Narrow Results

With the rise of social media, many library and information services have begun to incorporate a wide variety of social media and social networking applications into their systems and services. Among the mainstream social networking applications, micro-blogging, in general, and Twitter, in particular, have gained increasing popularity. This paper reports the results of an exploratory study of the application of Twitter in the context of a large public library system. Specifically, this study has sampled, content analysed and categorised a select number of tweets created by a public library system in order to identify and document the ways in which Twitter can be used for various information services and knowledge management practices in public libraries. One of the main outcomes of this study is a tweet categorisation scheme that has a specific focus on the information services offered by public libraries.

User profiles were designed through a qualitative approach to a case study of a public library, starting from an analysis of space social relations, of how the building's design shaped reading practices and of how space was actually being used.

Public Libraries can surely play a significant social, cultural and economic role. Improvements on quality however are a necessary prerequisite. On the other hand, quality is a complex and subjective concept, which should incorporate at any given time the true (expressed and implied) needs of all interested parties. This paper investigates and empirically assesses the current perceptions for quality in Greek public libraries in order to suggest a way forward for quality management implementation. For that purpose a survey based on semi-structured interviews with the directors of Greek public libraries has been constructed and the results are presented.

Evidence about internet access and use in Brazil is presented using 2005 Brazilian Bureau of Census data. The importance of internet access outside home, especially by disadvantaged groups is pointed out as well as the impact of socio-technical factors on types of internet access and use is analysed. The relevance and the complexity involved in identifying and classifying internet use and social factors involved are stressed. The role played by specific "social facilitators" of internet use, with emphasis on the role of the public libraries, is also considered.

The paper seeks the attitudes of the Greek public libraries about the case of brand name and if they undertake the responsibility and their efforts to obtain one.

Generally speaking, the paper insists that is a matter of libraries to engage people to the library and persuade them that they need it. But that is a communication matter, a matter beyond marketing. Also, the paper examines if libraries measure their users' response to their efforts to promote their services and events. Relevant to that is whether libraries have a promotion program and also a communication strategy based on the statistical data which (or not) they collect (or not) from their users and non-users. Research and study of users' attitudes is one more of the paper questions which are considered important in libraries' decision making processes and in finding optimized solutions.

Finally, some best practices and lessons learned, proper for Greek reality will be proposed.

EuropeanaLocal is a best practice network project, which will help Europeana to enhance its content and service by applying automated metadata harvesting among distributed repositories. Greek content providers and its metadata aggregator, the Veria Central Public Library (VCPL), are in a testing metadata harvesting period, in the framework of EuropeanaLocal. This paper analyzes the practices that the Greek Institutional Repositories follow in order to transform their metadata schemas to European Semantic Elements (ESE) profile and to export this profile through OAI-PMH to the VCPL aggregator. In addition, it describes the way in which the VCPL aggregates the ESE exported metadata output. Finally, it emphasizes on the transformation and aggregation tools that have been launched on a local level, before Europeana disseminates its official ones.

Because of municipal, state, and federal budget constraints, public libraries increasingly need to demonstrate their value to their communities. They often provide evidence of the demand for and use of services by their tax-paying residents. This project explores the use of public libraries by non-residents and how public library directors perceive the value of non-resident use for their libraries and communities. In-depth interviews were conducted with eighteen library directors throughout the Appalachian region of the eastern United States. A grounded analysis of these interviews using NVivo 8 software reveals a variety of non-resident user types and policies and approaches to offering services to non-resident users. Potential directions for future research into the relationship between non-residents, public libraries and the community business sector are suggested.