Volume 54, Issue 4

Digital visibility, a term coined by the Ciber research team at UCL, argues that use/consumption in the digital environment is not simply a function of need; it is also a function of visibility or prominence. It is a concept that describes and explains the impact of menu and topic prominence on transaction log (usage) statistics. This study repeats Ciber's digital visibility study, which was concerned with a Digital Interactive Television (DiTV) health information service, but this time the subject is a UK consumer health Web site, MedicDirect, a site attracting around a thousand users and 10,000 page views a day. Specifically the paper examines the change in use that results from increasing the prominence of two health pages – the cancer menu and cardiopulmonary resuscitation page on the Web site. The study was conducted over a three-month period when the links to the two health topics were placed on the home page and then moved and changed three times. Transactional log analysis was used to monitor the changes that occurred, the key metrics employed being number of users, number of page views, number of pages viewed in a session and number of visits made. It was found that, as predicted on the basis of our earlier results, use did indeed increase as a result of improving topic visibility. The results add further support to the findings of the initial digital visibility study.

With the growth in electronic availability and distribution of scholarly journals, citation indicators of these journals may be expected to change. This study estimated how electronic publishing affects citation indicators, Impact Factors and Immediacy Indexes, from 1995 to 2003. Two citation indicators of 70 journals in education, educational research, and special education in Journal Citations Reports were analysed in this study. The result shows that Impact Factors remain essentially unchanged while Immediacy Indexes increased significantly. For all journals, 75% had their Immediacy Indexes increase drastically recently and had higher Impact Factors than average. Because more journal articles are available in electronic form, both as part of complete electronic journals and within databases of separate articles, many more scientists access and use new articles without delay than in the past. Electronic publishing can be regarded as one of the factors affecting not only citation frequencies but also citation indicators. Digital access to scholarly journals promises to bring changes in citation indicators, especially Immediacy Indexes of well-established journals in education.

This study investigated the information seeking behaviour of working journalists in Kuwait using a self-administered questionnaire. The 92 respondents were mostly male, Arabic speaking, and expatriates. In terms of the type of information, they place emphasis on fact-checking, general and background information. Information is obtained by using a wide variety of both informal and formal sources. ‘Human’ sources, Internet, and ‘press releases’ are considered high in terms of both importance and satisfaction. The availability and use of ‘in-house electronic library of stories / reports generated by their colleagues’ is not only very limited but is also not satisfying. They consider their information searching skills very important for their work and are willing to go through training if it were provided to them. Lack of time is their top ranking problem. Several recommendations are made for improving the existing situation.

The Ghetto Theresienstadt served as a façade behind which the Nazis attempted to hide the atrocities they were committing in other ghettos and concentration camps throughout Europe. As a result of Theresienstadt's unusual nature, the Nazis sanctioned certain cultural and intellectual activities in the camp. Consequently, there remains a considerable record of the interior lives and personal perspectives of Theresienstadt inmates. Through a close examination of Theresienstadt memoirs, diaries and histories, this paper explores the concept of intellectual resistance as a result of participation in some of the camp's intellectual activities – namely the library, books and reading. These activities provided prisoners with a means of keeping their minds and imaginations active and alive, allowing them to escape temporarily from the horror surrounding them, as well as providing a means of maintaining hope and strength that increased their chances of survival. As of yet, no single work in English focuses on this topic. This paper strives to fill that void and to encourage librarians to consider the power of literacy and the significance of their responsibilities as providers of knowledge, story and information, particularly in times of terror or war.

With the inauguration of institutional reforms in the second half of the nineteenth century, the classical Ottoman library system, which had served Ottoman society and the educational infrastructure successfully for many centuries became increasingly obsolete as the new type of library began to appear. Towards the end of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century complaints about the conditions of foundation libraries markedly increased. Some attempts to redress the causes for the complaints were made, but these were generally unsuccessful. By the beginning of the twentieth century, these libraries had become institutions serving researchers in the field of Islamic culture and the occasional student pursuing the classical curriculum at the Islamic colleges. This article will trace the gradual process of these libraries to obsolescence and will attempt to discover the causes.

A classification scheme reinforces the social systems that were in place at the time the system was devised, and projects, no matter how subtly or ineffectively, the social, moral and intellectual values of that system. The Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) scheme is the most widely used library classification scheme in the world today; it is based on the shape of the 19 th century North American academic world, and shows a distinct bias no longer acceptable for libraries of the 21 st century. Non-Western languages and literatures are given short shrift in classes 400 and 800 of the DDC. The situation of African languages and literatures is a case in point. Attempts at official and local revisions have been made, but more systemic efforts are necessary. The problem is complex and there are no easy answers. Nevertheless, national libraries should step forward to address the issue, and the new models for adapting the DDC should be investigated.