نشریه مطالعات کتابداری و سازماندهی اطلاعات
سال سی و سوم شماره 1 (پیاپی 129، بهار 1401)

To provide a model for natural hazards information for urban areas in Iran such as earthquakes

A researcher-made questionnaire was circulated among184 senior managers of the Iranian Red Crescent Society selected by purposive sampling. Items of the questionnaire obtained from 114 sources published between 1990 and 2021, and compiled using meta-combination method and expert approval.138 questionnaires were completed and received. The statistical method was modeling and path analysis based on structural equations using SMART (PLS) software. To determine the validity of the model, the extracted Average Variance Extracted (AVE) or convergent validity were calculated. Combined reliability method has been used to eliminate measurement errors.

The information process is examined in three sections (ie. informants, tools & media, and message content). Informants consist of management organizations at national and local levels, as well as the civil society and the private sector. Tools and media consist of publications, art performance, games and competitions, audio and video materials, web resources, social media, GIS, and textbooks. Message content include individuals and families, national and local government organizations with a comprehensive study of earthquake risk in three pre-crisis, during crisis and post-crisis situations, based on exploratory factor analysis. Finally, 34 indicators in the section Informants, 41 indicators in the tools and media section and 57 indicators in the content of the information message section approved.

With regard to the informants section, Presidential Institution, Ministries of Interior, Roads and Urban Development, Communications and Information Technology, Municipalities and Villages Organization, Radio and Television Organization, Red Crescent Society, Governors Offices, MPs, city and municipal council members, heads of local departments, prominent locals, non-governmental organizations, and councilors approved in all crises. With regard to tools and media, artificial intelligence and cloud space, messengers (Telegram, WhatsApp, etc.), applications, seismic information systems, Geographical Information Systems (GIS), maps and satellite imagery, warning systems have been approved in three crisis situations. Content was agreed to include emergency bag before crisis occurs (0.746), interaction with people during the crisis (0.915), life skills and problem solving (0.910) after the crisis. With regard to the criteria of national and local management organizations (survey of jobs and livelihood of the community 0.655 before the crisis, organization of NGOs during the crisis and 0.721 post-crisis initial warning assessment) approved.

In order to develop the services of academic libraries and provide new services called Research Data Management (RDM) for helping faculty members and researchers in managing their own research data and benefiting from the research data of others, this article seeks to identify the components of RDM in academic libraries. The outcome can be used as a model for implementing RDM in a systematic and effective way.

This research was carried out in two steps. The first step was a qualitative content analysis to identify components of RDM. In the second step using the identified compontents, a questionnaire was composed and circulated in two Delphi rounds among 20 Iranian experts in the field for validation and refinement. To ensure the reliability of the questionnaire and the internal consistency of questions, Cronbach's alpha coefficient was calculated with a result of 0.97.

In the first step 69 components were identified for 6 steps of RDM process, 1) planning; 2) ethical and legal issues; 3) organizing, documenting, generating metadata, 4) storing and backing up, 5) preserving, protecting, deleting data, 6) sharing, and dissemination. Participants added two new steps 1) education and counseling and 2) technical to the previous 6 steps. Also, some components were removed, modified, merged, and moved, and finally 56 components were emphasized in 8 stages.

All identified components are important in the management of research data in academic libraries. In addition, the results showed that the two components of "formulation and development of research data management plan" and "generating metadata to data and files" are of particular importance. Developing data management plan helps individuals and research institutes estimate the material and human resources needed for projects in advance. Also, generating metadata by increasing percision, makes search, retrieval, discovery, access, and reuse of data by other researchers. Academic libraries should consider this in research data management activities.

To explore the views of experts regarding the components of strategic management in public libraries in Iran. Findings can help provide efficient services and achieve the goals and vision of public libraries and be a good tool for operationalizing the strategic management of public libraries.

Delphi technique was employed to obtain the opinions of 20 strategic management and information science specialsists selected purposefully in three rounds. Shapiro-Wilk test was used to check normality of individual data. With a significance level of less than 0.05 alpha, with 0.95 confidence, the data were non-parametric (not normal). Due to the quality and sequence of the Likert spectrum and non-parametric items, non-parametric binomial tests were used which are specified in the table of results of the binomial test of the data ratio in the two groups. Also, if the significance level obtained was less than 0.05 alpha, it as considered significant with 0.95 confidence. Significance level greater than 0.05 alpha, was not significant with 0.95 confidence and was removed. Kendall test was also used to determine the degree of coordination between views expressed. Such coefficient is denoted by the symbol w, meaning a value between 0 and 1. If the Kendall coefficient was zero, it meant complete disagreement, and if it was one, it meant absolute agreement.

Out of 99 components of strategic management, 78 were approved . Out of 41 components related to the development of strategic plans, 11 existed in the mission of the Public Library Foundation, 8 related to the environmenta scanning (ie. opportunities and threats), 15 reflecting internal factors (ie. strengths and weaknesses), and 7 related to the selection of appropriate strategies. Outo of 25 components related to the implementation, 12 related to operational plans, marketing, financial and accounting, research&development, information technology, and 13 focused on management issues. Components of control and evaluation of strategic plans also included 12 components, including control and evaluation of internal and external factors. Panelists agreed control and evaluation is highly imporntant in th eprocess.

