Black, Indigenous, and Peoples of Color reimagine library and information science through the lens of critical race theory. In Knowledge Justice, Black, Indigenous, and Peoples of Color scholars use ...critical race theory (CRT) to challenge the foundational principles, values, and assumptions of library and information science and studies (LIS) in the United States. They propel CRT to center stage in LIS, to push the profession to understand and reckon with how white supremacy affects practices, services, curriculum, spaces, and policies. The contributors show that the field is deeply invested in the false idea of its own objectivity and neutrality, and they go on to show how this relates to assumptions about race. Through deep analyses of library and archival collections, scholarly communication, hierarchies of power, epistemic supremacy, children's librarianship, teaching and learning, digital humanities, and the education system, Knowledge Justice challenges LIS to reimagine itself by throwing off the weight and legacy of white supremacy and reaching for racial justice. Contributors Miranda H. Belarde-Lewis (Zuni and Tlingit), Jennifer Brown, Anastasia Chiu, Nicholae Cline (Coharie), Anne Cong-Huyen, Tony Dunbar, Isabel Espinal, Fobazi M. Ettarh, Jennifer A. Ferretti, April M. Hathcock, Todd Honma, Harrison W. Inefuku, Sarah R. Kostelecky (Zuni Pueblo), Kafi Kumasi, Sofia Y. Leung, Jorge R. López-McKnight, Sujei Lugo, Marisa Méndez-Brady, Myrna Morales, Lalitha Nataraj, Vani Natarajan, Antonia P. Olivas, Kush Patel, Torie Quiñonez, Maria Adoria Rios, Tonia Sutherland, Shaundra Walker, Stacie Williams, Rachel E. Winston
This book builds a research-grounded, theoretical foundation for evidence based library and information practice and illustrates how librarians can incorporate the principles to make more informed ...decisions in the workplace. The book takes an open and encompassing approach to exploring evidence based library and information practice (EBLIP) and the ways it can improve the practice of librarianship. Bringing together recent theory, research, and case studies, the book provides librarians with a new reference point for how they can use and create evidence within their practice, in order to better meet the needs of their communities. Being Evidence Based in Library and Information Practice is divided into two parts; in the first part the editors explore the background to EBLIP and put forward a new model for its application in the workplace which encompasses 5 elements: Articulate, Assemble, Assess, Agree, Adapt. In the second part, contributors from academic, public, health, school and special libraries from around the world provide an overview of EBLIP developments in their sector and offer examples of successful implementation. Being Evidence Based in Library and Information Practice will be essential reading for library and information professionals from all sectors who want to make more informed decisions and better meet the needs of their users. The book will also be of interest to students of library and information studies and researchers.
Traditionally, Web of Science and Scopus have been the two most widely used databases for bibliometric analyses. However, during the last few years some new scholarly databases, such as Dimensions, ...have come up. Several previous studies have compared different databases, either through a direct comparison of article coverage or by comparing the citations across the databases. This article aims to present a comparative analysis of the journal coverage of the three databases (Web of Science, Scopus and Dimensions), with the objective to describe, understand and visualize the differences in them. The most recent master journal lists of the three databases is used for analysis. The results indicate that the databases have significantly different journal coverage, with the Web of Science being most selective and Dimensions being the most exhaustive. About 99.11% and 96.61% of the journals indexed in Web of Science are also indexed in Scopus and Dimensions, respectively. Scopus has 96.42% of its indexed journals also covered by Dimensions. Dimensions database has the most exhaustive journal coverage, with 82.22% more journals than Web of Science and 48.17% more journals than Scopus. This article also analysed the research outputs for 20 selected countries for the 2010–2018 period, as indexed in the three databases, and identified database-induced variations in research output volume, rank, global share and subject area composition for different countries. It is found that there are clearly visible variations in the research output from different countries in the three databases, along with differential coverage of different subject areas by the three databases. The analytical study provides an informative and practically useful picture of the journal coverage of Web of Science, Scopus and Dimensions databases.
The themes discussed in the contribution recur in the author's theoretical reflection in recent years: definition of LIS: the discipline that reflects on the construction, organization, management ...and use, as well as on the languages and services to the public of the library; relationship between librarian and LIS teacher: both figures have the same identity, both insist on the same cultural and technical background; open access: the theme is fundamental as a substrate for the free sharing of research products; metadata creation: the process of recording data functional to the identification and retrieval of any type of resource; terminology: new concepts and new types of resources have imposed new terms; authority control: by assembling different data, it allows a greater identification of the resources and of the entities associated with them. The reflection ends with the importance of the international dimension of research. KEYWORDS LIS; open access; metadata creation; authority control; LIS terminology I temi trattati ricorrono nella riflessione teorica dell'autore degli ultimi anni: definizione di Biblioteconomia: la disciplina che riflette sulla costruzione, l'organizzazione, la gestione e l'uso, nonche sui linguaggi e sui servizi al pubblico della biblioteca; rapporto tra bibliotecario e docente di Biblioteconomia: entrambe le figure hanno una medesima identita, insistono nello stesso alveo culturale e tecnico; open access: il tema risulta fondamentale come substrato per la condivisione libera e gratuita dei prodotti della ricerca; la metadatazione: il processo di registrazione dei dati funzionali all'identificazione e al reperimento di qualsiasi tipo di risorsa; la terminologia: nuovi concetti e nuove tipologie di risorsa hanno imposto nuovi termini; authority control: consentire, assemblando dati diversi, una maggiore identificazione delle risorse e delle entita a esse associate. La lezione chiude con il richiamo alla dimensione internazionale della ricerca. PAROLE CHIAVE Biblioteconomia e Scienza dell'Informazione; LIS; open access; Metadatazione; Controllo di autorita; Terminologia LIS
Library education is changing. At a time when librarianship is increasingly seen as part of the information industry, Library and Information Science is also searching for its place in a new and ...rapidly developing university landscape.
