Library Project Research Articles

Narratives of Eastern Mediterranean and Atlantic European cities

We have selected seven contributions for this issue of Spool, four from the Eastern Mediterranean basin (Istanbul, Beirut, Acre and Jaffa) and three from Atlantic Europe (Bodo, Matosinhos and Gafanha da Nazare). Roula El Khoury and Paola Ardizzola address the post-civil war reconstruction of Beirut in Lebanon and reveal how neoliberal models of development resulted in a generic city. Adem Erdem Erbas uses the Istanbul port heritage area in Turkey to showcase how GIS helps to consider underground cultural inventory from a historic landscape perspective within the framework of the conservation plans. Ana Jayone Yarza Perez explores the potential of adaptive reuse evaluation procedure in the Old City of Acre, Israel, as a means to deal with development and gentrification in this World Heritage site. Komal Potdar explores the historical evolution of the old town, cultural geography, and the current state of exclusion and gentrification in Jaffa, Israel. She underlines the need for discourse on socio-spatial analysis and assessment for decision-making processes for urban heritage design. Diego Inglez de Souza and Ivo Pereira de Oliveira reconnect architectural history with social and industrial accounts as a strategy for understanding the relationship between infrastructure, fishing, and urbanisation by studying the emblematic case of Matosinhos, Portugal. Andre Tavares seeks to trace the links between fluctuations in the natural cod resources, the technologies used by fishermen to catch and process the fish, and the development of coastal landscapes and the urban form of the fishing port Gafanha da Nazare, Portugal. And finally, Fatma Tanis uses an interview with architect Daniel Rosbottom from DHDR to provide insight into situated architecture in port cities by addressing a library and concert hall project realised in Bodo, Norway.

Library Projects of the National Scientific Library and Information Complex

Library Projects of the National Scientific Library and Information Complex

The Digital South Caucasus Collection: An International Digital Library Project

The Library of the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW) at New York University aims to provide access to scholarship on the ancient world for the widest audience possible, both domestically and internationally, via our digital library collections. Our latest project, the Digital South Caucasus Collection (DSCC), is an international collaboration between ISAW and archaeological institutions in the south Caucasus that seeks to preserve and provide open access scholarship on the ancient south Caucasus. This poster describes some of the initial challenges and approaches to building a digital library project during a global pandemic. The project is very much a work in progress, but has already provided various insights into collaborating with international institutions on digital library collections.

Library’s Augmented Reality (AR) Projects: Foreign Experience

The article analyzes the positive foreign experience of implementing augmented reality (AR) library projects. It has been found out that the most common uses of augmented reality in libraries today are providing access to information products with augmented reality and their promotion, navigation of library space and resources, promoting user education through the creation of appropriate applications with learning materials and resources and simplification for the user assimilation of information due to the diversity and interactivity of its visual presentation, informing and providing access to cultural heritage sites, organizing tours and exhibitions. Given that the use of AR in libraries not only expands the range of services and resources but also positively affects its reputation as an interactive creative institution, open to users and innovation, AR technology is effective not only in the library service system but also in the marketing activities of the institution, helping to attract new users. Current approaches to the implementation of library projects using augmented reality technology are highlighted. Their assistance in strengthening corporate culture, inter-institutional ties, and civil society is substantiated. It has been proved that the AR applications created as a result of project implementation operate on the principle of integrated information products, which allow the user to access distributed information from one access point via mobile phone, integrating not only information of the virtual space of the Internet environment but also real, physical, space. The advantages of AR implementation in the library have been determined, among which: budget realization, easy integration with available technologies, and promotion of interactivity of library service. The need for professional development of librarians and the organization of training courses on the use of immersive technologies in library activities is emphasized.

The Qualities of Architecture in Relation to Universal Design.

Aesthetic experience of the built environment involves all our senses: the sight of colour and form; the echo in a room; the smell of wood; the touch of handrails; the refreshing cool air on the skin, and so on. However, the definition of universal design sets no criteria for aesthetics, only stating the functional requirements that need to be met. The term for many architects and planners is still too closely associated with legislations, regulations, and standards. Buildings designed by some of the pioneers of modern architecture have been briefly mentioned in relation to universal design: Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright's use of the ramp as an architectural element, Mies van der Rohe's plans, the fluent transition between inside and outside, through which people may move easily and effortlessly, and Alvar Aalto's design of details, such as door handles suitable for people of varying heights. However, their architectural works have greater potential as sources of inspiration with respect to moving buildings in a universal direction. Rem Koolhaas' innovative design for a client with reduced mobility and his library projects are examples of how a contemporary architect has used Le Corbusier's architecture as a source of reference. This paper refers to or includes works made by the above-mentioned architects to illustrate universal design and thereby discusses architectural qualities and aesthetics in relation to the needs of people with reduced mobility, vision and hearing.

