Seeking meaning: A process approach to library and information services

The paper provides the results of the first phase of the research project Trust and Authority in Scholarly Communications: The Periphery of World Scholarship in the Digital Era conducted in Malaysia. The objective of the study is to examine the changing behaviours and attitudes of academic researchers in today’s scholarly digital environment, with respect to how they determine authority and trustworthiness in the sources they use, cite, and publish in. This phase utilised focus groups to address the research objective. Five focus groups were held during the period of December 2013 to April 2014 in three universities in Kuala Lumpur. In all a total of 48 researchers attended the focus groups, comprising 21 scientists and 27 social scientists. Findings indicate that peer-reviewed journals are still the central to the authors, however they seem to have more freedom in relation to journals they read and cite, compared to publish. Overall, authors view that scholarly resources that are current, relevant, authored by credential scholars, peer-reviewed, having credible reference lists, published by reputable journals, and having online presence are fit for scholarly utilisation. The extent to which authors are prepared to believe that the scholarly information source and channel are trustworthy for publication rely on it in view of its impact, indexation status, reputation, peers’ recommendation, accessibility and visibility, and authority’s approval. New forms of communication channels such as social media or new journal models are not much used in formal scholarly communication. The focus groups provided the direction for questionnaires and interviews that would follow.The paper also discusses the implication of the findings to academic librarians towards delivering the right services to meet the needs of the scholarly community.

https://mjlis.um.edu.my/article/download/7819/5375

Trust and authority in the periphery of world scholarly communication: A Malaysian focus group study

Purpose: This paper considers the concept of an information literate school community (ILSC) and approaches to information literacy instruction appropriate to secondary schools in Malaysia.

Methodology: The paper examines the literature to determine the conditions that need to be in place in order to create an ILSC, and benchmarks for determining how well a school is progressing towards an ILSC. Different approaches to IL education are outlined and a case study of project based learning in the history curriculum is highlighted.

Findings: The project based learning approach in the history curriculum for 13-15 year olds does not ensure good information literacy skills if library instruction is not embedded. A digital library of the students’ history projects is being developed to encourage improvements in students’ work.

Originality: This paper offers an insight into how Malaysian schools approach the task of developing student information literacy and their progress towards becoming ILSC.

Building an information literate school community: approaches to inculcate information literacy in secondary school students

Presents the result of the calculated IS! equivalent Impact Factor, Relative Diffusion Factor (RDF), and Journal Diffusion Factor (JDF) for articles published in the Medical Journal of Malaysia (MJM) between the years 2004 and 2008 in both their synchronous and diachronous versions. The publication data are collected from MyAis (Malaysian Abstracting & Indexing system) while the citation data are collected from Google Scholar. The values of the synchronous JDF ranges from 0.057 - 0.14 while the diachronous JDF ranges from 0.46 - 1.98. The high diachronous JDF is explained by a relatively high number of different citing journals against the number of publications. This implies that the results of diachronous JDF is influenced by the numbers of publications and a good comparison may be one of which the subject of analysis have similar number of publications and citations period. The yearly values of the synchronous RDF vary in the range of 0.66 - 1.00 while diachronous RDF ranges from 0.62 - 0.88. The result shows that diachronous RDF is negatively correlated with the number of citations, resulting in a low RDF value for highly cited publication years. What this implies in practice is that the diffusion factors can be calculated for every additional year at any journal level of analysis. This study demonstrates that these indicators are valuable tools that help to show development of journals as it changes through time.

Measuring the influence of a journal using impact and diffusion factors

This paper describes the digital library of historical resources, a research project which involves building a testbed for the purpose of developing and testing new collaborative digital library functionality and presents an initial analysis of the digital library's public use on the web. The digital library is modeled to focus on serving secondary students information needs in conducting history projects. As such, in the implementation of the digital library, the use of online resources would be an integral part of history project based learning activities. Students should be enabled to access digital resources, create and publish their own documents in the digital library and share them with others. As a testbed system, the collaborative digital library known as CoreDev has demonstrated its capabilities in serving an educational community as has been reflected by the positive feedback on the functional requirements from 44 users. Over 75% of the respondents in the user survey considered themselves capable of using the digital library easily. The beta tester demographics (n = 105) indicate that the digital library is reaching its target communities.

