Program Library Research Articles

Why do people not attend public library programs in the current digital age? A mix method study in Hong Kong

PurposeThe study aims to investigate the characteristics of the current situation of library programs and explore the possible reasons behind the low participation in Hong Kong. It focuses on the development of library programs in the era of digital technology, which can lead to discussion and reflections on the further development of library programs with innovative technology services.Design/methodology/approachThis study applied a mixed-method research approach to investigate the current situation of library programming and the reasons for low participation in Hong Kong. The first part analyzes the characteristics of library programs offered by the Hong Kong Public Libraries (HKPL) through data collection from the HKPL website. The second part of this study investigated the reasons behind the low participation in library programs through quantitative research through an online survey.FindingsThe findings show that current library programs were dominated by reading activities and children's programs to a great extent, which both users and non-users are not very interested in. Further, most respondents expressed more interest in cultural and leisure events and hands-on activities (especially new technologies related) than traditional library programming. Many lapsed and non-users chose not to attend the library programs for boredom and uselessness. As a result, there is a need for HKPL to adjust its services to stay relevant to the needs and interests of local communities.Originality/valueScant studies explored the reasons behind non-users of public library programs, especially in Asia. This research contributes to the literature by analyzing and proposing the characteristics of the current situation of library programs and exploring the possible reasons behind the low participation in Hong Kong.

Libraries advancing health equity:a literature review

PurposeProgress toward health equity is necessary to reduce health disparities, and health literacy is key to achieving this goal. Because libraries provide access to knowledge and insights about their communities, they are effective partners in advancing health equity and implementing programs to reduce health disparities. A literature review on library programs and activities that focus on promoting health equity was conducted.Design/methodology/approachA literature review on library programs and activities concerning health equity and social determinants of health was conducted. Relevant literature was identified from searches of databases, library publications and grey literature.FindingsThe authors found 224 eligible sources and many types of libraries advancing health equity. Libraries frame their role in advancing health equity through external programs in three ways: (1) providing access to high-quality health information, (2) delivering health literacy training and resources and (3) connecting their communities with community health services. Libraries also advance health equity by focusing on internal library operations and providing research services focused on cultural humility and competence as they apply to health care.Originality/valueThis literature review will help the National Library of Medicine (NLM) develop a strategy to support libraries advancing health equity through information made available by programs and activities of NLM and the Network of the National Library of Medicine.

Considering Community Partnerships and New Projects: Advice from the Field

There are many considerations to take before embarking on a new project or creating a new community partnership. Many such considerations are undocumented and not widely taught in Master of Library and Information Science programs. This article fills in the gap with suggested steps to take before implementing a new service or partnership. Recommendations stem from the author’s own experiences and aim to help public library workers—from staff to administration—avoid possible pitfalls and become effective advocates for focus and intentionality.

AN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE-BASED SPEAKING SYSTEM FOR DUMB PEOPLE

For deaf-mute people all around the world, Gestures are the main mode of communication for DeafMute people worldwide. In this gesture-based voice system, machine learning presents a real-time vision-based system for monitoring hand finger gestures. It was developed in Python using Raspberry Pi along with a camera module, which is compatible with the Open CV library for computer vision. The Raspberry Pi includes an image processing technique that monitors the fingers of the hand using the extracted attributes. The main purpose of a gesture based speaking system is to develop control communication between humans and computers. This leads to a system that can recognize and monitor known objects and has surveillance and application capabilities. The major goal of the suggested work was to allow the system to function properly. The main objective is to enable the system to recognize and monitor certain properties of objects specified by the Raspberry Pi along with camera module using an appropriate image processing technique. The Open CV library's feature extraction technique of the Open CV library for Python programming runs on Raspberry Pi using an external camera. A gesture based speaking system using machine learning provides a new, intuitive, and simple way to communicate with computers that are more human-like.

Controlling and scripting laboratory hardware with open-source, intuitive interfaces: OpenFlexure Voice Control and OpenFlexure Blockly.

Making user interaction with laboratory equipment more convenient and intuitive should promote experimental work and help researchers to complete their tasks efficiently. The most common form of interaction in current instrumentation is either direct tactile, with buttons and knobs, or interfaced through a computer, using a mouse and keyboard. Scripting is another function typical of smart and automated laboratory equipment, yet users are currently required to learn bespoke programming languages and libraries for individual pieces of equipment. In this paper, we present two open-source, novel and intuitive ways of interacting with and scripting laboratory equipment. We choose the OpenFlexure family of microscopes as our exemplar, due to their open-source nature and smart control system. Firstly, we demonstrate 'OpenFlexure Voice Control' to enable users to control the microscope hands-free. Secondly, we present 'OpenFlexure Blockly' which uses the Blockly Visual Programming Language to enable users to easily create scripts for the microscope, using a drag and drop Web interface. We explain the design choices when developing these tools, and discuss more typical use cases and more general applications.