This book analyzes the development of the contemporary university in light of present critical social theory, focusing on such aspects as academic acceleration, organizational accretion and the rise of an ”entrepreneurial spirit,” all of which have both epistemological and organizational consequences. Library and Information Science has proven well-suited to meet this development. One way has been through the rapid international growth of the iSchool movement, now counting close to a hundred member schools all across the world. iSchools not only meet the requirements of contemporary university development, but also contribute to a recontextualization of librarianship and library education. As the iSchool movement relates to a view of information as a commodity and the ”iField” to increased economic growth, it recontextualizes the library sector, traditionally connected to democratic development based on the ideas of the Enlightenment.
Educating librarians in the Contemporary University is written from a European perspective, and examples such as the EU research platform, Horizon 2020, Government Research Proposals, and policy documents from European iSchools are used in an attempt to understand the current development in Library and Information Science and its relevance for librarianship. As the European Research and Development Sector increasingly connects universities to the solution of various ”social challenges” with emphasis on commercial collaborations, the view on knowledge and use of university resources are affected in a way which seemingly make critical analyses difficult.
Questions are asked about the relation between iSchools, late capitalism and the development of Critical Librarianship. Is there a way of fulfilling the ambitions of the critical theory classics and achieve research and an education environment which encourage emancipatory goals within the iSchool movement?
Bibliometric methods are used in multiple fields for a variety of purposes, namely for research evaluation. Most bibliometric analyses have in common their data sources: Thomson Reuters’ Web of ...Science (WoS) and Elsevier’s Scopus. The objective of this research is to describe the journal coverage of those two databases and to assess whether some field, publishing country and language are over or underrepresented. To do this we compared the coverage of active scholarly journals in WoS (13,605 journals) and Scopus (20,346 journals) with Ulrich’s extensive periodical directory (63,013 journals). Results indicate that the use of either WoS or Scopus for research evaluation may introduce biases that favor Natural Sciences and Engineering as well as Biomedical Research to the detriment of Social Sciences and Arts and Humanities. Similarly, English-language journals are overrepresented to the detriment of other languages. While both databases share these biases, their coverage differs substantially. As a consequence, the results of bibliometric analyses may vary depending on the database used. These results imply that in the context of comparative research evaluation, WoS and Scopus should be used with caution, especially when comparing different fields, institutions, countries or languages. The bibliometric community should continue its efforts to develop methods and indicators that include scientific output that are not covered in WoS or Scopus, such as field-specific and national citation indexes.
S. R. Ranganathan’s work Five Laws of Library Science published in 1931 shaped library science and has served as a foundation for the profession of librarianship. The five laws of librarianship need ...to be revised as technology progressed in society. With the rise of digital libraries, however, it is essential to take a second look at these laws and see how they've held up in the face of new technologies. This study tries to explain how the theory is put into practice and to identify areas where it needs to be reformulated for the benefit of libraries. The Five Laws of Library Science by S. R. Ranganathan was reviewed for this research's literature study, and the five rules were combined with the traits of Generation Z to create new laws that are appropriate for this period. The research’s primary conclusions are (1) Information: Emphasize Content Over Container; (2) User Engagement; (3) Quantitative Information Analysis; and (4) Common Learning (Online and Offline).
New sources of citation data have recently become available, such as Microsoft Academic, Dimensions, and the OpenCitations Index of CrossRef open DOI-to-DOI citations (COCI). Although these have been ...compared to the Web of Science Core Collection (WoS), Scopus, or Google Scholar, there is no systematic evidence of their differences across subject categories. In response, this paper investigates 3,073,351 citations found by these six data sources to 2,515 English-language highly-cited documents published in 2006 from 252 subject categories, expanding and updating the largest previous study. Google Scholar found 88% of all citations, many of which were not found by the other sources, and nearly all citations found by the remaining sources (89–94%). A similar pattern held within most subject categories. Microsoft Academic is the second largest overall (60% of all citations), including 82% of Scopus citations and 86% of WoS citations. In most categories, Microsoft Academic found more citations than Scopus and WoS (182 and 223 subject categories, respectively), but had coverage gaps in some areas, such as Physics and some Humanities categories. After Scopus, Dimensions is fourth largest (54% of all citations), including 84% of Scopus citations and 88% of WoS citations. It found more citations than Scopus in 36 categories, more than WoS in 185, and displays some coverage gaps, especially in the Humanities. Following WoS, COCI is the smallest, with 28% of all citations. Google Scholar is still the most comprehensive source. In many subject categories Microsoft Academic and Dimensions are good alternatives to Scopus and WoS in terms of coverage.
This article aims to provide a systematic and comprehensive comparison of the coverage of the three major bibliometric databases: Google Scholar, Scopus and the Web of Science. Based on a sample of ...146 senior academics in five broad disciplinary areas, we therefore provide both a longitudinal and a cross-disciplinary comparison of the three databases. Our longitudinal comparison of eight data points between 2013 and 2015 shows a consistent and reasonably stable quarterly growth for both publications and citations across the three databases. This suggests that all three databases provide sufficient stability of coverage to be used for more detailed cross-disciplinary comparisons. Our cross-disciplinary comparison of the three databases includes four key research metrics (publications, citations,
h
-index, and hI, annual, an annualised individual
h
-index) and five major disciplines (Humanities, Social Sciences, Engineering, Sciences and Life Sciences). We show that both the data source and the specific metrics used change the conclusions that can be drawn from cross-disciplinary comparisons.