Volume 53, Issue 4

The intrusion of the extreme right-wing National Front party into French public libraries in the 1990s mobilized librarians to confront political interference and to defend the democratic values inherent in libraries. This paper reviews the actions of the extreme right in imposing their political ideology on library acquisitions and services, and the reactions they provoked. Their intervention called into question the mission of public libraries, political autonomy, acquisitions policies and practices, and the role of the librarian. French librarians, the nation, and ultimately the international community were alerted to the National Front's subversion of libraries to a political agenda. These incidents triggered practical and philosophical responses as librarians developed strategies to combat political interference, confronted issues of censorship and the challenge of developing pluralistic collections, and asserted the librarian's role in safeguarding democratic principles. The response of library associations in France is also discussed.

The past few years have seen an enormous growth in the number of journals that libraries can access electronically. This is a well-researched and well-documented phenomenon, but no studies have compared the actual number of electronic journals a library can access, particularly in comparison with the total number of journals they receive through all sources, including print. The growth of serials management companies suggests the possibility of this research. Through analysis of resources tracked by Serials Solutions, Inc., one can get a firm grasp on how many electronic journals a library is tracking, in comparison with the number of print or microfilm titles they have. This article presents the first comprehensive analysis of how many journals public and various types of academic libraries can access electronically, rather than in print. While highlighting the incredible increase in access to information electronically, it also identifies the limitations of the current research, particularly regarding libraries' print holdings. As data collection improves, future research will be more accurate, and will provide a basis for studying both the growth of electronic access to journals and the expected reduction in print access to journals.

The Web has become an important tool for scholars to publicise their activities and disseminate their findings. In the information age, those who do not use it risk being bypassed. In this paper we introduce a statistical technique to assess the extent to which the broad spectrum of research areas are visible online in UK universities. Five broad subject categories are used for research, and inlink counts are used as indicators of online visibility or impact. The approach is designed to give more complete subject coverage than previous studies and to avoid the conceptual difficulties of a page classification approach, although one is used for triangulation. The results suggest that Science and Engineering dominate university Web presences, but with Humanities and Arts also achieving a high presence relative to its size, showing that high Web impact does not have to be restricted to the sciences. Research funding bodies should now consider whether action needs to be taken to ensure that opportunities are not being missed in the lower Web impact areas.

In accordance with a decree issued by the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research in Algeria in August 2000, an electronic copy of every Master's and PhD thesis defended in all academic institutions must be deposited at the CERIST Research Centre. Deposit is a condition for getting the diploma. CERIST is then entrusted with the mission to build a database of Algerian theses and to update the national inventory of current theses and research. However a serious problem of archiving and preserving these Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) has emerged. From December 2001 to November 2002 a great number of ETDs has been deposited and constitutes a set of more than 1000 floppy disks and 100 CD-ROMs. What guarantees that these digital materials deposited by students are preserved and safeguarded? What guarantees that the content of these materials are preserved and accessible at any time regardless of machine, operating system and software. This paper explores the problem of the long-term conservation and preservation of electronic theses in the Algerian context, and shows how international recognised standards and techniques for setting up and organising the local ETD's archives may be applied.

This paper identifies trends in the content of home pages for Web sites of LIS Schools. Out of the 94 LIS School Web sites on a list maintained by the Internet Training and Consulting Services (ITCS), only 62 sites were working and showed no errors. All 62 Web sites were downloaded in a one-month period (May 2002) using the Microsoft Excel spreadsheet program, and the data collected from each home page was tabulated. The most common elements were then incorporated into a model home page that visually shows the predominant content on this type of Web site.

The public is rapidly being furnished with digital health information of all kinds and on a wide and expanding range of platforms – kiosk, Web, digital interactive television and mobile device. Along with different platforms are different ways of providing information: text, graphics, audio records as well as two-way communication and video. This paper examines one of the very first attempts to provide the general public with health information and advice via a video on demand (VODs) service, downloadable from a digital interactive television (DiTV). This was the NHS Direct service on the HomeChoice channel available to cable TV-on-demand subscribers in the London area. The authors analyse questionnaire and records of actual video use to build up a picture of the impact the service has. Reported here are the initial results of a video on demand service. Data on users, use, satisfaction and the value of the service was investigated using a combination of log analysis and questionnaire survey methods.

In aggregating the wide range of resources and services provided by the university libraries to produce a single composite index for comparison, two types of weights representing the relative importance of the criteria have been discussed in the literature. One is a priori weights assigned by the experts in a subjective manner before the scores for the criteria are measured. The other is a posteriori weights determined objectively from the scores measured for the criteria. Taking into account the opinion of experts, this paper proposes an a posteriori approach based on the concept of least squares to compare university libraries. Since the characteristics of the libraries as revealed by their performance scores on each criterion have been considered in calculating the composite indices for comparison, the results are more representative and are thus more acceptable to the libraries being compared. To illustrate this approach, university libraries in Taiwan are ranked using the proposed approach. The composite indices calculated from this approach are greater and more concentrated than those calculated from the a priori approach. Psychologically, this is very attractive to the libraries being ranked, although most libraries have similar ranks determined from these two approaches.