Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Evolution Of An Institutional Repository: A Case History From Nebraska, Paul Royster

UNL Libraries: Faculty Publications

The 13-year history of the institutional repository (IR) at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln is recounted with emphasis on local conditions, administrative support, recruitment practices, and management philosophy. Practices included offering new services, hosting materials outside the conventional tenure stream, using student employees, and providing user analytics on global dissemination. Acquiring trust of faculty depositors enhanced recruitment and extra-library support. Evolution of policies on open access, copyright, metadata, and third-party vendors are discussed, with statistics illustrating the growth, contents, and outreach of the repository over time. A final section discusses future directions for scholarly communications and IRs in particular.

Cultural Memory In Danger: Sustainable Information, Preservation, And Technology In The Humanities: A Theoretical Approach, Casey D. Hoeve

UNL Libraries: Faculty Publications

Management of library collections is an inherently collaborative process. Spanning multiple generations, materials are selected that support user communities, as librarians strive to achieve optimization of storage and access at the lowest cost.i While established partnerships are crucial for the survival of libraries, within any cooperative network, there exist opportunities for divergent practices. Alternative initiatives may have progressive intentions, but competing systems and groups have the potential to disrupt recognized standards and infrastructure, some of which can prove detrimental to information organizations.

Abrupt format changes and technological advancements have altered the ways in which materials are currently acquired, accessed, and …

Oai-Pmh Harvested Collections & User Engagement, Deeann Allison

UNL Libraries: Faculty Publications

Discovery tools are used in libraries to bring together books, articles, and other resources. Research has focused on user and librarian evaluation of these tools, but there are few evaluations of non-book and non-article sources. Discovery tools can also include metadata for local collections harvested through the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). Creating these harvests can be time consuming for staff, so it is important for libraries to understand if and how patrons use these records. The University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries (UNL Libraries) harvests metadata from local collections into the Encore discovery tool. A study was conducted …

Chatbots In The Library: Is It Time?, Deeann Allison

UNL Libraries: Faculty Publications

This paper describes a pilot at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln for a chatbot that answers questions about the library and library resources. The chatbot was developed using a SQL database to store the question and answers using Artificial Intelligence Mark-up Language metadata. The user interface was built using PHP, adapted from Program-O. The open source PHP program was modified to support better display and the launching of URLs within the chatbot screen. Database content was created by “mining” library websites for information, and analyzing chat logs.

The chatbot answers questions from a variety of users from around the world. It …