Editorial
Article Type: Editorial From: Library Review, Volume 62, Issue 6/7
The penultimate issue for 2013 begins with a highly original study, which fills a gap in the literature of African library administration, but is also of wider value to practicing librarians and researchers as well as individuals involved with international development projects. Many countries are coping currently with what can be categorised as the “brain drain”, that is, an exodus of indigenous professionals seeking employment opportunities elsewhere, usually for financial reasons. The first paper, produced by two researchers based in the USA, is one of the first studies to assess the impact of this phenomenon on the provision of academic library services, using Anglophone Africa as a case. The authors are especially concerned to monitor the effect of return programmes in ameliorating and or reversing this trend, concluding that academic libraries in English-speaking Africa offer a promising environment to returnees.
Changing continents, Nazim and Mukherjee identify and evaluate the essential knowledge management competences required to deliver effective academic library services in India.
The remaining five papers are all concerned with aspects of connectivity and communication. Hamade reports his study of Kuwaiti students’ usage and perception of social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, with a view to establishing the impact of changing information seeking behaviours on individual information needs and by extension, information service provision. Understanding and mapping such behaviour enables information professionals to serve their users more effectively, and to identify and explore more relevant methods to market and communicate their service offer.
Bhat examines web site usage in an interesting and highly focused evaluation of Indian newspaper web sites in terms of their performance on the web using Alexa databank. The Alexa indexes include traffic rank, pages viewed, speed, links,bounce percentage, time on site, search percentage, together with numbers of Indian and overseas users. Interestingly, there seemed to be little correlation between high traffic and high performance measured against these attributes; low traffic sites often performed comparatively better on many of the indexes.
In my last editorial I explored the theme of open access and its relationship to knowledge exchange and scholarly communication. In the sixth paper in this issue, Sedighi investigates interdisciplinary relations in certain high-priority fields of science and technology, based on ISI data. In an applied study using scientometric, citation analysis and network analysis methods, he examines the scholarly output of Iranian researchers in five disciplines indexed in the web of science database. He concludes that whilst analysing and mapping interdisciplinary relations in a scientific field may provide useful information regarding connectivity and interdependence amongst disciplines, overall, the results showed that the use of a bibliographic method alone is insufficient to map all aspects of interdisciplinarity in the scientific field. To achieve a true picture, a suite of different analytical methods such as citation analysis,co-authorship analysis and bibliographic coupling is necessary.
Amara Malik and Khalid Mahmood of the University of the Punjab explore the infrastructure needed to supply the right information, at the right time, in the right format via digital reference services in university libraries, in a context where digital transformation has been relatively slow. As they observe,the pace of such transformation differs markedly in differing countries, with the rate of adoption in the Punjab being “comparatively very slow”,despite government efforts to develop the ICT infrastructure required to support and promote education and a research culture. Their study examines the current infrastructure and makes recommendations for the future.
Finally, in contrast, Bonilla-Calero’s paper explores elements of good practice for institutional repositories, through an examination of Strathprints at the University of Strathclyde, self-evidently a much more advanced environment in terms of technological infrastructure. The difference between these latter two experiences is somewhat sobering, but both have their challenges to face.
The main conference season for the library and information world is almost upon us. I will be out and about during the next few months, attending and sometimes speaking at a variety of conferences. If any of you plan to be at any of this year’s conferences and see my name on the attendance list, please do come along and say hello. Alternatively, if there is an Emerald stand, do leave me a message and I will get back to you. I am more than happy to explore ideas for future papers, or to listen to your views on the journal and any ideas for future issues.
Judith Broady-Preston