Environmental education in public libraries

PurposeThis research aims to investigate effective public library environmental education interventions in order to inform the development of a framework for public libraries.Design/methodology/approachA qualitative research method was developed incorporating surveys and follow-up interviews with librarians working in USA public libraries, who were known to have been involved in environmental education initiatives.FindingsThe research determined which environmental education interventions were most likely to lead to action and behaviour change in public library users. The resulting discussion has allowed for the creation of a framework which establishes factors useful for successful implementation of environmental education programmes and activities. These elements include partnership, institutional commitment, inclusion and outreach and practical activities linked to a larger vision.Research limitations/implicationsThe research participants were limited to those libraries in the USA which were all affiliated with the American Library Association (ALA) Resilient Communities programmes and had received grants.Practical implicationsThe paper concludes with a framework for implementing environmental education programmes in public libraries. Effective interventions are also shared which provide practical ideas and strategies.Social implicationsProviding structure and considerations for establishing an environmental programme enables libraries to build on experiences of other libraries. As climate change action becomes a more pressing issue, providing these interventions supports action.Originality/valueThe paper discusses the concepts of environmental education and the role which public libraries can play in this arena, concluding that sustainable development should be treated as a new tenet of librarianship and environmental education as a new research field of library and information science.

Layanan Perpustakaan Universitas Airlangga Berbasis Inklusi Sosial melalui Pembinaan UMKM di Wilayah Surabaya Utara dan Timur

The social inclusion-based library transformation program initiated by the director of The National Library of the Republic of Indonesia serves as the background of the study. Libraries that prioritize social inclusion provide resources to the community to help them maximize their potential for welfare. The crucial and strategic function of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSME) is one of the factors contributing to Indonesia's economic growth. MSMEs and social inclusion-based libraries have a close working relationship since the community can develop imagination, innovation, and creativity in establishing and developing their products by library services. Airlangga University Library is one of the libraries founded on social inclusion and has been mentoring MSMEs in Surabaya's northern and eastern regions since 2019. The purpose of this study was to determine the role of sources of information, facilities and infrastructure as well as programs created by the Airlangga University Library in increasing the productivity and income of MSME actors. This is qualitative research using Focus Group Discussion (FGD) data collection technique. Interviews with 6 (six) assisted MSME actors showed that the programs created by the Airlangga University Library inspired them to be more enthusiastic about developing their businesses. The study's findings indicate that the library's programs can be used as a source of information for advancing and developing MSME. The Airlangga University Library is expected to provide more sources of information that are relevant to needs, infrastructure to market products and organize other programs that provide knowledge for MSME actors in developing business.

Grisette: Symbolic Compilation as a Functional Programming Library

The development of constraint solvers simplified automated reasoning about programs and shifted the engineering burden to implementing symbolic compilation tools that translate programs into efficiently solvable constraints. We describe Grisette, a reusable symbolic evaluation framework for implementing domain-specific symbolic compilers. Grisette evaluates all execution paths and merges their states into a normal form that avoids making guards mutually exclusive. This ordered-guards representation reduces the constraint size 5-fold and the solving time more than 2-fold. Grisette is designed entirely as a library, which sidesteps the complications of lifting the host language into the symbolic domain. Grisette is purely functional, enabling memoization of symbolic compilation as well as monadic integration with host libraries. Grisette is statically typed, which allows catching programming errors at compile time rather than delaying their detection to the constraint solver. We implemented Grisette in Haskell and evaluated it on benchmarks that stress both the symbolic evaluation and constraint solving.

Multisensory reading promotion in academic libraries.

