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Discussing steps in systematic literature review in health sciences

Discussing steps in systematic literature review in health sciences

This work presents a proposal for comprehensive training of the curricular units Reference Service, Specialized Information Sources, Collections’ development and Information Literacy in the Bachelor's Degree in Library Science of the Faculty of Information and Communication. There are several meeting points among these subjects, sometimes identifying cyclical or linking relationships depending on the topic being addressed. Possible synergies included are the reference service and its collection of specialized sources; the management of specialized collections in an area of knowledge; the close link between information literacy and the reference service as a framework for its development. Based on the identification of these links, it is proposed a methodology applied to university teaching of the bachelor’s degree in library science, which allows an integrated formation of the contents. It is expected that this methodology will result in a better understanding of the topics for the student body, obtaining a comprehensive training on the topics.

The CTBTO Library's main goal is to support novel strategy development by experts, ensuring sources of reliable information as well as keeping up to date the community with the latest research about the four main monitoring technologies of the verification regime by providing access to technical and scientific databases to the entire PTS. The CTBTO Library, as part of the Capacity Building Section, IDC Division (IDC/CBT), was tasked to develop a map of knowledge to understand accurately the specific information needed by the users, as well as to learn how CTBTO experts communicated with the scientific community. One of the best tools of Bibliometrics in Library Science to address this challenge is the social network analysis approach. This framework allows for identifying how the knowledge grows and learning when, how and who has established connections. The network visualization represents with bubbles the number of publications with links, direct connection and interaction in co-authorship, on the same organization or with many others every time one author recognizes its affiliation; countries in this analysis represent the collaboration between CTBTO State Signatories. This study provides insights where CTBTO may develop capacities with other institutions in terms of seismic, hydroacoustic, infrasound and radionuclide monitoring technologies to achieve its goal.

Mendely is a multiplatform service: web portal, desktop software and mobile application, which allows you to manage bibliographic references; find 30 million academic documents; and share and collaborate online (6 million profiles). It is proprietary and free, acquired in 2013 by Elsevier.

Learning management systems are redefining the meaning of higher education. Its development has allowed reproducing the experience of learning without having to go to the classroom. So that the digital library doesn't lose visibility to the college community, it must be actively integrated into the distance educational projects. This conference describes a digital reference service for searching textual learning objects, whose direct users are the teachers. The selected objects are included in the subjects’ bibliographies, which are later accessed by the students from the learning management system. To do so, the reference service must select relevant documents in coordination with the teachers, and provide digital access, observing copyright. Furthermore, as one of the attributes of learning objects is reutilization, their metadata must be described in order to retrieve them later for other subjects. This process will avoid duplication of effort and add value to the found objects.

This presentation explores the current state of chat reference and specifically addresses using Springshare’s proactive LibChat to increase chat traffic in a natural experiment that took place at two four-year institutions over the academic year 2017-2018, in comparison with two four-year institutions that did not implement this method. As part of a recent transition of the California State University system to Ex Libris’ Alma/Primo, several universities embedded Springshare’s proactive chat widget on Primo search results pages (SRPs), which allowed users to begin reference transactions natively within their research sessions. In this presentation, we take advantage of a natural experiment that arose when two libraries deployed chat to SRPs, and two other libraries with similar enrollment profiles in similar geographic areas did not. By analyzing chat transactions collected from the four libraries over the course of academic years 2016-2017 (pre-deployment) and 2017-2018 (post-deployment), we calculate the effects on chat transactions when introducing proactive chat onto Primo SRPs. This quasi-experimental panel study, with two libraries in the treatment group paired with pseudo-control libraries, found that introducing proactive chat onto SRPs significantly increases the transaction count – even up to a quadrupling of the baseline in certain months. Presenters will also explain how libraries can set up their own natural experiments as an alternative to A/B testing of Primo. We close with an overview of pros and cons regarding chat on search results pages, offering workflow suggestions for libraries considering this implementation and the corresponding increase in reference traffic that it will bring.

The use of reliable data from scientific literature through models close to evidence-based clinical practice are basic to foreseeing the consequences of clinical decisions in contexts of uncertainty. To take informed decisions it is needed to have the ability to to recover, analyze and critically judge the quality of sou rces and evaluate the levels of scientific evidence for later application. This process can be either endangered or enhanced by several factors. The aims of this paper are to analyze the key aspects in which librarians influence the integration of scientific evidence in clinical practice and to discusse on the role that health libraries should have. A literature review was conducted using MEDLINE, Embase, CINAHL and LISA. Review articles and original research aimed to study the role of health librarians in improving the integration of scientific evidence in clinical practice have been analyzed. Works related to critical thinking, clinical decissions processes and library services have been taken into consideration as well. Several organizational and individual factors act as barriers to informed clinical decision making, as lack of time for reading and implementationof the results, lack of skills or experience in searching for information, lack of training or participation in projects of research, etc. If several interventions are combined, including active and continued training by health librarians, it can help improve the weaknessess. The evidence shows that excellence in informed clinical decision-making requires well trained health professionals to conduct a search for effective information and to evalua te critically the results. Librarians can contribute to this process and, consequently, improve patient attention through team work with health professionals. This scenario raises the need to expand the training of librarians and redefine library tasks and services to other disciplines.

The specialty of content curation is presented; good examples of its use are shown in social media such as blogs, newsletters, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Paper.li, Instagram, with special attention to the Library & Information Science sector; and finally, it shows how to do curation according to the method of the 4 S's.

