death of their digital presence. Navigating the social within the digital can be a contentious undertaking, as social networks confuse the boundary between offline and online relationships. These systems work to bring people together in an online environment, yet participation can dislocate users from other relationships and deviant online behaviour can create offline issues. The author begins by examining the creation of a digital presence in online networks popularized by websites such as Facebook and MySpace. The book explores how the digital presence influences how social, cultural and professional relationships are discovered, forged, maintained and broken, and journeys through the popular criticisms of social networking such as employee time-wasting, bullying, stalking, the alleged links between social networks and suicide and the decline of a user s public image. Social networks are often treated as morally ambiguous spaces, which highlights a dissonance between digital and social literacies. This discord is approached through an exploration of the everyday undercurrents present in social networks. The discussion of the digital presence ends by addressing the intricacies of becoming digitally dead, which explores how a user removes their identity, with finality, from social networks and the entire web.
Identifies the undercurrents present in social networks and explores how these influence everyday lifeProvides insight into how the digital presence insidiously encroaches on offline aspects of a user s lifeExamines the idea of becoming digitally dead by discussing the often taboo subject of virtual and non-virtual suicide in the context of social networks"

This book has been written with a view to understand the validity of the perceptions of Open Access (OA) e-journals in the Library and Information Science (LIS) field. Using relevant OA journals this book presents and evaluates journals qualitatively and quantitatively. Over the last three hundred years scholarly journals have been the prime mode of transport in communicating the scholarly research process. However in the last few decades, a changing scenario has been witnessed in their form and format. OA is an innovative idea that attracts a fair amount of support and opposition around the world because it bridges the gap between digitally divided scholars by solving the pricing and permission crises that have imbalanced the scholarly communication process. Some scholars are of the opinion that OA has led to a chaotic environment where anyone can publish anything. Scholarly Communication in Library and Information Services records, in detail, the impact by accessing the journals web site qualitatively and quantitatively in measuring the important elements such as articles, authors, countries, subjects and cited references. Finally, the book calculates the impact factor using synchronous and asynchronous approaches.
First ever study to extensively evaluate LIS Journals Web site qualitatively by using a newly developed set of criteriaLIS OA journals are also evaluated quantitativelyCounts citations of LIS OA articles in terms of formal citations by using Google Scholar"

This book examines the theory, behaviour, connections and issues of modern information organizations. Asking leading professionals where we may be in the near future, it challenges both our perceptions and preconceptions. Posing perhaps the most vital question of all... Are we prepared? Do we have a vision?

This book showcases new interdisciplinary academic research on the relationship between information literacy and learning. It combines findings with new understandings drawn from theoretical and empirical research conducted in primary and secondary schools, higher education, workplaces, and community contexts. The studies offer new insights into questions such as how transferable are the information practices and skills learned in one context to other contexts? What is the degree to which information competences are generic, to what degree are they domain and context specific? What are the kinds of challenges and outcomes that emerge from incorporating information literacy into education and training courses? And, most importantly, what kinds of theories and philosophies regarding the nature of learning, information, and knowledge, should information literacies education and research efforts be based on?

At a moment when the term "Democracy " is evoked to express inchoate aspirations for peace and social change or particular governmental systems that may or may not benefit more than a select minority of the population, this book examines attempts from ancient Mesopotemia to the democratic movements of the early twenty-first century to sustain and improve their own lives and those of outsiders who have migrated into territory they regard as their own. Democratic activists have formed organizations to regulate the distribution of water, to restore the environment, and to assure that they and their children will have a future. They have organized their relations with deities and those who held secular power, and they have created particular institutions that they hoped would help them shape a good, free, and creative life for themselves and those who follow. They have also created laws and representative bodies to serve their needs on a regular basis and have written about the difficulties those they have elected to office have maintaining their ties to those who brought them to power in the first place. Since early times, proponents of direct or participatory democracy have come into conflict with the leaders of representative institutions that claim singular power over democracy. Patriots of one form or another have tried to reclaim the initiative to define what democracy should mean and who should manage it. Frequently people in small communities, trade unions, repressed, exploited, or denigrated racial, religious, political, or sexual groups have marched forward using the language of democracy to find space for themselves and their ideas at the center of political life. Sometimes they have re-interpreted the old laws, and sometimes they have formulated new laws and institutions in order to gain greater opportunities to debate the major issues of their time. Whatever conclusions they come to, they are only temporary since changing times require new solutions, assuring that democracy can only survive as a continuous process. As such and as a system of beliefs, democracy has many flaws. But looking cross-culturally and trans-historically, it still seems like democracy still holds promise for improving the lives of all the world's people.