Seventy-eight basic components for strategic management were identified and approved and presented in a framework. The process and framework shows a deeper understanding of the strategic management system in public libraries. Public library administrators should identify gaps and shortcomings in strategic plans in the process of development, implementation, and evaluation.

To discuss the importance of oral history projects undertaken at the NLAI for securing a deeper understanding of the history of LIS in Iran. Analysis of the narratives shows that how the morale of the pioneer Iranian professional librarians has served the development of modern librarianship in their country.

The data based on which inferences are made were extracted through careful analysis of the content of the interviews carried out in the process of six oral history projects.

The challenges faced by early Iranian professional librarians in the process of the establishment, expansion and flourishing of modern librarianship in Iran, and transition from traditional to modern librarianship were many. Personality traits like work discipline, planning, and passion for acquiring skills from American colleagues (then working in Iran as consutants and educators) were instrumental in overcoming challenges.

Findings demonstrate how oral history can shed light on less seen aspects of contemporary history. Oral history projects need to be taught in LIS education to enable students to gain a deeper insight of their profession. Documenting oral history of public, school, university and specialized libraries is important for improving social status of the profession. Also, reporting activities of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in order to strengthen the spirit of volunteer work in the fields of book, librarianship, and book reading should be on the agenda of those interested in the history of librarianship and trustees in this field to strengthen the culture of collective participation

Examining previous research in the field of information-seeking regarding daily rapid access behavior patterns, determining the research gaps, components and sub-components of interest, research methodology and spatial distribution of the existing body of research.

This systematic review is based on Prism standard. The related research were probed and extracted from 11 national databases from 2012 to 2020 and 5 none-Iranian from 1995 until 2021. Considering the input and output criteria, 25 research sources, including journal articles and dissertations, were identified.

Information and communication channels, information needs, and challenges in accessing information are the most important issues addressed. The sub-components of the investigated topics included books, magazines, newspapers, radio, satellite, internet, virtual social networks, family, relatives, friends, elders and libraries. Information needs included education, culture, economy, society, religion, health, climate, transportation, sports, nutrition, and customs. Challenges in accessing information involved inaccessibility of transportation systems, communication and information infrastructure, health centers, as well as language problems. The research literarure empolyed both quantitative and qualitative with more attention to ethnography. Also, questionnaires, interviews and observations were used. The study population in Iran are Tribes (42%), minorities (14%), teachers and other employees (28%), adults (14%); unfortunately, no study on children, clerics, youth and adolescents, and the elderly is available. The study population in the world are clergy (5%), minorities and immigrants (27%), youth and adolescents (16%), the elderly (5%), students, teachers, workers and other staff (28%) and adults (27%). Research has been conducted in Iran, Australia, USA, New Zealand, Spain, China (Taiwan), Africa (Nigeria), Canada, Pakistan, and Finland.

Attention to information behavior of everyday lifein the research literaure has intensified globaly. A wide range of studies have tageted information and communication channels, such as virtual social networks, paying attention to the information needs of minorities, ethnic groups, and focusing more on individual variables. However, there is little research addressing the impact of socio-economic, cultural and consumption capital on the everyday life information seeking on nomads, immigrants and other groups. In Iran, information resources, tools, technologies, and libraries have not been successful in meeting information needs of tribes and nomads. At the global level, benefiting from qualitative research methodologies has facilitated theorising in the field, whereas in Iran relying on quantitative techniques has prevented generating theories. As can be seen in research outside of Iran, due to the extensive, multidimensionality and complexity of information behavior, it is necessary for information seeking behavior experts to continue further investigation. Everyday life in the current period leads towards qualitative and individual research projects with mixed methods.

The key problem in achieving efficient and user friendly retrieval when specialized homographs are searched is the development of a search mechanism to guarantee delivery of minimal irrelevant information (false drop=0). This paper has solved the problem through the implementation of a corpus-based approach using semantic tagging. The aim has been to optimize information retrieval system’s performance using semantic tagging of specialized homographs to decrease false drop.

This research was conducted experimentally and employed one of the three methods of word sense disambiguation. The research sample consisted of 442 scientific articles of two groups ie, experimental group and the control group. The control group had 221 full-text articles without tags and the experimental group included the same number articles, but manually tagged and placed in the proposed retrieval system to measure the effectiveness of tags in disambiguating specialized homographs and decreasing false drop.

While retrieval in the control group was with false drops due to the semantic ambiguity of specialized homographs, tagging specialized homographs in the full text of articles in the experimental group had a direct effect on decreasing false drop. The level of significance of the Wilcoxon signed-rank test (P = 0.0001, Z = -5.909) showed that the rate of false drop of retrieval results after using the tagged specialized corpus in the information retrieval system was significantly different. Assessment of negative and positive rankings showed that the rate of false drop of the results after using the tagged specialized text corpus decreased significantly and reached its minimum level of 0.

The rate of false drop in the research findings is an evidence of acceptable tagging effectiveness in Sense Disambiguation of specialized homographs and its effective role in optimizing the information retrieval system to minimize false drop of the results.  Accordingly, the corpus-based approach of the information retrieval system, while providing an opportunity for full-text retrieval could prevent false drop and save the user time and energy. Semantic tags are valuable for disambiguation of specialized homographs, but require high quality training data. Overall, the results show that well-structured training data can play a very important role to improve disambiguation. This research experimentally and analytically reveals that this approach, compared to keyword search, achieves a significantly better degree of false drop. The technique employed can be applied to the problem of information retrieval in all languages.