To confront college students' new reading patterns and the continuous decline in academic library borrowing rates, we conducted empirical research on promoting multisensory reading as a way to attract students' attention, and to stimulate interest in, and promote the practice of, reading through a library program called "Reading Today Listening Everyday" (RTLE) on a library's WeChat public account. The program involved 48 librarians and 105 students who were recruited into different groups to co-create, edit and release multisensory tweets every workday. Multisensory contents including text-based content, audio-based content and emotional resonance were presented to evoke readers' visual, audio, and emotional senses to induce more reading practice. Using the Context, Input, Process and Product (CIPP) evaluation method, the multisensory presentation in RTLE program was proven to be effective in promoting library reading with a high number of tweeted page views and an increased borrowing rate for recommended books. In 2020, 269 issues accompanied by 269 audio frequencies garnered 80,268 page views, depending on the caliber of the reading promoter out of the 48 librarians and 52 student anchors behind it. The 484 RTLE-recommended books were borrowed 113 times in 2020, which was a rate 1.46 times higher than in 2019 (77 times). The analysis of the relationship between tweet views and borrowing rates for recommended books indicates that more page views indicate greater reader interest, leading to increased borrowing. From readers' feedback and comments, the gain afforded by multisensory reading can improve higher-level reading trends such as the number of reading interests, enjoyment, engagement, etc.

The spirit of knowledge: Creating spiritual competency for critical information spaces

The industry-wide effort to integrate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) practices into the LIS field opens a wider conversation forfostering cultural humility in LIS work. Cultural humility, a necessary aspect of DEI, cannot be achieved by approaching non-Western cultures through Western assumptions of the world when these assumptions perpetuate the mystification, alienation, and invalidation of non-Western cultural knowledge and expression—especially those that center metaphysical or spiritual aspects in their knowledge systems. Unless disrupted, this limitation of current DEI initiatives will further invalidate cultural practices, identity, and Indigenous Systems of Knowledge, leading to whitewashed representations of culture within collections, reference services, programming, and other library systems. This paper discusses spiritual competency as a prerequisite to cultural humility, the harm caused by its absence, as well as the tools and frameworks that, when practiced, can create spiritual competency.

The Knowledge Organization Education Within and Beyond the Master of Library and Information Science

By analyzing 63 English-speaking institutions that offer ALA-accredited master’s programs in library and information studies, this research aims to explore the education for knowl­edge organization (KO) at different levels and across fields. This research examines the KO courses that are the required courses and elective courses in the MLIS programs, that are offered in other master’s programs and graduate certificate programs, that are adapted to the undergraduate degree and certificate programs, and that are particularly developed for programs other than MLIS. The findings indicate that the great majority of MLIS programs still have a focus on or a significant component of knowl­edge organization as their required course and include the knowl­edge organization elective courses, particularly library cataloging and classification, on their curriculum. However, there is a variety of the offerings of KO related courses across the programs in an institution or in the same program across the institutions. It shows a promising trend that the traditional and new KO courses play an important role in many other programs, at different levels and across fields. With the conventional, adapted, or innovative content, these courses demonstrate that the principles and skills of knowl­edge organization are applicable to a wide variety of settings, can be integrated with other disciplinary knowl­edge and emerging technologies, and meet the needs of different career pathways and groups of learners.

Information Literacy Programmes in Libraries of Higher Education in Telangana: A Study

Information Literacy Programmes in Libraries of Higher Education in Telangana: A Study

News from the Field

PALNI celebrates 30th anniversary ACRL, ARL share community response to White House memorandum on public-access to research IMLS now accepting applications for Native American, Native Hawaiian Library Services grants supporting core library programs Task force recommends digital Federal Depository Library Program New from ACRL—Teaching Critical Reading Skills: Strategies for Academic Librarians OverDrive releases 2022 digital book circulation data and highlights Gale launches new ChiltonLibrary platform New born-digital chapter focusing on Islamic history hosted by Project MUSE

РАЗРАБОТКА TELEGRAM-БОТА ДЛЯ АВТОМАТИЗАЦИИ УЧЕБНОГО ПРОЦЕССА

This report discusses the creation of telegram bots to automate the learning process from choosing a programming language and libraries to creating functionality and integration with the Telegram API. It also provides an example of using a bot to pass the test. Such a telegram bot allows you to optimize processes in an educational institution and make life easier for teachers and students. In addition, the report touches on the possibility of expanding the functionality of the bot in the future. In general, the creation of a telegram bot for automating the educational process is an urgent and promising task that can significantly improve the organization of the educational process and increase the effectiveness of training. Due to the ease of use and accessibility of the Telegram messenger, such a bot can gain wide popularity among teachers and students of various educational institutions.