In a world where computing power, ubiquity and connectivity create powerful new ways to facilitate learning, this book examines how librarians and information professionals can utilize emerging technologies to expand service and resource delivery. With contributions from leading professionals, including lecturers, librarians and e-learning technologists, this bookl explores strategic approaches for effectively implementing, living with, and managing revolutionary technological change in libraries.
Explores the impact of the social and technological aspects of Web 2.0 on libraries and library servicesDraws on empirical researchExperienced practitioners

Initially branching out of the European contradance tradition, the danzon first emerged as a distinct form of music and dance among black performers in nineteenth-century Cuba. By the early twentieth-century, it had exploded in popularity throughout the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean basin. A fundamentally hybrid music and dance complex, it reflects the fusion of European and African elements and had a strong influence on the development of later Latin dance traditions as well as early jazz in New Orleans. Danzon: Circum-Caribbean Dialogues in Music and Dance studies the emergence, hemisphere-wide influence, and historical and contemporary significance of this music and dance phenomenon.
Co-authors Alejandro L. Madrid and Robin D. Moore take an ethnomusicological, historical, and critical approach to the processes of appropriation of the danzon in new contexts, its changing meanings over time, and its relationship to other musical forms. Delving into its long history of controversial popularization, stylistic development, glorification, decay, and rebirth in a continuous transnational dialogue between Cuba and Mexico as well as New Orleans, the authors explore the production, consumption, and transformation of this Afro-diasporic performance complex in relation to global and local ideological discourses. By focusing on interactions across this entire region as well as specific local scenes, Madrid and Moore underscore the extent of cultural movement and exchange within the Americas during the late nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries, and are thereby able to analyze the danzon, the dance scenes it has generated, and the various discourses of identification surrounding it as elements in broader regional processes. Danzon is a significant addition to the literature on Latin American music, dance, and expressive culture; it is essential reading for scholars, students, and fans of this music alike."

Throughout its history, the Western library has played a significant role in bringing the book to the hands of Western scholars. This book analyses that history, examining constructs of librarianship, publishing and scholarship within that history as gate keeping access to knowledge. Exploring significant events in the field from the time of the Lyceum to the present day in the development of repositories of books and their access by scholars. Gatekeepers of Knowledge engages in an analysis of those events from a perspective that makes visible the ways in which the production, storage and access of books, have been privileged, while others have been marginalised.
Examines its material as analyses of significant events in the development of libraries, books, and scholarship in the western worldEmbeds those developments in significant political, economic, social and cultural fields of particular erasTies scholarship to class structures and associated protocols in its treatment of scholarship as the generation of knowledge

The primary purpose of Pursuing Information Literacy is to inspire individual thinking and application. The book reviews important information literacy and its social significance and the application of information literacy in a number of different sectors. The future of information literacy is explored in concluding chapters.
Philosophical framework and practical approachesBeyond academia; different equationsConsistency and comfort as concept; expansion of domain

This book examines the following factors: sponsorship of research, control of the dissemination of research, effects of dominant research paradigms, financial interests of authors, publishers, and editors, role of new technologies (for example, Web 2.0).
It is widely accepted among researchers and educators that the peer review process, the reputation of the publisher and examination of the author's credentials are the gold standards for assessing the quality of research and information. However, the traditional gold standards are not sufficient, and the effective evaluation of information requires the consideration of additional factors. Controversies about positive evaluations of new medications that appear in peer-reviewed journals, the financial reports on Enron prior to the revelations that led to its collapse, and obstacles to the publication of research that does not conform to dominant paradigms are just a few examples that indicate the need for a more sophisticated and nuanced approach to evaluating information.
Each of the factors is discussed in a factual manner, supported by many examples that illustrate not only the nature of the issues but also their complexity. Practical suggestions for the evaluation of information are an integral part of the text.
Highlights frequently overlooked criteria for evaluating researchChallenges the assumption that the gold standards for evaluation are sufficientExamines the role of new technologies in evaluating and disseminating research

This book explores recent trends in human resource management practices and presents options for their application within the special context of libraries, especially academic and research libraries. It lays out a set of the most pressing HR management issues facing senior library leaders in the context of continuous organisational change in the 21st century and offers library practitioners effective tips for people management.
A practical how-to book that provides realistic and proven solutions to real-world challengesProvides examples from organizations to highlight concepts and their applicationsSummary of key points at the end of each chapter, as well as specific tips in three areas: A - Attention (things to pay attention to); R - Results (initiatives that help to achieve desired results) and T - Techniques (ways to apply the concepts presented."