Volume 51, Issue 1

Previous articles have dealt with various aspects of the Ottoman library system including the catalogues of the collections. However, since their publication, new material has come to light and this is now the opportune moment to review the development of cataloguing, from the foundation of the first Ottoman libraries to the present century. In this article, Turkish library catalogues and cataloguing shall be dealt with in three distinct periods. The first period covers the history of cataloguing from the very beginning to the second half of the 19 th century, dealing in particular with three of the earliest catalogues, dating from the 16 th century. The second period deals with the attempts to prepare union catalogues of the collections in the libraries of Istanbul, together with the appearance of the first printed catalogues for individual libraries. The third is the Republican period, covering the seven decades from 1923 to the present day.

More and more news outlets are opening up on the World Wide Web. As newspapers in the UK and around the world join broadcasters such as CNN and the BBC, and news agencies (e.g. AP, Reuters), there is much discussion about the particular features of an online news service that set it apart from its print equivalent. This concentration on the migration of the news content from one medium to another has not, however, been accompanied by the same concern for the migration of the reader. This paper describes one small-scale experiment observing users both freely negotiating The Times Web site and engaged in specified tasks that examined navigational and other access/retrieval issues. Findings indicate that the much trumpeted “value-added” element of newspaper Web editions – such as reference and archive services – were not expected or particularly admired by readers, who simply required a comprehensive hard news service. Navigational difficulties, occasioned by poor signposting, multiple menu bars, unstructured contents lists and complicated organisation and layout, proved to be issues shaping user opinion far more than actual site content.

The library science community has long been discussing the important issue of university library standards. Differences in education systems, economic development and culture make a unified set of standards for all countries impractical. This paper proposes a methodology for establishing standards based on existing libraries. A regression analysis is conducted to find the relationship between each of the three major resources of the library – collections, personnel and buildings – and the university size in terms of the number of students and faculty. The standards are derived from the regression lines. The data of the twenty-four university libraries in Taiwan reveal that the power function has the best explanatory power for all the three resources. The exponents of the power function are 0.8349, 0.5756, and 0.8703 for collections, personnel and buildings, respectively. All these values are smaller than 1, a sign of decreasing returns. Compared to the standards of the Association of College and Research Libraries, this set of standards is lower in collections and personnel, but similar in buildings. Since the education system, economic development, culture and other factors of a country are taken into account implicitly, empirical standards are more realistic and are achievable by the university libraries. The methodology developed in this study can be applied to establish standards for the university libraries of other countries.

This study analyses the ability of Spanish library and information science graduates to meet the needs of the companies and institutions employing them. The survey focused on the employability of Carlos III University of Madrid Documentation Department BA students and graduates. Students graduating between 1996 and 1999 were surveyed. Information was also collected from employers approaching the placement office run by the Carlos III University of Madrid's Professional Guidance and Planning Service (SOPP). These employers were surveyed to obtain some insight into how satisfactorily newly hired employees performed. The results are expressed in percentages and discussed in comparison to the results obtained in prior surveys conducted for the same purpose.

The countries of Anglophone Africa, consisting of former British colonies and protectorates, almost all provide public library facilities in the form of national library services (also including traditional national library facilities). The idea is first found in Zimbabwe (then Southern Rhodesia) in 1928. Evelyn Evans developed it fully in Ghana as the first Chief Librarian of the Gold Coast Library Board in 1950. The services to the public closely followed the example of the British county libraries. The idea was influential, first in West Africa, then in other parts of the continent. William Serwadda, Director of the Uganda National Library Service (1964–66) criticised it, without success, on the grounds that it did not reflect the needs of African people. Since the 1970s the national library services have failed to attract significant numbers of users and have mostly stagnated from lack of funds. Critics such as Kingo Mchombu have taken up Serwadda's theme and there has been experimentation throughout Africa with informal community-based services concentrating on the dissemination of information. It is argued that the national library services need to adopt a fresh approach based on this experimentation so as to provide effective facilities for their potential users.

The concept of a society based on information and knowledge is becoming the norm in every country, including Spain. The need to have well-designed information policies that allow us to come to terms with the new upsurge of media, technology and services that has taken place in our society is discussed first. Information policies required by these changes in society have been implemented in Spain and are described in relation to the new challenges of the “Society of Knowledge.” Similarly, the background and past efforts made in the field of information policy in Spain are analysed, along with the latest government projects that comprise an attempt to get this country to form part of the “Information Society” with the help of the supra-national information policy of the European Union.