Knowledge map of digital libraries in Iran: a co-word analysis

This study aimed to knowledge mapping of Digital Libraries (DLs) field in Iran. This is a scientometrics study. In this regard, Social Network and co-word analysis methods were used. 554 research resources such as books, national and international journal papers, conferences articles, and MA and Ph.D. Theses in Iran up to 2013 were studied. Researcher made checklist was used to collext data. Also Gephi and VOSviewer softwares were used to visualize and analyze the subject networks. Researches in the field of DLs were classified into 10 research topics and 59 Subtopics. Findings showed that "Evaluation", "Digital content and collections", "Architecture, systems, tools and technologies" and etc. are higher frequency research topics. Also "Evaluation", "Metadata", "Content preservation and security" and etc. most central and core subtopics in subject networks; Moreover subtopics such as "Electronic publishing standards", "Use of taxonomies to provide unified and organized access to various digital repositories", "Digital preservation systems", "Resource sharing" and etc. are research areas that paied less research attention in Iran. Also results reflect that less researches pay attention to the technical and experimental domains. This show that domains co-occurrence structure with nearly two decades of studies in this field, compared with international studies, isnot matured and correlation between clusters are little and unbalanced.