Thirty Years and Three New Libraries: Learning on the Job

AbstractThe following article, written by Amanda Saville, is a summary of the author's experiences as the client for three major new library buildings. It attempts to provide some advice and help for others contemplating a new library or significant refurbishment project by taking readers through the various stages of a development project. It assumes that the reader has no prior experience of managing building projects and offers some practical suggestions for a library client to consider. The projects on which the author was involved are listed at the end of the article and readers who would like to learn more are encouraged to go to the websites of the three institutions as all of them include detailed information and many images of the buildings.

Simulation and optimization of fire safety emergency evacuation in university library

To ensure the safety and emergency evacuation of university library buildings and improve the efficiency of safe personnel evacuation after an emergency, this study considered the actual size and volume of university libraries. The library project of the main campus of Liaoning Technical University was modeled using the Pathfinder software. By considering the site personnel load, personnel attributes, evacuation speed, and personnel ratio, a simulation was conducted to analyze the effect of stacked items’ quantity and location and the effect of the number of items, such as tables, chairs, and bookshelves, and other factors on the time required for evacuation through an indoor evacuation passage. The results reveal that the bottleneck area of evacuation is the indoor corridor and exit of evacuation stairs. The stacking quantity and location planning of items in the reading area greatly influence the evacuation time. Restrictive measures should be taken when the number of personnel in each layer reaches a certain value. The results obtained by this study can provide a theoretical basis for the reasonable planning of evacuation pathways and the future safety management of university libraries.

A peer-to-peer service approach in academic libraries

The role of the student worker is expanding in academic libraries. Their unique perspectives add valuable insights to the design and delivery of library services, project development, outreach activities, and operational planning. Student-workers gain internal and external benefits from working in peer-to-peer learning environments which also inform library managers of ways to improve library operations. The peer-to-peer service model is a framework that library managers can use to facilitate peer-to-peer learning. Lessons learned in expanding the role of the student worker through a peer-to-peer service model are shared and should be considered when creating experiential and operational support for library services.

Software applications in modeling of physical processes in radio engineering and electronics in the context of distance learning

This article examines the existing software applications for electronic circuit prototyping that can help evaluate the operation of the entire circuit based on specified parameters and find the best options. Using the TAC application and the Arduino library components, projects and instructions for creating and testing electronic circuits were developed. The resulting application was tested for capabilities and efficiency. The interface design and settings were also assessed to determine whether they simulate real conditions. The functionality of TAC application made it possible to generate alternate circuits. The results of software testing showed that using the application speeds up the learning process significantly when compared to traditional methods and helps eliminate problems that may emerge when designing and assembling circuits. The application may be useful in designing complex electronic circuits and developing teaching aids for students in technical fields.

The Construction of “Native” Jews in Late Mandate Palestine: An Ongoing Nahda as a Political Project

AbstractThis article concerns the place of late Ottoman Jews in Palestine on the eve of the 1948 War. It focuses on Israel Ben-Zeʾev (Wolfensohn), a Jerusalem-born educator and Nahda intellectual who led a movement of self-identified “native” Jews, including both “Old Yishuv” Ashkenazim and Sephardim, to combat their marginalization by the Zionist institutions. I examine his lifetime struggle to advance the study of Arabic and “Arab Jews” (yahud ʿarab) under early Islam by creating institutions of knowledge production and educational programs modeled on those he knew from his early academic career in Cairo. It was in the context of these struggles that demands for separate political representation for native Jews and for a specialized field of Arab Jewish studies coalesced as part of a broader project of a shared Arab-Jewish cultural modernization. They culminated in 1948, when Ben-Zeʾev finally realized his Arabic library project, ironically using looted Palestinian books, only to see its destruction four years later by Zionist leaders and Hebrew University professors.

Port City Architecture

This article addresses the role and the importance of the 19th-century narratives and depictions of port cities in contemporary architectural design with a specific focus on paintings. In the last decades, cities the world undertook a large number of urban regeneration projects along waterfronts. In this way, vacant sites on waterfront areas became an opportunity to apply contemporary architectural design; however, many of those projects resulted in generic buildings failing to establish relationships with their landscape, environs, and the history of port cities. High-rise buildings, for instance, began to dominate waterfronts in many of the port cities (e.g., in London, Liverpool, Rotterdam, Baltimore). The land was simply used as a “site” by developers, and the contemporary architectural design failed to address the specificity of the architecture and caved in to the demands which had little to do with the possibilities of place. This article showcases a library and concert hall project realised in Bodo, Norway, to provide insight into an alternative model, where the architecture is situated specifically in response to the port condition and acts as a mediator between port, city and landscape. An interview with the architect Daniel Rosbottom, founder of the architecture firm DRDH which designed the project, provided insight into the design process. As Rosbottom elaborated broadly, a 19th-century painting of church San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice h, by the English painter J.M.W Turner was used as an inspiration for the design process. The embedded knowledge in the painting informed the project at various levels and turned a site into a place on the waterfront of Bodo. The design process analysis reveals similarities and significance of paired relations between artworks and architectural design and hints that the remedy of the contemporary architectures in port cities may lie in port cities’ own (immaterial) resources.

