Volume 70, Issue 4

Digitization of archival materials has gained global popularity as both practice in cultural heritage institutions and a scholarly topic. However, ethical issues involved in digitization, especially the challenges brought by cross-cultural archival digitization practices, have been only weakly explored. In the domain of Asian Studies librarianship in the United States, digitizing archive materials acquired from Asian countries in academic and research libraries has facilitated Asian Studies research, but also brought up ethical concerns of inappropriately translating the original culture for new audiences. This paper treats digitization as a translational device bridging cultural contexts, public audiences, and personal accounts, as well as openness and privacy. Focusing on the unique open-access digital archival collection The Chinese Marriage Documents (1909–1997) at the University of Pittsburgh as a case study, I examine crucial cross-cultural ethics involved in the digitization process and discuss best practices to digitize and disseminate culturally sensitive archives ethically.

With the rapid development of information technology and mobile Internet access, social media content has become extremely abundant and open, and users have become heavily dependent on social reading. As a result, users’ reading motivation has greatly changed from traditional reading to digital reading to social reading. Exploring the potential effects of social reading can contribute to providing strategies to accurately target high-quality reading content to help promote reading with social media. Drawing upon the use and gratifications theory and reading motivation scales, the current study examines the effectiveness of reading motivation to explore in depth the influencing mechanism of users’ reading on social media. Structural equation modeling is employed to empirically test the impact factor model. The results indicate that social media users’ reading motivation mainly includes entertainment, self-presentation, information acquisition, social promotion, and social interaction. Regarding the overall contribution, social motivation is the most important factor in social media reading activities, followed by intrinsic reading motivation and information reading motivation. The findings and their implications are discussed to provide suggestions for social media operators promoting high-quality reading.

Public libraries exist to serve the information needs of communities, meaning their services need to be reflective of those served communities. However, the literature points to under-usage of libraries among indigenous communities in South Africa, and suggests that the perceived irrelevance of libraries could be a contributing factor. The argument made in this article is for the involvement of communities in planning and implementing services, to enhance awareness, relevance and use of libraries. Such involvement would also provide a space for communities to contribute content based on their indigenous knowledge. In this qualitative multiple case study of purposively selected provincial library services in South Africa, data were collected using semi-structured interviews with library heads. The data were coded and categorised according to themes derived from the stated research questions. The findings show a disjuncture between the interpretation and application of the concept of community involvement – a misalignment that has a negative impact on the ability of libraries to provide inclusive services. A framework for community involvement is suggested as a way of enhancing the synergy between community information needs and public library service provision. The proposed framework identifies indigenous communities, libraries and archival institutions as key stakeholders in harnessing indigenous knowledge. It is recommended that a similar study be conducted with community librarians where the nuances of communities can be unveiled, given that the current participants were heads of library services.

Children’s books involve a large number of topics. Research on them has been paid much attention to by both scholars and practitioners. However, the existing achievements do not focus on China, which is the fastest growing market for children’s books in the world. Studies using quantitative analysis are low in number, especially on the intellectual structure, evolution patterns, and development trends of topics of children’s bestsellers in China. Dangdang.com, the biggest Chinese online bookstore, was chosen as a data source to obtain children’s bestsellers, and topic words in them were extracted from brief introductions. With the aid of co-occurrence theory and tools of social network analysis and visualization, the distribution, correlation structures, and evolution patterns of topics were revealed and visualized. This study shows that topics of Chinese children’s bestsellers are broad and relatively concentrated, but their distribution is unbalanced. There are four distinguished topic communities ( Living , Animal , World , and Child ) in terms of centrality and maturity, and they all establish their individual systems and tend to be mature. The evolution of these communities tends to be stable with powerful continuity.

The current research aimed to identify and prioritize the main dimensions underlying the concept of electronic readiness (e-readiness) in university libraries. A mixed exploratory method was used as the research methodology including documentary and survey methods. The literature coding process was confirmed by two different researchers in related fields, which resulted in a conceptual framework including 66 indicators, 12 components and four main dimensions of human resources, electronic infrastructures, networked programs and services, and enablers of the network world. To assess the indicators, a reliable and validated questionnaire derived from the framework was administrated among 221 participants including faculty members in related fields in Iran. By identifying the reliable items using a one-sample t -test, a refined AHP version of the initial questionnaire was also administrated among a set of 20 managers of university libraries located at Tehran city. Findings confirmed the consistency comparison for different matrices, which then resulted in satisfactory and reliable relevance for all components. Findings also showed that the dimensions network programs and services, human resources, electronic infrastructures and enablers of the networked world had the standard relevance respectively. The final framework and its priorities provide library managers and policymakers in higher education with a list of indicators and considerations for appraisal purposes.

While storytime programs for preschool children are offered in nearly all public libraries in the United States, little is known about why adults choose to bring children to participate. This survey study gathered information from 346 parents and caregivers who attended storytime programs at 35 public libraries in three states. Parents and caregivers indicated child enjoyment of hearing stories and participating in activities and the opportunity for children to interact as the primary reasons for attending; however, differences in motivation to attend were noted by community density, relationship to the child, educational level of the adult, and length of attendance. In addition to identifying those aspects of storytimes that resonate most for children and building upon them, librarians should integrate cooperative activities that facilitate interaction. Further, librarians should take stock of their own contexts and modify programs to best address the needs of their specific community.

This study investigates the customers’ perceptions on three traditional dimensions of the perceived library service quality (library personnel; library resources and user services; and facilities and equipment), customer satisfaction, and customer loyalty of the public library users. Survey data using simplified questionnaires were analyzed which were collected from 1015 users of public libraries in 2015 and 2019 respectively in South Korea. The results show that they were generally satisfied with public library services and want to visit them again and/or recommend them to others based on the good perceptions on the public library service quality, because the means of each variable on a Likert 5-point scale was fairly high: customer satisfaction 3.85, customer loyalty 4.12, and perceived service quality 3.80 (library personnel 3.80, library resources and user services 3.81, and facilities and equipment 3.79). Each of three dimensions of perceived service quality had statistically significant positive impacts both on customer satisfaction and on the loyalty of the users, and that customer satisfaction had statistically significant positive impacts on customer loyalty. Different groups by gender, age, education, and occupation show the mean differences in customer loyalty. This article suggests research and managerial implications and limitations of the study.