ПРОЕКТУВАННЯ І ПРОГРАМНА РЕАЛІЗАЦІЯ АВТОМАТИЗОВАНОЇ СИСТЕМИ ВІДВІДУВАНОСТІ ТА АНАЛІЗУ ДАНИХ В ЗАКЛАДАХ ОСВІТИ

The work is devoted to the research of the optimal method of monitoring the attendance of educational institutions by students, both teachers and parents: the design and implementation of an automated system that allows to simplify this process, to develop the necessary reports, including notifying parents with information about the attendance of their children; creating modules for analyzing the received information using mathematical modeling methods and the Python programming language and libraries for data processing. The principle of operation of the system is that the information about the student who came to the educational institution is read by a scanner and sent to the local computer, where it is stored. On the same computer, the stored information is analyzed and the necessary reports are generated. Another approach to system development also uses a cloud server. Problems and shortcomings arising from various possibilities of organizing an automated system are analyzed. To save information on the computer to which the scanner is connected, approaches based on the use of the Python language are considered, which allows easy transfer of data to various databases, including Access and MySQL, and another where the scanned information is immediately stored in the Access database, which is located on the computer to which the scanner is connected. Database structures for storing and processing information have been developed and implemented. The system generates various reports with the necessary information, which can be the basis for making certain decisions: for example, a report for the dining hall on the number of students by class, on the total number of children in the school, the total number of people present and absent in absolute and relative terms, etc. The modern Telegram messenger was used to send messages. To implement the idea, Bot Father and the function of this platform were used, which allows you to create automatic robots to perform mailing tasks to its users. The bot logic is controlled using HTTPS requests to the bot system API. With the help of SQL queries, the necessary information is extracted, which is transferred to the developed software module for analysis on a separate group of students or on the institution as a whole. Regression analysis methods are used in software mode using Python tools. The work on the creation and implementation of an automated intellectual system was carried out on the order of a secondary education institution.

Listening in the Field: Recording and the Science of Birdsong by Joeri Bruyninckx

Reviewed by: Listening in the Field: Recording and the Science of Birdsong by Joeri Bruyninckx Rachel Mundy (bio) Listening in the Field: Recording and the Science of Birdsong By Joeri Bruyninckx. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018. Pp. 256. Listening in the Field offers a narrowly focused and deeply researched history of sound recording's impact on avian bio-acoustics from 1880 to 1980. The book examines a century of recording technology used to document birdsong in the United States and Europe, with analog sound recording at its center. No mere historical surveyist, Bruyninckx takes his reader from songbird research into much broader questions about how data gets made, and how and when technology is part of that process. [End Page 243] Starting with music notation and moving through magnetic tape recording, Listening in the Field explores the study of birds through the lens—or rather, filter—of a century of analog sound recording. Bruyninckx starts his story in the phonograph era and concludes it with the advent of digital sound recording in the 1980s. The result is a compact, linear narrative about the science of birdsong that parallels developments in analog audio technology. Yet in addition to exploring the history of avian bioacoustics, Bruyninckx uses that history as a case study in the interplay between sound and sight as scientists standardize and debate what evidence should sound and look like. These topics are structured through five chapters and a conclusion that explore the relationship between avian bioacoustics, sound recording, and visual evidence. Organized chronologically, the pages traverse technologies of sound transcription that range from musical notations of birdsong in the 1880s to printed spectrographic images in the 1970s. Chapter 1, "Eavesdropping in the Wild," lays out the structure of the book and frames its central question, "What does it take for an ephemeral sound, a faint cry, to be registered under the unsympathetic circumstances of field research, and to be recognized as an object of scientific evidence?" (p. 3). Chapter 2 turns to the experimental transcriptions that shaped studies of birdsong from the 1880s until the 1930s. While this topic has been analyzed elsewhere by authors such as Emily Doolittle and David Rothenberg, Bruyninckx contrasts it with the "sterile" aesthetic that emerged with mobile sound recording equipment in the 1930s (ch. 3). The third chapter incidentally includes a wonderfully detailed history of Cornell University's avian bioacoustics program and sound library. In chapter 4, Bruyninckx explores the criteria dividing amateur from professional listeners in "citizen science" programs like Cornell's, and in chapter 5, he demonstrates the negotiation between aural and visual media that characterized "professional" ornithological uses of the sound spectrograph. It is in the fifth chapter that Bruyninckx hits his stride as a historian of science, drawing out the ambiguities that characterize the making of science through the story of the sound spectrograph, a mechanical ear that supplemented human listeners in avian bioacoustics. Bruyninckx shows how ornithologists who adopted the tool balanced quantitative data with qualitative decision-making about what counted as a phrase, a syllable, or a song. While the book lends itself to cumulative reading, this is a chapter that would be particularly well suited as an excerpt for interested readers in the history of science, sound studies, or related fields. As a study in evidence, the book shows how "scientific recordings were never only scientific objects." Any reader interested in birdsong will be delighted by the depth of historical research in this book. At times, I wished its analysis of evidence did more, particularly as this deconstructive trope has been applied elsewhere in science and technology studies with more attention to social context. That "something more" begins to emerge in the [End Page 244] conclusion, however, which notes that the "noise" that is routinely removed from bioacoustic recordings of birds is, in fact, an important fact in birds' lives, one with substantial ecological and environmental implications. Listening in the Field is one of the best books of its kind, exploring an engaging and timely topic with a winning combination of focused research and pointed insights to show us the best of what the history of science has to offer. It will be a welcome read...