PARTNERSHIP AS AN EFFECTIVE FORM OF CONSOLIDATION AND INTEGRATION OF INFORMATION RESOURCES OF LIBRARIES OF UKRAINE

Objective. The report is aimed to represent library partnership as an important component of diversification interaction of domestic scientific libraries and a universal form of consolidation of digital resources of documentary heritage. Methods. The methodology of the article is based on the general scientific principles of systematization, complexity, comprehensiveness of knowledge. Results. The content of publications of Ukrainian scientists in recent years on the importance of library projects for the development of domestic librarianship is highlighted. The use of the term "library partnership" in library science is substantiated. The most successful projects of scientific libraries of Ukraine as modern multifunctional institutions are presented. Conclusions. Positive consequence of active interaction of libraries through partnership is the implementation of effective communication, overcoming industry and departmental separation, targeted activities on customer focus, expanding the range of new services, a qualitatively new level of information library space. Prospects for further development of the domestic scientific, educational and cultural space through the library partnership are outlined.

Reliability and reproducibility in computational science: implementing validation, verification and uncertainty quantification in silico.

Reliability and reproducibility in computational science: implementing validation, verification and uncertainty quantification in silico.

Libraries and Reading Habits Among Elementary School Children: The Concept of the Classroom Collection

The elementary school regards the development of reading skills and the cultivation of free reading among students as one of its tasks. one of its ways of achieving this is to operate libraries in the school. Some schools provide only a central library. Some societies or locales, however, also believe in operating classroom collections in the elementary grades, so as to increase children' a exposure to books and reading. The reading habits of 301 fourth-grade students in Israel were examined. The sample included: (a) children who participated in a class library project in grades 2-3, with a central library also existing in the school; (b) children who participated in a class-library project in grades 2-3, with no central library in the school; and (c) children who did not participate in a class-library project, while having a central library in the school. Certain contribution of the class library project emerges, but the realization of this contribution depends on the existence of a central library in the school. A class library is not a substitute for a central collection. It can only constitute one approach among different approaches that can encourage children reading.

Architecture of care: social architecture and feminist ethics

Care ethics places a person’s relationship to another at the heart of related debates. Rooted in feminism, care ethics is a useful tool for exploring ethical aspects of a recent, international trend in social architecture, in which architects attempt to provide spatial solutions for needs ignored by both governments and private markets. In this article, care ethics serves as the theoretical background against which two architectural projects are examined: the Levinsky Garden Library project, built for migrant workers and asylum seekers in Tel Aviv; and the Wadi Abu Hindi school, renovated for Bedouin communities in Area C, east of Jerusalem, in the West Bank. Both projects were realised in the past two decades, in cooperation with international NGOs and municipal organisations. Joan Tronto has argued that the ability to care adequately is a quality of the morally good person or society. Her approach to care is distinguished by her insistence on placing care ethics in a political context. Applying Tronto’s concept of care to architecture equals widening the professional perception of architects. Based on Tronto’s concept, projects at the intersection of architecture and care ethics create opportunities for mutual modifications across both fields. As such, these projects expand current disciplinary roles, as architects use their professional tools to respond to an oppressive condition, beyond their professional responsibility.

The aging effect in evolving scientific citation networks

The study of citation networks is of interest to the scientific community. However, the underlying mechanism driving individual citation behavior remains imperfectly understood, despite the recent proliferation of quantitative research methods. Traditional network models normally use graph theory to consider articles as nodes and citations as pairwise relationships between them. In this paper, we propose an alternative evolutionary model based on hypergraph theory in which one hyperedge can have an arbitrary number of nodes, combined with an aging effect to reflect the temporal dynamics of scientific citation behavior. Both theoretical approximate solution and simulation analysis of the model are developed and validated using two benchmark datasets from different disciplines, i.e. publications of the American Physical Society (APS) and the Digital Bibliography & Library Project (DBLP). Further analysis indicates that the attraction of early publications will decay exponentially. Moreover, the experimental results show that the aging effect indeed has a significant influence on the description of collective citation patterns. Shedding light on the complex dynamics driving these mechanisms facilitates the understanding of the laws governing scientific evolution and the quantitative evaluation of scientific outputs.

