Criteria for evaluating digital libraries have been suggested in prior studies, but limited research has been done to understand users' perceptions of evaluation criteria. This study investigates users' opinions of the importance of digital library evaluation criteria. Thirty user participants, including 10 faculty members and 20 students, were recruited from five universities across the United States. They were asked to rate the importance of evaluation criteria in eight dimensions (e.g. collections, information organization, context, etc.). The results demonstrate that users care about evaluation criteria related to the use and quality of collection and services rather than the operation of digital libraries. The findings of this study are relevant to the development of user-centered digital libraries and associated evaluation frameworks through the incorporation of unique users' needs and preferences.
Server transaction logs containing complete click-through data from a digital library of primarily image-based documents were analyzed to better understand user search session behavior. One month of data was analyzed using descriptive statistics and network analysis methods. The findings reveal iterative search behaviors centered on result views and evaluation and topical areas of focus for the search sessions. The study is novel in its combined analytical techniques and use of click-through data for image collections.
In domestic university libraries, the difference between the knowledge resource collection activities on campus is depending on the size of the university, and their collection is concentrated on some types of digital resources. In recent years, the main universities in developed countries has developed actively in social openness and share activities of their knowledge resources, through the OA-based institutional repository, for the purpose of image improvement and competitiveness as a knowledge production base. This study examined ways to improve the relevant regulations in order to effectively collect and systematically manage the knowledge resources from graduate school, research institutes, center for teaching and learning, e-learning center, museum, press, a variety of campus organizations, so as to enhance the role of the library as the right manager of knowledge resources on campus. To this end, this study, considering the improvement of relevant regulations, investigates the operating situation of the library regulations of 176 universities and suggests necessary improvement methods in order to facilitate the digital legal deposit and expand its scope.
It is necessary to construct authority records in OPAC to improve the precision and the recall by organizing and connecting information systematically. Especially, the authority records are widely used in the museums, archives, art galleries, etc as well as in the libraries for work collocation and search. But KORMARC-Authority Format (KSX6006-4) could not have been revised and managed consistently reflecting international cataloging trends and revision needs of Korea libraries since it was published in 1999. Resultingly, there are only few libraries that would have constructed the authority records in OPAC in Korea, and OPAC without authority records could deteriorate the search quality. Therefore, this study would suggest the revision of KORMARC-Authority Format by investigating authority related international trends such as ICP, FRAD, RDA, VIAF and analyzing new MARC21-Authority Format applying these authority related trends. The research methods were used such as literature review, the analysis of 5 domestic libraries' authority records and VIAF records, and the group interview with librarians.
The purpose of this study is to identify the factors that influence users' intention to use mobile services in academic libraries, based on the Davis' Technology Acceptance Model. This study employed both perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use, which were core variables in TAM, and added perceived playfulness that was recently applied to many researches on mobile system acceptance intention. As external variables, ubiquitous ability, context awareness, and mobile internet self-efficacy were employed. The data was collected from 325 surveys from two academic libraries and was analyzed with SPSS 18.0 and AMOS 21.0. As a result, perceived usefulness was the most significant factor in predicting users' acceptance intention and perceived ease of use was an indirect determinant of service usage. But perceived playfulness was not significantly correlated. Ubiquitous ability among external variables had a significant effect on perceived usefulness, context awareness did on both perceived playfulness and ease of use, and mobile internet self-efficacy did on perceived ease of use. Based on the findings, this study discussed theoretical and practical implications in academic library mobile service area.
Providing reliable and high quality information sources will be one of the basic skills of librarians in the future. Therefore, this study proposed evaluation criteria for health-related information sources based on a survey of public and medical librarians. As a result, a total of 21 items were selected as evaluation items, in three groups. The first, the health information content group, had 13 evaluation items, including accuracy, recency, medical expertise, regular updates, consideration of audience, objectivity, ease of understanding, plain (non-scientific or technical) language, completeness, relevance to the topic, verifiability, citation of information sources, and specification of precautions or warnings. The second group, the health-information sources group, had 5 evaluation items including clarity of health information for achieving its purpose, clarification of the responsibility of health information, compliance to the privacy policy, fairness of health information providers, and ethics of health information providers. The third group was the health-information website design group, and featured 4 evaluation criteria: ease of access, search capabilities, website ease of use, and query-response services.
The objective of this study is to suggest a future direction for cultural programs in public libraries by literature review and the investigation of the programs in practice in Seoul Metropolitan City from various perspectives. The programs were categorized by their characteristics, such as subject, users, and managerial aspects based on the literature review. Then we investigated their rates to total number of programs in order to identify trends in years. There were two interesting points as follows: experience-centered and health education programs have been increasing in terms of the subject, and participation-oriented programs in terms of managerial aspects has also been increasing. The results led us to suggest strengthening the programs in those categories for future planning on public libraries' cultural programs.
This paper detailed the content and methods of the instructional activities of teacher-librarians in Korea. Using Kuhlthau's levels of education model as a theoretical framework, the study analyzed its data on the direct instructional activities the Korean teacher-librarians reported. The participants included four researchers in school libraries as well as the high school teacher-librarians in Seoul. Written survey were conducted for researchers and teacher-librarians respectively. The results show that there exists a gap between the theoretical emphasis on instructional activities of teacher-librarians and the practice of teacher -librarians in schools, and that the level of instructional activities has not yet advanced fully to the high levels of instructional activities. Future efforts should be made on developing legal as well as educational systems to support advancing the instructional levels of teacher-librarians. Integrating information literacy curricula into the national-level curriculum for public education could be a good example.