The Library Is My Canvas: Art and Experiential Learning in an Academic Library

The literature concerning experiential learning in academic libraries generally pertains to opportunities for student workers and library and information science students, along with case studies of experiential learning integration into the classroom. This article details the successful partnership between an academic library and university art program, demonstrating the library’s progression from provider of traditional resources and space for displaying student artwork to experiential learning environment for project-based learning opportunities requiring total student involvement from conception to completion. These experiences provide for unique learning opportunities, beautification of the library, and expansion of the library’s identity on campus as a learning space.

DH Eh? A Survey of Digital Humanities Courses in Canadian LIS Education

Library and librarian involvement in digital humanities (DH) has grown over the past few years. However, it is unclear whether current library and information studies (LIS) programs are properly preparing students for this type of work. This study analyzed course offerings at Canadian ALA-accredited LIS programs. While Canadian ALA-accredited LIS programs offer DH-relevant courses, the number of courses offered and their range/scope vary greatly among institutions. Although many are teaching the technical skills required by the field of DH librarianship, collaboration and project management training remain elusive in most programs.

Text classification technique for discovering country-based publications from international COVID-19 publications.

The significant increase in the number of COVID-19 publications, on the one hand, and the strategic importance of this subject area for research and treatment systems in the health field, on the other hand, reveals the need for text-mining research more than ever. The main objective of the present paper is to discover country-based publications from international COVID-19 publications with text classification techniques. The present paper is applied research that has been performed using text-mining techniques such as clustering and text classification. The statistical population is all COVID-19 publications from PubMed Central® (PMC), extracted from November 2019 to June 2021. Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) was used for clustering, and support vector machine (SVM), scikit-learn library, and Python programming language were used for text classification. Text classification was applied to discover the consistency of Iranian and international topics. The findings showed that seven topics were extracted using the LDA algorithm for international and Iranian publications on COVID-19. Moreover, the COVID-19 publications show the largest share in the subject area of "Social and Technology in COVID-19" at the international (April 2021) and national (February 2021) levels with 50.61% and 39.44%, respectively. The highest rate of publications at international and national levels was in April 2021 and February 2021, respectively. One of the most important results of this study was discovering a common trend and consistency of Iranian and international publications on COVID-19. Accordingly, in the topic category "Covid-19 Proteins: Vaccine and Antibody Response," Iranian publications have a common publishing and research trend with international ones.

Anonymization of whole slide images in histopathology for research and education.

The exchange of health-related data is subject to regional laws and regulations, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the EU or the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) in the United States, resulting in non-trivial challenges for researchers and educators when working with these data. In pathology, the digitization of diagnostic tissue samples inevitably generates identifying data that can consist of sensitive but also acquisition-related information stored in vendor-specific file formats. Distribution and off-clinical use of these Whole Slide Images (WSIs) are usually done in these formats, as an industry-wide standardization such as DICOM is yet only tentatively adopted and slide scanner vendors currently do not provide anonymization functionality. We developed a guideline for the proper handling of histopathological image data particularly for research and education with regard to the GDPR. In this context, we evaluated existing anonymization methods and examined proprietary format specifications to identify all sensitive information for the most common WSI formats. This work results in a software library that enables GDPR-compliant anonymization of WSIs while preserving the native formats. Based on the analysis of proprietary formats, all occurrences of sensitive information were identified for file formats frequently used in clinical routine, and finally, an open-source programming library with an executable CLI tool and wrappers for different programming languages was developed. Our analysis showed that there is no straightforward software solution to anonymize WSIs in a GDPR-compliant way while maintaining the data format. We closed this gap with our extensible open-source library that works instantaneously and offline.