Providing Restricted Access to Mental Health Archives within Government Archives: The Subject Stakeholder

ABSTRACT Since 2010, the author has been part of the Central State Hospital (CSH) Digital Library and Archives Project to digitize records from the first state psychiatric hospital for African Americans, founded in 1870 in Virginia at the pleadings of the Freedman's Bureau and run by the state since then.1 Many of the records of this hospital not yet accessioned by the Library of Virginia have now been digitized, and this project is working on a set of tools for lawful access, including one that can be used for automated redaction to protect sensitive data while responding to the needs of different stakeholder groups. Project participants were especially concerned about understanding the communities that have grown up around state-run psychiatric hospitals, as the project was done at the request of the hospital. The proposed plan is to work with the Central State Hospital and the Library of Virginia to provide the project materials to both. The records that were chosen to be digitized included the minutes of the people who first ran the hospital as well as the registers kept on the patients, which differ over time.2 In the past ten to fifteen years, professional discussion about community archives has responded to communities' desires to build their own archives so that they can be treated fairly, especially with reference to records created about them and kept by others, including records found in state archives.

Promotion of reading habit among school children in Sri Lanka

School Library Development in Sri Lanka is a large scale project which covers 4000 schools and includes building construction, distribution of books, furniture and equipment and training of human resources funded by the World Bank. BOBLEP (Book Based Language Enrichment Programme) developed from the concept of reading promotion within the library project. The project not only promotes reading using the purchased books, but it also promotes production of books by school children as well as teachers. It was decided as a result of the success of the project, to expand similar reading promotion activities in general. Teacher and Teacher Librarian education programmes of Sri Lanka incorporated a variety of such activities to train reading promotion among school children. The full paper will present the history and the structure of the project and activities carried out by the teacher librarians to expand it from an English language project to a reading promotion project conducted by the school libraries. It is expected that by sharing the information of this project, other developing countries which face similar constraints in providing suitable reading material can gain useful ideas.

A study of the Bookery’s Library Assistants programme in Cape Town


 
 
 The paper reports on a qualitative case study of one high school library. It forms part of a broader study of the Bookery’s School Library Project which has established 40 libraries in disadvantaged schools in Cape Town. The paper examines what difference the library is making to the school. The overarching aim is to find what might be learned from the Bookery’s Library Assistant (LA) programme about the staffing of school libraries in the South African context, where fewer than 20% of schools have functional libraries. The case study over two weeks comprised observations, interviews, and a questionnaire survey of the teachers. The working relations between the Bookery library assistant and the “teacher-librarian”, a full- time class teacher and the library’s driving force, are found to be crucial to the library’s sustainability. The library is clearly playing an important role in the students’ school experience and in meeting the information needs of teachers in their classroom teaching. But, despite general beliefs that the library is “a good thing”, only a minority of teachers integrate it into their teaching. It seems that teachers lack insight into the role of a library and information literacy in 21st century learning. Other key restrictions on the fulfilment of the library’s potential are its limited collections and the lack of ICTs. In the words of one participant, the overall conclusion is that “ It is helping but there are limitations”.
 
 

Public views on a new library project: a content analysis 2014–2019

PurposeThis study aims to investigate how the local residents viewed a new public library project in Macao through the analysis of newspaper articles published in 2014–2019 and how these views have changed the decision-makers in selecting a different site for the new library.Design/methodology/approachContent analysis was used to analyze public views. 569 newspaper articles on the new library project published in local major newspapers from January 2014 to August 2019 were coded and analyzed. Percentage agreement for the two coders and Cohen's Kappa were used to calculate the inter-rater reliability.FindingsThe top 5 factors discussed in the newspaper articles were the general decision-making process (38.65%), location (18.20%), selection of the Old Court Building as the new library site (15.07%), budget (13.5%) and new library services (6.85%). The local residents tended to raise questions on the high cost, the appropriateness of the selected library site, the preservation of the local heritage buildings, and the role that the government should play in this project.Research limitations/implicationsThis study only collected and analyzed the data from the articles published in the major newspapers in Macao. Other types of media from sources such as Facebook were not included in this study. Articles containing similar information but from different newspapers were all counted as individual entries for data collection. The voices/options were not divided by groups. For further analysis, the articles could be separated by voices from politicians, librarians and other special interest groups. The chosen categories in this study were based on Voyant Tools and the authors' interpretation/focus of the research question. The categories could be subdivided for further study. For example, the overall support of the project could be broken into full support, support with some minor reservations, support with major reservations, etc. And some articles currently in the neutral category with some degrees of support might fit into one of the above new sub-categories.Originality/valueThe case carries new references for any communities embarking on similar projects.