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Library and information science has been at an infant stage in Pakistan, primarily in resource management, description, discovery, and access. The reasons are many, including the lack of interest and use of modern tools, techniques, and best practices by librarians in Pakistan. Finding a solution to these challenges requires a comprehensive study that identifies the current state of libraries in Pakistan. This paper fills this gap in the literature by reviewing the relevant literature published between 2015 and 2021 and selected through a rigorous search and selection methodology. It also analyzes the websites of 82 libraries in Pakistan through a theoretical framework based on various aspects. The findings of this study include: Libraries in Pakistan need a transition from traditional and limited solutions to more advanced information and communication technology (ICT)-enabled, user-friendly, and state-of-the-art systems to produce dynamic, consumable, and sharable knowledge space. They must adopt social semantic cataloging to bring all the stakeholders on a single platform. A libraries consortium should be developed to link users to local, multilingual, and multicultural collections for improved knowledge production, recording, sharing, acquisition, and dissemination. These findings benefit Pakistani libraries, librarians, information science professionals, and researchers in other developing countries. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study of its kind providing insights into the current state of libraries in Pakistan through the study of their websites using a rigorous theoretical framework and in the light of the latest relevant literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many academic libraries collect art exhibition catalogues and juvenile books to support the curriculum, but academic library review sources and book vendors have limited coverage of these niche areas. For more than a decade, Wichita State University has used purchase plans from Worldwide Art Books and Junior Library Guild to acquire print books. This paper discusses the assessment of both plans, how experience with this assessment has influenced development of an assessment plan, and reasons other libraries may want to assess their own niche collecting plans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Association for Library Collections & Technical Services (ALCTS) Board of Directors approved the Core Competencies for Cataloging and Metadata Professional Librarians, hereafter referred to as the "Core Competencies," in January 2017. The Core Competencies lists the skills required of professionals performing cataloging and metadata work in libraries of all types. In the six years since the document's release, the cataloging and metadata community has adopted new cataloging standards, experimented with new tools, and engaged in conversations and reparative efforts around inclusive metadata. In this paper, we, the authors of the Core Competencies, report the results of our survey research that assessed the current use of the document within the cataloging and metadata community and solicited comments on ways in which the document might be revised. We conclude with recommendations for immediate changes to the document, and for its future use and maintenance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper summarizes a research program that focuses on how catalogers, other cultural heritage information workers, web/Semantic Web technologists, and the general public understand, explain, and manage resource description tasks by creating, counting, measuring, classifying, and otherwise arranging descriptions of cultural heritage resources within the bibliographic universe and beyond it. A significant effort is made to update the nineteenth- century mathematical and scientific ideas present in traditional cataloging theory to their twentieth- and twenty-first-century counterparts. There are two key elements in this approach: (1) a technique for diagrammatically depicting and manipulating large quantities of individual and grouped bibliographic entities and the relationships between them, and (2) the creation of resource description exemplars (problem-solution sets) that are intended to play theoretical, pedagogical, and IT system design roles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditionally, standard catalog records have provided bibliographic data that mostly address the basic features of library resources. At the same time, catalogs have offered access to these records through a limited array of names, titles, series, subject headings, class numbers, and a relatively small number of keywords contained within descriptions. Today's catalog users expect access to information well beyond what can be offered by traditional approaches to bibliographic description and access. By pursuing a suite of projects, the Library of Congress (LC) has responded to the challenge of enticing patrons to continue to include the online catalog among the tools they use for information retrieval. Drawing extensively on the power of automation, staff of LC's Bibliographic Enrichment Advisory Team (BEAT) have created and implemented a variety of initiatives to link researchers, catalogs, and Web resources; increase the content of the catalog record; and link the catalog to electronic resources. BEAT's ongoing work demonstrates how, in the electronic era, it is possible to provide new and improved ways to capitalize on traditional services in the digital age. This paper will illustrate these points by focusing on BEAT's tables of contents projects to demonstrate how library automation can make significant bibliographic enhancement efforts quick, easy, and affordable to achieve. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In June 2009, the Association for Library Collections and Technical Services Heads of Technical Services in Large Research Libraries Interest Group established the Task Force on Cost/Value Assessment of Bibliographic Control to address recommendation 5.1.1.1 of On the Record: Report of the Library of Congress Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control, which focused on developing measures for costs, benefits, and value of bibliographic control. This paper outlines results of that task force’s efforts to develop and articulate metrics for evaluating the cost and value of cataloging activities specifically, and offers some next steps that the community could take to further the profession’s collective understanding of the costs and values associated with bibliographic control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews the enormous changes in cataloging and classification reflected in the literature of 2003 and 2004, and discusses major themes and issues. Traditional cataloging and classification tools have been revamped and new resources have emerged. Most notable themes are: the continuing influence of the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Control (FRBR); the struggle to understand the ever-broadening concept of an "information entity"; steady developments in metadata-encoding standards; and the globalization of information systems, including multilinguistic challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) presents a complex conceptual model. Because of this, it is not easy for everyone to understand. The purpose of this paper is to make some of the more difficult aspects of the FRBR model, in particular the Group 1 entities work, expression, manifestation, and item, easier to understand by placing FRBR in the context of what it is: a conceptual entity-relationship model. To this end, a definition of the term ‘model’ is presented, a variety of types and functions of models are introduced, conceptual models are discussed in detail, modeling an abstraction is explained, and different ways of interpreting FRBR are suggested. Various models used in the history of cataloging are introduced to place FRBR in the context of the historical development of document models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The North American library community is looking at ways to enhance authority records with nonroman scripts. The Library of Congress Name Authority Cooperative Program (NACO) Authority File (LC/NAF) is limited to Latin script. This paper looks ahead to the use of other scripts in LC/NAF. The author examines the options for using Hebrew script in MARC 21 authority records, and considers the prospects for cooperative authority work between American and Israeli libraries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the enrichment of traditional cataloging for improved access to information particularly in the Library of Congress Tables of Contents projects. Catalog users expect access to information well beyond what can be offered by traditional approaches to bibliographic description and access. The Library of Congress has responded to the challenge of enticing patrons to continue to include the online catalog among the tools they use for information retrieval. The staff of the Bibliographic Enrichment Advisory Team have created and implemented a variety of initiatives to link researchers, catalogs, and Web resources; increase the content of the catalog record; and link the catalog to electronic resources. The paper also illustrate such points by demonstrate how library automation wherein it can make significant bibliographic enhancement efforts easy and quick.

This study investigates the factors that influence perceived and expected daily task competencies for technical services administrators; that is, the competencies technical services administrators claim to possess (perceived) and those they believe they ought to possess (expected) in the areas of acquisitions, cataloging, and serials. For the purposes of this paper, a technical services administrator is defined as one who oversees, at a minimum, the acquisitions, cataloging, and serials units in his or her library. The author surveyed 116 technical services administrators via e-mail in fall 2003, receiving a response rate of 54 percent and an acceptable use rate of 53 percent. The survey was designed to correlate perceived and expected competencies with: (1) an incumbent's professional background; (2) tenure in current position at present institution; and (3) size of technical services unit as measured in full-time equivalents (FTE). The study concludes that incumbent tenure and size of the technical services unit affect both perceived and expected competencies, with the latter having a greater effect. Professional background affects competency possession, but has only a marginal effect on competency expectation. The findings reveal that administrators with ten or more years in their current positions who have noncataloging backgrounds and at least ten FTE in their technical services units are least likely to know the daily procedures of their technical services units. Administrators with ten or more years in their current positions who have cataloging backgrounds and at least ten FTE in their technical services units are least likely to feel they ought to know the daily procedures of their technical services departments. These administrators are also least likely to have responsibilities that fall outside of technical services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the literature review represented in this article examines the articles, books, theses and reports published from 1995 to June 2003 in the areas of cataloguing and classification of fiction books, browsing and selection of fiction by readers, user studies of readers, and adult readers' advisory services. Due to the lengthy academic publication process, studies published in 1995 were for the most part not included in Liangzhi Yu and Ann O'Brien's review. The major area of study that will not, for the most part, be included in this study is historical. Several books have been written in this area since 1995, along with many articles and theses. The numerous books and articles written before 1995 and the primary sources from the 1920s and before contain enough information for another literature review. Because this is one of the few areas of library science that has plenty of historical research, this would be a particularly valuable literature review, especially for researchers and students of library science. One of the more unusual aspects of the literature review here was the surprising number of books, articles, and theses published overseas. Nearly half of the more than 180 books, articles, and theses looked at for this paper were published in Europe, Australia, and New Zealand.