An increase in scholarly publishing has been accompanied by a proliferation of potentially illegitimate publishers (PIPs), commonly known as "predatory publishers." These PIPs often engage in fraudulent practices and publish articles that are not subject to the same scrutiny as those published in journals from legitimate publishers…

Given academia's frequent use of publication metrics and the inconsistencies in metrics across disciplines, this study examines how various disciplines are treated differently by metric systems. We seek to offer academic librarians, university rank and tenure committees, and other interested individuals guidelines for distinguishing general…

The purpose of this paper was to discuss the collaborative initiative between the Mona Library (ML) and the Library and Information Association of Jamaica (LIAJA) focused on digitizing the Association's peer-reviewed publications, specifically the Jamaica Library Association (JLA) Bulletin and the LIAJA Bulletin, for enhanced access and…

Beginning with a discussion of how collections diversity has been conceptualized and assessed within the literature, we then analyze four areas in which professional practices and modes of thinking create barriers to collecting materials from historically marginalized voices. Specifically, we discuss how metadata practices can obscure these…

To identify potential needs for primary source collections, this study examines course descriptions and student learning outcomes from the University General Course Catalog of the University of Nevada, Reno. Primary source collection development analysis has not been a focus for librarianship literature. This study uses OpenRefine to analyze words…

Considering the importance of subject retrieval for scientific visibility, and the need to guide authors in self-archiving their papers in institutional repositories of university libraries, this study observed the patterns and strategies used by authors while indexing for keyword assignment. The study examined four categories of analysis:…

Discovery of digital items by scholars and the public is highly dependent upon effective metadata to ensure inclusion and prioritization in search engines. Subject descriptions based on controlled vocabulary, such as Library of Congress subject headings (LCSH), are particularly useful to enhance discovery, but they may be expensive to provide. In…

A college class of non-science majors completed a metadata project in 15 weeks for a Women's History collection at a southern 4-year university. The class "First and Second Wave of Feminism" explored for the first time a scientific method of cataloguing while learning to promote, restore and preserve the history of women in the United…

Formally describing and assessing the difficulty of learning and teaching material is important for quality assurance in university teaching, for aligning teaching and learning activities, and for easing communications among stakeholders such as teachers and students. This paper proposes a novel taxonomy to describe and quantify the difficulty…

Based on a comparison of two nearly identical surveys in 2010 and 2016, this study examines the deepening practitioner concern over the use of social tagging within digital collections during the past six years. While participants reported a greater level of experience and increased use of social tagging, concerns regarding control, consistency,…

We studied the population of articles on higher education published in academic journals by researchers from post-Soviet countries in the last three decades. We found that post-Soviet countries contribute differently to the overall publication output, with only Russia, Lithuania, and Estonia having more than 100 articles in journals indexed in…

The 29th Annual Pacific Islands Association of Libraries, Archives, and Museums (PIALA) Conference was held November 21 through November 26, 2019 and the primary venue was the Robert F. Kennedy (RFK) Memorial Library, University of Guam in Mangilao, U.S. Territory of Guam. This volume includes a listing of 2018-2019 PIALA Officers and Board…

Growing interest in online learning has instructors looking for new ways to engage learners in asynchronous discussions. Building on experiences with hashtag use to connect on social media platforms, the purpose of this study is to investigate the contexts of hashtag use and its associated impact on learner engagement in asynchronous online…

This paper presents the research project the PACTE group is carrying out on 'Establishing Competence Levels in the Acquisition of Translation Competence in Written Translation'. A continuation of PACTE's previous experimental research on translation competence and its acquisition, the project aims to propose level descriptors as a first step…

People who claim that applying Novakian concept maps in Turkish is problematic base their arguments largely upon the structural differences between the English and Turkish languages. This study aims to introduce the indexing method to eliminate problems encountered in Turkish applications of Novakian maps and to share the preliminary results of…