Collaborative digital library of historical resources: Evaluation of first users

Project-based teaching methods are increasingly used in Malaysian secondary school classrooms with the expectations that students will be engaged by the chance to use different information sources creatively and will especially benefit from the use of various presentation types to improve learning. In project-based learning (PBL) students exhibit information literacy (IL) skills: they formulate authentic, meaningful questions; plan tasks; gather resources and information; evaluate information; collaborate with others; and report findings. This paper examines the affordances that a collaborative digital library (CDL) can bring to bear on supporting IL practices in the digital information environment (DIGIE). The CDL supports solitary information seeking, interaction among users as well as working with information. The collaborative environment provides the platform for the students to participate in e-publishing of reports and digital resources that can be shared by others. It also allows students to organize their project reports in various presentation styles, cite the references they use in the appropriate format as well as submit the report and other resources in various formats, in order to create materials for publication in the digital library. The CDL places much of the responsibility for managing the digital library workflow into the hands of students, teachers and teacher librarians. Student responsibilities include the application of metadata, as well as conventional IL skills such as ascertaining information resource provenance and investigating intellectual property rights before depositing digital resources within the library. Findings regarding studentsâ€™ and teachersâ€™ reception of the digital library are encouraging.

Supporting Information Literacy Practices In Digital Information Environment: An Approach Using A Collaborative Digital Library For School Projects

Malaysian scientific performance in the Web of Science: 2001-2010.

This paper describes the digital library of historical resources, a research project which involves building a testbed for the purpose of developing and testing new collaborative digital library functionality and presents an initial analysis of the digital libraryâ€™s public use on the web. The digital library is modeled to focus on serving secondary students information needs in conducting history projects. As such, in the implementation of the digital library, the use of online resources would be an integral part of history project-based learning activities. Students should be enabled to access digital resources, create and publish their own documents in the digital library and share them with others. As a testbed system, the collaborative digital library known as CoreDev has demonstrated its capabilities in serving an educational community as has been reflected by the positive feedback on the functional requirements from 44 users. Over 75% of the respondents in the user survey considered themselves capable of using the digital library easily. The beta tester demographics (n = 105) indicate that the digital library is reaching its target communities.

Digital Library of Historical Resources:Evaluation of First Users

This paper illustrates the possibility of using an Enterprise Architecture as an instrument for requirements analysis and evaluation in digital library development. The collaborative digital library has been conceived to support secondary school students information needs in conducting school-based projects. The researchers examine the needs of digital library stakeholders and how a collaborative digital library might be designed to meet these needs. Zachman Framework for Enterprise Architecture was used as the approach to investigate the user requirements and define the digital library organisation, resources, processes, technology and information flows. In applying Zachman Framework and to holistically control the study, the case study approach and multiple data collection techniques were adopted. Information obtained from these data gathering techniques helps to populate the requirements of the top three layers (18 cells) in Zachman Framework to ascertain the design details of the digital libraryâ€™s scope, business and system model. The framework abstracts the characteristics and features of the digital library based on six dimensons, Motivation, Data, People, Process, Place and Time, and explains their structures and processes from the perspectives of the planner, owner and designer of the digital library. This paper provides the detailed mapping between the first three layers of the Zachman cells and the dimensions utilized in formulating the requirements and design of the collaborative digital library. It consists of the various elements that a digital library should provide for as delineated in several frameworks being conceptualized and described in digital library research since 1995 for the design, development, and evaluation of digital libraries. Instead of listing the elements as requirements, the researchers embed the requirement process and development in an architectural framework, thus presenting it more systematically taking into account the six digital library dimensions mentioned earlier

Zainab A.N.

Papers

Supporting Information Literacy Practices In Digital Information Environment: An Approach Using A Collaborative Digital Library For School Projects

Malaysian scientific performance in the Web of Science: 2001-2010.

Digital Library of Historical Resources:Evaluation of First Users

The Application of Zachman Framework in Architecting a Collaborative Digital Library