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The paper comparatively investigates the relation between controlled vocabularies assigned by the experts in Library of Congress and tags assigned by users in Library Thing database in three subjects, Economics, History and Sociology under Social Science domain. Based on Term matching (S= 14.80 %, E= 12.77 % and H= 8.06 %) and Jaccard similarity coefficient (E= 0.15, S= 0.15 and H= 0.11), we found little matching between both vocabularies. We also found that experts mostly use double-word and multi-word specific topical terms (S= 73.14 %, E= 72.89 % and H= 61.05 %), whereas social taggers mostly use single-word general non-topical terms (E= 54.88 %, H= 54.21 % and S= 48.55%) and little topical and few personal terms. While comparison with LCSH subfield, we found that experts prefer topical terms for all subjects, whereas, taggers only prefer it for Economics and geographic subdivision terms for History and Sociology, but they don’t prefer chronological terms for tagging. Even, experts prefer little title-based terms (H= 196 terms, S= 195 terms and E= 175 terms) but taggers mostly prefer title-based terms (H= 673 terms, S= 564 terms and E= 444 terms) in three subjects. However, the study concludes that both vocabularies are different, but libraries can exploit those uncontrolled vocabularies and can introduce ‘hybrid metadata ecology’ which combines controlled vocabularies, classification and folksonomies for better subject access and retrieval of social science documents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Identifying trends in research through co-citation or content analysis of journal contents is quite a common practice in LIS research. In this study, however, we proposed the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), a popular topic-modeling approach for identifying research trends of published articles in three scopus-indexed Indian LIS journals. A total of 1213 titles & their abstracts published between 2011 and 2022 have been considered. From these data, a corpus of frequently used 15 key phrases was identified from each journal using Count Vectorizer and then ten topics having higher coherence scores were extracted from each journal corpus using LDA techniques to understand to what extent these topics are different in these journals. The analysis of the study indicates that 'Library users' studies' especially in academic libraries; and 'bibliometric indicators for measuring research growth are a few common topics in these journals and, technological innovation; utilisation of electronic and print information resources; library management; or network analysis are some of the topics that are journal specific. From the t-SNE visualisation and pyLDAvis diagram, it was seen that the topics of DJLIT are significantly unique with discrete distributions than the other two journals. On analysing the growth of the top ten topics longitudinally, it was seen that research on digital libraries, analysing the global output, online search strategy, ranking universities, etc. are concurrent interests of research among researchers while academic library resources, including electronic resources and its use, open access are among diminishing research interests of authors. Since the topic-modeling approach can provide results devoid of bias, it can be used to identify research land scape longitudinally as well as obsolescence of topic in a domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emergence of COVID-19 pandemic hampered the availability of information sources and services in most academic institutions around the world. Making information available during major crisis reveals the long-standing position of the library in helping its patrons. This post COVID-19 study that took place between February 2020 and January 2021 investigated the availability of information sources and services during the COVID-19 pandemic in university libraries in Nigeria. Using a descriptive design, the study used 240 students who were purposely selected from 30 universities including federal, state and private universities in South-South geographical zone of Nigeria as sample. The study revealed that information sources such as: e-books, print journals, e-journals and electronic databases and services such as: Circulation, interlibrary loan, remote access, SDI, online reference services among others were available to the patrons in university libraries in Nigeria during the COVID-19 pandemic. The findings showed that the inhibiting factors against the availability of information sources and service in university libraries were poor telecommunication network, closure of some library sections, lack of preparation, unavailability of library policy on pandemic/disaster management and poor coordination among others. The study recommended some areas for improvement to ensure the availability of information sources and services to the library patrons during major crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]