The Public Library in an Aging Society

This chapter describes the present conditions of our aging society, with a particular focus on Japan as a typical example of such a society. In Japan, one in every four individuals is over 65 years of age, and one in eight is over 75 years of age. Further, based on this demographic change to an older population, this chapter discusses a new library service designed to enhance the lives of elderly citizens. The authors explore this new service from the viewpoint of lifelong learning, utilizing the results of recent government surveys and some case studies, such as those done at the Izumo City Hikawa Library and the Akita Prefectural Library in Japan. Although the elderly have been placed within the category of “disabled library patrons,” in recent years, it has become more common to consider the elderly, as a whole, as an individual service category. We should, in the near future, pay more attention to supporting elderly citizens at public libraries to engage them in the development and maintenance of their own communities.

What’s Past is Prologue

This chapter gives a comprehensive review of Taiwan’s Digital Archives Program, built on a national scale over the past 15 years. Currently more than 100 libraries, archives, museums, academic institutions, and government agencies are involved, and the program has created more than 5 million digital objects as well as more than 700 databases and Websites. This chapter investigates the goals and strategies of the program, probing into research and development, important achievements, values, lessons, and challenges in 6 aspects, including digital contents, digital technology, metadata interoperability, applications, industrialization development, and international cooperation. Although this national program was officially terminated at the end of 2012, the accumulation of digital contents, core technologies, and digital infrastructure over its lifespan makes it certain that one can look forward to its continuing impact upon open data, digital humanities, and sustainable digital archives.

A New Research Agenda on Mass Communication, Social Informatics, and Children’s Literature in US

The rapid development of online environments presents challenges to researchers and scholars in various disciplines; an inter-disciplinary collaboration is needed to understand related societal phenomena in the digital age. The purpose of this chapter is to establish a research framework consisting of mass communication, social informatics, and children’s literature regarding children and their racial perceptions. The uniqueness of this approach is to apply the findings of online readers’ comments on a new story to a particular subject area, children’s literature, in which the authors examine how societal issues are illustrated in popular books. Within this framework, the authors identify three research areas: social awareness through the communication process, social perception through the analysis of social informatics, and social adoption through illustrations in the children’s books.

Exploring Workplace Experiences of Information Literacy through Environmental Scanning Process

Information Literacy (IL), as a key component of education for decades, has been underemphasized at the workplace. This chapter reports on a study aimed to explore workplace experiences of IL through the environmental scanning process adopted by the travel industry in Singapore. Some 42 travel agent companies responded to the survey, and 13 employees, representing various functional units and hierarchical levels, participated in the follow up interviews after the survey. It was found that IL skills had significant influence on the quality of information for decision-making. Senior Managers were satisfied with their employees’ overall level of IL skills. However, many problems still surfaced during the environmental scanning process, such as inability to find the needed information, overreliance on habitual information sources, and improper storage of information.

Informed Democracy

This chapter presents the preliminary findings of a qualitative study exploring people’s information experiences during the 2012 Queensland State election in Australia. Six residents of South East Queensland who were eligible to vote in the state election participated in a semi-structured interview. The interviews revealed five themes that depict participants’ information experience during the election: information sources, information flow, personal politics, party politics, and sense making. Together these themes represent what is experienced as information, how information is experienced, as well as contextual aspects that were unique to voting in an election. The study outlined here is one in an emerging area of enquiry that has explored information experience as a research object. This study has revealed that people’s information experiences are rich, complex, and dynamic, and that information experience as a construct of scholarly inquiry provides deep insights into the ways in which people relate to their information worlds. More studies exploring information experience within different contexts are needed to help develop our theoretical understanding of this important and emerging construct.

Trends in LIS Education and Research in Pakistan

This chapter provides an overview of the development of formal Library and Information Science (LIS) education and research programs in Pakistan. It analyzes the trends in scholarly literature publishing while identifying the areas of LIS research addressed by Pakistani authors. It also discusses the challenges faced in LIS education and highlights the milestones of LIS education and research history in the country.

Information Architecture

This chapter analyzes the definition, origins, and evolution of Information Architecture (IA), discusses IA principles, the need to understand IA, the problems that can be solved by IA, and IA in practice. It also discusses the characteristic patterns of IA to comprehensively understand IA from five aspects, such as core concepts, research objects, disciplinary viewpoint, effects, and the human’s role in IA. In terms of implementing IA, the chapter analyzes two guiding theoretic principles and the common process of IA and summarizes and concludes with tools, methods, and measures of IA.

Philanthropy, Partnerships, and Corporate Social Responsibility in Academic Libraries

Philanthropy, partnerships, and corporate social responsibility are not new forms of collaborations between businesses and the broader community. In Indonesia, these schemes have supported both individuals and institutions for more than a decade. This chapter examines a possible role to be played by institutional, corporate, and foundational partnerships in providing additional facilities, resources, and activities within an academic library in Indonesia. Using the “corners” set up in the main library at Universitas Gadjah Mada (UGM) as a case study, the chapter outlines the contributions made to a vibrant academic institution and its broader community at the regional, national, and international levels through these methods. Understanding how philanthropy, foundations, and corporate social responsibility implemented in a mutual and practical way in an academic institution contributes to a new model of support for the public sector using a partnership scheme that involves the interaction of public, private, and civil sectors.

Perceptions and Viability of Launching LIS e-learning Programs in Developing Countries

E-Learning is still relatively uncommon in developing countries, but there is growing interest. This case study explores the factors influencing readiness to launch e-learning of a Library and Information Science (LIS) program in a developing country, with a focus on understanding attitudes toward e-learning and the viability of transitioning to an online delivery model in Vietnam. A technology infrastructure assessment was performed to understand whether changes were needed at Vietnam National University to support e-learning, and 5 key informant interviews and 4 focus group sessions with 39 participants were performed with faculty, graduate and undergraduate students, members of the professional community, and administrators to understand their usage of technology and their perceptions and attitudes toward e-learning. Study findings suggest the importance of understanding the cultural context and the need for further e-learning research, as well as the steps needed for e-learning readiness and integration.

Capturing Scholarly Communication in Southeast Asia

One of the objectives of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) is to promote scientific and research collaboration in order to raise the level of competitiveness in Southeast Asia. Bibliometrics can play an important role in informing science and scholarship policy evaluation and recommendations in this region. Bibliometric researchers have been observing scholarly activities in this region since the 1980s. However, the number of scholarly publications in this region has been relatively low compared to the rest of the world. Most of these bibliometric studies focus on benchmarking research performance between these countries, although they vary in many regards, for instance, in the countries/regions of interest, data sources, and analytical techniques. Evaluation studies of collaboration within this region are evidently rare and mostly focus on collaborations with non-ASEAN countries. By connecting the results of these studies through different periods and methodological perspectives, this chapter discusses the challenges and knowledge gaps in this research area in order to identify potential research topics and approaches for future studies.