The purpose of this study is to analyze and identify the characteristics in the current library classification research, and to provide suggestions for the future in this area. This study covers the published studies in library classification from 2004 to 2013. They include the research on Korean Decimal Classification (KDC), Dewey Decimal Classification and others. The results show that the main purpose in those studies is to improve current KDC system. A suggestion is provided in this study to concentrate on specific classification systems for school libraries and small libraries, for digital collections.
This study investigated organizational changes in technical services of university libraries and analysed librarians' perception on the changes of technical service department by the survey to 32 technical service librarians. It also identified several factors that have changed work environment of technical departments such as the shared cataloging and outsourcing, and electronic resources in various formats and creation of metadata for these resources. Most librarians agreed that university libraries have to foster technical librarians' professioanal development to cope with emerging changes of technical services. They also recognized that the integration of traditional cataloging and metadata management is an important issue of orgranizational changes. Contrary to librarians' perception, technical service librarians were not fully awared of the procedure of metadata related works in other departments. Furthermore metadata creation and management were also conducted in several departments of libraries without proper control.
The research analyzes the factors that influence the job satisfaction of library volunteers for the disabled. Based on comparable literature review, this research extracts comprehensive factors that affect job satisfaction. The research found that job satisfaction depended on marital status, age, education and the channel that a volunteer went through to participate in assisting the disabled. Self-motivation also influenced the job satisfaction, but altruistic motivation did not. For environmental factors, compensation, prior experience, and roles did not influence the job satisfaction. For the factors related to the awareness of the value of volunteering, overall expectation and fitness of tasks were found to be passive with job satisfaction.
The study aims to study the user perception and satisfaction on the current church library services in Korea. 100 registered attendees and 10 priests, from three different groups were randomly selected for the survey. Three groups - the one with its own library, another with a community type library, and the other without church library - were compared. A literature review and survey were executed, and the questionnaires of the survey for analysis in this research contained demographic information, usage of church library, mission and function of the church library, library space, librarians, collection, community services of the church library, and perception on the effect of the library's community service on a specific religious activity (evangelism). The analysis revealed that the satisfaction level on church library service was relatively high (3.5 point on average, 5-point Likert scale), even though the frequency of using the church library service was relatively low. The study also found that users perceived the library as a community library or archives of the church, and study rooms and reading rooms as its major functions. It reveals that religious materials were preferred as the church library collection and the service of the church library to its community was perceived as being a effective and positive factor on evangelism. Applying church library service should be considered in order to enhance the understanding on the religion and effective results of evangelism.
The study aims to identify the procedural problems of the archival reference service through Freedom of Information Act. Since FOIA enacted in 1998, there has been a rapid increase of use of government information. However, most of academic users tend to be strongly dissatisfied with the user service. The authors argue that archival reference service through FOIA substantially prevents researchers from using archival records for their research and lower researcher's visits to archival institutions. For this, the study conducted 19 in-depth interviews of academic users and analyzed how FOIA influence academic user's information behaviors based on Strauss and Corbin's grounded theory.
The purpose of this study is to analyze the intellectual structure of reading studies by using Co-Word Analysis based on the mixed weight in which the level of academic journals and the position of keywords are calculated. To achieve it, 838 academic articles relating to reading studies from KCI during the period from 2003 to 2012 were retrieved and 56 keywords were extracted. The results of clustering analysis, MDS, network analysis are that the network based on the mixed weight has a better performance in above three methods and reading studies can be divided into 4 bigger divisions and 11 subdivisions. Finally, the result of document analysis shows reading studies changes its research tendency from theoretical studies to empirical studies.
This study investigates the evaluations, preferences, and opinions of students' experiences with their academic library blog and to identify student suggestions on how to improve the utilization such blogs. For this study, the D academic library blog was selected for study, while employing survey and focus group research methods. The results include the students' subjective evaluations of the library blog's operations, suggestions on how to improve the operation, and how to stimulate the utilization of the blog. This study may provide insights on how to improve academic library blog operations with access, updates, content, and marketing strategies.
This research was conducted to measure the satisfaction level of users and the service quality of specialized libraries in the digital environment. 289 users of 24 government-funded institutes were divided into humanity/social science area and science/technology area for comparison. Using seven hypotheses, the tests were conducted between three independent variables, service quality, space quality, and information quality and one dependent variable, user satisfaction. It was concluded that the competence and quality of the librarian, library homepage, and quality of information are most critical for user satisfaction. Suggestions are made: an improvement in the service quality and specialization of the librarian's skills, a need for librarian's courtesy education, a provision of differentiated and specialized quality of information, an easy access to the library homepage, and supports on the contents and information search.
This study aims to make suggestions on how to effectively provide continuing education for librarians in privatized public libraries. For this end, the study examined concepts and importance of continuing education. It then investigated a current status of education/training procedures provided by Librarian Training Division of the National Library of Korea, and continuing education programs for public librarians implemented by primary regional libraries. It also analyzed continuing education programs of library associations in the U.S. and the U.K. Based on these analyses, the study conducted a survey for a sample of librarians in privatized public libraries, identified problems of continuing education for them, and made recommendations for its improvement.
This study investigates the importance of records management for local festivals by focusing on the Chunhyang Festival, one of Korea's oldest regional festival still in existence. This study analyzes the current conditions of records management to indicate problems and offer measures of importance. The results of this study showed the following problems. First, the absence of public-private partnerships and the lack of a stable commission. Second, the absence of ordinances for festival public records management. Third, the absence of systematic document management. Finally, absence of an expert records researcher and the absence of a records archive. Therefore, the study floated for an overall management method for the Chunhyang Festival records.