Digital Preservation for the Individuals

Purpose - This is a concept paper highlighting the most important points pertaining to the development of a web service for the preservation of the digital assets of individuals.Design/methodology/approach - A commercial web service aimed at the general public for the preservation of their digital assets is outlined. It encompasses the ability to legitimately bequeath one’s digital assets to another individual in case of death or inability, and ensures the preservation and accessibility of the digital files and their metadata for a given (long) period of time, by applying the principles of digital preservation, as described by OAIS. The development and scientific challenges of this endeavor are also briefly discussed.Originality/value - The project responds to a real contemporary public need, and offers a service which will become highly relevant in the near future. The lacking of such a service will very soon be painfully felt by the public, with the mass loss and depreciation of their personal digital assets.

Greek Libraries Network Purpose, goals, vision. The audience development in libraries through educational programs for children

Purpose – Abstract: Purpose - In 2015 the National Library of Greece took over the Greek Libraries Network to support the efforts of academic, research, public, municipal and school libraries in the country to develop and advance the services they offer to the public. The main objective is to make this network a center of knowledge diffusion, networking and professional communication among its members as well as making libraries hubs of creativity for everyone. Design/methodology/approach - The existence of this network gives each member-library the ability to multiply its users, since the users of each library are members of the entire network. The actions of the Greek Libraries Network aim at audience development in the libraries, with a special focus on children, in order to create a new generation of readers.Findings - The proposed educational programs promote reading through specific themes and books. Through specially designed workshops children can experience the library as a space that offers innumerable opportunities for education and creativity. Originality/value - In this endeavor, the National Library of Greece stands shoulder to shoulder by visiting the natural spaces of each member-library of the Greek Libraries Network, heeding their needs and concerns, but also getting feedback and new ideas for the improvement of its services.

Best collaborative practices for advocacy and promotion of Open Educational Resources

Purpose – The present study, after reviewing the relevant literature and the recent trends that became evident from the Open Education Global Conference 2018 (and other similar fora), documents the best practices to be adopted by the Greek academic libraries, in order to support the OER actions in Higher Education by making the Academic Community aware of the culture of OER adoption/use. Design/methodology/approach – It emerged from the analysis of the empirical results of a relevant research conducted among faculty of Greek Universities. The research inquired into the support/guidance that academic libraries offer to the faculty of their institutions for: a. adopting/using Open Educational Resources (OER), b. creating OER and c. OER intellectual property (copyright). Findings – The results of the research showed that most of the faculty does not consider academic libraries much supportive of them in any of the three areas investigated -as opposed to what occurs in Europe and internationally. Originality/value – The practices documented could: a. gain advantage from the existing library infrastructure and enhance the know-how and digital competence of librarians in the following areas: OER location, intellectual property (copyright), metadata and quality assurance, institutional repositories (storage and preservation), b. support faculty and students in cultivating their digital skills and thus achieving “OER Literacy”.

Hellenic Libraries Union Catalog (HLUC)

The Hellenic Library Union Catalog (HLUC) is one of the projects that were developed as a result of the relocation of the National Library of Greece (NLG), as a part of Action 2 "Development of Digital Services" and was fully funded by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation. It is an information system that aims to integrate and highlight all the collections from the Greek libraries in one single catalog. It was designed and implemented by the NTUA Annex of the Hellenic Academic Libraries Link, in collaboration with the National Library of Greece. It essentially organizes an open access collection of high- quality bibliographic data and aims to promote, amongst other things, rare, special and other types of bibliographic material. All Greek libraries are invited to participate.Currently HLUC is in a pilot phase. So far, more than 50 libraries from Greece and Cyprus are participating and the number of participants is increasing. The objective of the pilot phase was to test the operation of the HLUC by controlling the entire workflow starting from the moment that the data is imported to the system, incorporated and presented via the HLUC environment. Also system failures will be identified and corrected and functions as well as the general infrastructure will be improved. During this pilot phase, system reports will be sent to the member libraries aiming to receive their feedback, in order to improve the services provided by the HLUC. The purpose of this paper is to describe all the procedures followed for studying, designing and developing the system and to present how it works.

South European undergraduate and continuing professional development program reconceptualization for the New Information Professional: a synergistic innovation perspective

Purpose – As, under the new educational, communicational and technological paradigms, Library and Information Science curricula reconceptualization is gaining momentum, this opinion paper should be seen as a theoretical contribution to current thinking around South European formal education and Continuing Professional Development potential to effectively addressing the New Academic Library challenges.Design/methodology/findings - Building on context-specific case studies and previous international research focusing the investigation of the necessity to reshape official undergraduate programs and academic librarian career-long learning opportunities, our paper discusses whether and how an open flexible synergistic approach could be an ideal solution to current scenario pain points. Besides offering a brief but comprehensive review of the topic, it further proposes a set of future research studies that may result foundational to change within the librarian community by helping unpack the complexities of an ecosystem still in search of its identity.

Comparing and evaluating an interactive, subject-based search system with the traditional digital library’s search functionality

Purpose-The purpose of this paper is to compare and evaluate the usability, usefulness and effectiveness of an Interactive, Information Retrieval – IIR system with a DSpace-based digital library.Design/methodology/approach– The proposed evaluation approach consists of two subcomponents. The first one refers to a log file analysis capable of revealing quantitative features of the systems’ usage. The second part refers to a user survey that compares the new IIR system against the traditional subject-based search functionality provided by DSpace in terms of usefulness and effectiveness. Findings- Based on the evaluation results, it seems that users are very interested in employing new methods and techniques in information seeking and retrieval, especially when such new tools and methods help them in fulfilling their information needs accurately and timely. The results also revealed that the users are more satisfied when employing the new search functionality and the search and retrieval process is improved.Originality/value - A novel IIR system for subject-based browsing was evaluated and interesting results for the future of such tools are shown.

Personal photograph collections ontology development through thematic tags

Purpose- The number and the variety of photos have grown to a great extent as they can be created anytime, everywhere and spontaneously. Searching for a particular photo file has become a boring, repetitive and tedious activity. The application of an ontology to express the user profile characteristics relation with the narrative, spatial, time and other types of information of the collected photos becomes imperative.Design/methodology/approach -The work presented in our article includes the development of a personal photograph collections ontology (MyOntoPhotos) specialising in documenting the metadata of the topics that end-users prefer mostly to capture with their devices. An extensive survey, among 650 participants, was conducted with the use of an online questionnaire comprised of semi-closed questions, following the Likert scale and the scale category grading.Findings -The ontology created was based on the results of an extensive survey aiming to identify thematic areas of interest, apart from spatial and temporal information, as other similar efforts did in the past. It is mentionable that the survey results proved the majority of the responders selected 22 thematic tags.Originality/value - Based on the research findings an innovative concept for a mobile application is presented, focusing on enhancing end-users photo collections organizing and retrieval functions.