International Journal of Information Science and Management
Volume:10 Issue: 1, Jan-Jun 2012

This research attempted to study the reading behavior of graduate students in digital environment at University of Isfahan through 2008-2009. Different elements such as types of electronic resources, reading methods, amounts of note taking, amounts of printing and the advantages of using the electronic resources are being discussed. The paper employs descriptive survey research method to answer the questions. Data needed for research was gathered through a researcher-made questionnaire based on the related literature and Liu''s questionnaire (2005). The statistical population used in this research consisted of the graduate students of seven departments in University of Isfahan and stratum random sampling was applied. The findings showed that students make use of different types of electronic resources. They tend to take notes from printed material and print electronic resources. They scan when they read from computer monitors. The highest advantage of reading electronic resources is acquiring update information and remote access while the least significant advantage is the ease of reading on the computer screens.

As much discussed in literature, the creation of digital libraries should be informed by user requirements and behaviors (Soergel, 2002). According to researchers, the best designs for children come from children. This study describes how the Iranian children use a digital library (ICDL). This work was done in order to explore and discover new directions for the development of children digital libraries. It has focused on Iranian children’s specific needs to Persian literature and technological facilities using a digital reading environment for pleasure.

Library standardization is mainly concerned with technical services, space and equipments, and information content of library collection with little or no regards to the user. Given every country''s certain social, economical and cultural conditions, specialized libraries should engage increasingly in developing information literate users on the basis of standards, rather than standardizing technical services, equipments and the physical space of libraries. By doing so, they give users more independence in acquiring information and gaining knowledge, and make the specialized libraries'' services more efficient.

Today, the scientific communications are developed and expanded on the internet and the famous World Wide Web service, and the popularity of the electronic scientific databases (ESDs) such as ScienceDirect, Google Scholar, and Scopus is an evidence of this claim. In addition to providing scientific contents, the ESDs offer researchers diverse scientific web services such as scientific communications and collaborations. In accordance with the electronic developments such as ESDs and their scientific web services, the scholars’ research process is evolved so as the birth of the electronic research (e-Research) process makes scholars initiate their research, drive it, and reach its determined goals electronically. In this paper, we focus on the ESDs’ scientific web services role in the research process. After presenting a classification for the scientific web services, a comprehensive framework for the e-Research process is proposed. Also, the effects of the scientific web services on adoption of the e-Research process are studied. For this purpose, an appropriate questionnaire was prepared and delivered to the graduate students in the Engineering and Management disciplines of Tarbiat Modares and Amirkabir universities, located in Tehran, to assess the scientific web services’ usages in their research processes development. After analysis of the acquired data, the findings showed that the scientific web services of information storage and sharing, searching, and communications are the most popular and useful web services in the scientific community, and therefore, have great effects on the adoption of the e-Research process so that the more convenient and desirable these services are, the more popular they get.

So far, various Romanization schemes have been proposed for capturing Persian text using Latin alphabet. However, each have served a very specific and yet limited function. This paper proposes an extended Romanization scheme that can facilitate a wide range of encoding needed in the field of Natural Language Processing. The proposed scheme endeavors to preserve both orthographic and phonological phenomena in the language. It also accounts for encoding handwritten manuscripts, in which glyph ambiguity is a salient feature. It is particularly relevant to Romanizing the Kufi script, in which diacritical marks are omitted. The current work also recommends orthographic rules in an effort to standardize future Romanization tasks.

Controlled vocabularies have been frequently used in information retrieval systems. Control of the vocabularies and evaluating the utility of their terms are two critical questions. This research aims at the development of Persian subject headings through statistical analyses. The current research was conducted on more than 450,000 records extracted from the electronic version of National Bibliography of Iran (NBI). Data has been processed through data mining techniques. The correlation analysis was performed to determine the relationship between the number of items in NBI and the number of Persian subject headings as well as the rank of each subject heading and its use frequency in NBI.The count of new subject headings vs. the count of new catalogued materials in NBI grew linearly at the beginning and increased logarithmically when the number of catalogued materials reached 3,200. The analysis of the use frequency of distinct headings within NBI resulted in three classes: most, frequent, and normal used subject headings. The findings partly agree with Lancaster’s prediction, as he states that a controlled vocabulary will grow very fast in the beginning. It was also found that the majority of subject headings are rarely used by NBI. It is due to absence of a mechanism to control the building of new headings.

The article discusses a trial undertaken in a LIS education program to help prepare students from different cultural backgrounds to work in virtual, multicultural work places. The focus of the trial was developing teamwork, which may now involve global, multicultural and virtual components, for which students need to be prepared, given work place changes of recent years. The trial took place in a school of information studies at a large, multi-campus rural university in Australia. The lecturer grouped students from an off-shore campus, with a different cultural background, with local students to work online on a group assignment. Evaluation involved an anonymous, web-based survey after all group assignments were completed. The survey explored the experiences of students regarding their group work in multicultural teams. The findings highlight the challenges of group work in fully online environments. They include language and cultural diversity, time zone spread and lack of face-to-face communication. Some of these challenges are likely to be replicated in the work place where multicultural team work is involved. Some of these challenges are likely to be replicated in the work place where multicultural team work is involved. Some suggestions to overcome these challenges are included at the end of the article.