Volume 52, Issue 1

Collective memory is an important feature of group identity. The collective memory, or common history of a group, is in many cases represented by its cultural institutions, including libraries. During the twentieth century, many instances of genocide, or attacks on groups, occurred. This continues today. These attacks often include aggression against the cultural institutions which, as evidence of a separate cultural identity, are seen to give political legitimacy to the group under attack. This article sees the many instances of premeditated attacks on libraries as integral parts of genocidal campaigns. Examples from the Second World War are explored, as are events in the former Yugoslavia. The role librarians have played in these examples is discussed and practical ways in which librarians and the international library community can combat such attacks are identified. Finally, it is argued that the most effective way to prevent attacks on libraries is the promotion of pluralism and respect for the cultural heritage of others. Libraries can promote pluralism through their collections, their organisation, and their approach to information. In educating their users to respect other cultures, libraries contribute to safeguarding the cultural heritage of those represented by their collections.

Using questionnaire data from digital television subscribers, links are established between the information sources used and the characteristics and interests of users. The research establishes that groupings can be made and identifies user groups most likely to use each source type. Four groups of users are identified and described: active traditional information users, passive traditional information users, electronic isolated users and electronic sociable users. The research forms part of an ongoing research project, which has, as part of its aim, the task of identifying particular users with the information sources that may be most appropriate for them.

The year 2001 will be known for many destructive and highly visible public tragedies. However within the librarian discourse, it will be remembered for the controversies encircling the publication of Nicholson Baker's Double Fold . This article assesses the rationale, direction and scope of this book and resultant debate, showing what it reveals about libraries, librarians and the distinctions between information and knowledge. Yet the article also suggests that Baker did not extend his case for preservation far enough: to the realm of popular memory, popular culture and digital ephemera. Without attention to these matters, libraries will remain neglected cemeteries: the passionless cranium of the culture.

Fifteen sets of external descriptions of Web pages were examined for common phrases, general syntactic structure and content. For the seven largest sets, the value of meta tag descriptions and keywords, the first 200 characters of the body and text marked with common HTML tags as extracts helpful for writing external descriptions was estimated by applying two measures: density of external description words and density of two-word external description phrases. Syntactic patterns were found to vary between sets, with larger sets tending to be more internally consistent. Generally, titles showed the highest match densities (means between 50.6% and 69.4% for words and between 30.1% and 61.3% for phrases); match densities were also generally high for meta tag descriptions and for the first 200 words of the body, and low for text tagged A, with mixed results for keywords and for text tagged B, CENTER, or FONT.

There is a growing need for practical solutions to provide flexible access to digital documents in a structured form on the Web. The existing library classification schemes serve as good bases for achieving this goal. This paper presents a brief review of the various methods applied in automatic classification. It focuses on the main activities fulfilled within various research projects to make possible the effective automatic indexing and classification of Web sources. It describes the approaches taken in the Nordic WAIS/WWW; DESIRE II – Engineering Electronic Library System (EELS); GERHARD; and SCORPION projects. Artificial neural networks and artificial intelligence show great potential.