Reference at our academic library, following an interval of protracted decline, recently went through a renaissance period following the evolution of our chat reference service. This change was brought about by a desire to more actively capture today’s digitally native students. Academic libraries have previously sought to increase usage of their reference services by a variety of methods, including physically roving through the library or offering satellite locations. In an attempt to mirror that approach in an online environment, we implemented a proactive chat widget that allowed us to “e-rove” to students throughout our library’s website and catalog. Our previous chat implementation was passive in nature, requiring students to seek out help, often prior to searching. This meant that students would need to seek out the chat button in order to use the service. The redesign of chat reference included a proactive widget that popped-up, getting the users attention and encouraging them to chat with a librarian. The transition to a proactive approach resulted in a staggering increase in the number of chats that occured. This dramatic increase resulted in both positive and negative effects for students and librarians alike. The philosophy of reference at our academic library calls upon librarians to treat each reference interaction as an instructional opportunity. A hallmark of outstanding customer service is the anticipation of patron needs, and actively offering assistance. The increase in chat volume often called into question our ability to provide adequate patron instruction and quality service. Our presentation will discuss the successes and challenges brought on by this change from a passive chat service to a proactive one. We will discuss topics such as: the quality (READ Scale) of chat reference questions that occured during this evolution, how the volume increase impacted librarian responsibilities and how the library reacted to each of these events. In an age where many academic libraries are seeing a decline in reference services, chat reference brings this service to the 21st century at lightning speed. By fine tuning their own chat references services, libraries can make research even more relevant for today’s student.

Rapid Reviews (RR) are increasingly being used by clinicians, policy makers and healthcare decision makers, and are becoming a more significant resource for health policy, and to identify evidence gaps. The purpose of RR is good; however, RR definitions, methods, and applications are numerous and also vary substantially. There is no a clear definition so it’s possible to get RR explained as “a type of systematic review in which components of the Systematic Review (SR) process are simplified, omitted or made more efficient in order to produce information in a shorter period of time, preferably with minimal impact on quality”, as well as “a type of knowledge synthesis in which components of the SR process are simplified or omitted to produce information in a short period of time”, among many others. Furthermore, there are several types of RR, and there is either no agreement on that. Our main is to compile and review the wide vary of methods and types of RR that are available in the literature, and try to analyse the value of each one focusing on the information specialist role. In order to achieve that, we made a selection of the institutions or agencies (AHRQ, CADTH, KCE, WHO...) who have publicly available their methods about this area. We checked the different recommendations and searched for some basic elements of special interest as, for instance, the presence of protocol, time or development, number or researchers, information specialist as member of the team, databases searched, etc. Despite the large and assorted amount of RR, it seems that there are also some common points: they should assure high quality bearing a special relevance to the transparency of methods, as well as the importance of engagement or the recommendation of counting on the collaboration of information specialists to perform these kind of studies. Additionally, they all agree that a RR should be performed in less time than a systematic review. On the other hand, there are significant differences on how to abbreviate processes: limiting search strategies by database, by dates, updating literature search of previous reviews, excluding assessment of the quality of included studies, or the type or factors to consider contextual factors affecting the studies. In brief, there is no accordance within the different typologies of RR, in the time that should be spent for their production, or in the recommendation to use text mining, among many others. The short-term expectations seem to be similar, and new RR recommendations are already being announced (e.g. from Cochrane). Summarizing, the current landscape of RR is quite chaotic, and there’re lot of discrepancies between methods, and no consistency or agreement amount producers. It would be recommendable to work on a consistency and uniformity of this kind of documents, in order to make easier basic aspects for the reporting and the quality assessment of RR.

Distance Education Bureau of University Grants Commission emphasizes on infrastructural facilities for the learners, and faculty members. It encompasses setting up and maintaining of separate library and resource centre. With the help of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) it is now a feature of every open and distance learning institutions to provide library services to its learners in an effective and efficient way. The role of the library is vital in all types of education - conventional as well as distance mode. This paper discusses how Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) library provides innovative ICT based library services like RATE service; e-Gyankosh etc for the user community to access all subscribed online resources and databases from remote end. It also describes National Open and Distance Learners' Library and Information Network (NODLINET). NODLINET has a nationwide coverage for distance learning libraries. It helps in sharing resourses and services. This paper also highlights various other initiatives taken by the library like Discovery services, A-to -Z service, M-Library services, Mobile Augmented Reality service etc.

Science 2.0 is the scientific activity that utilizes of ICT and social networks, using the innovative tools and services provided by them, with a philosophy that advocates for participating, communicating, collaborating and sharing.

The demand for digital information received by the Service of Reference and Bibliographic Information through the Google Drive tool, implemented in the Library page on the website of the Faculty of Right. A percentage reading of the statistical data collected in nine-month period and the results are presented by means of graphs.

Library service is the combination of the services- process and its delivery. In a library, the service offered from acquisition section, technical section, reference section etc. are the processes carried out there and thereafter delivered to the users. The library services have changed fast in last ten years. Now a days e resources, Internet and Web 2.0 tools represent large portion of library services. Innovation and technology transfer differentiates the role of the librarian and extends it beyond the limits of the information intermediary. The librarian in order to involve, anticipate and especially produce innovation has to learn how to learn, as libraries have to learn how to change.

This paper is presented as part of the application for participation in the procedure for filling the post of Head of Information and User Education emanating from the resolution of June 3, 2014, of Universidad Pablo de Olavide, laying specific competition calls for the provision of two jobs of civil servant administration and services, technical manager at the Library of the University.

The open digital services play an important role in the processes of global communication and exchange of information in different infoentornos. The aim of this paper is to discuss open digital services as parts key to strengthening the teaching, research and dissemination of useful content to support virtual education. Elements: In this document the following points are addressed: info-environments as frames of digital services open; characteristics of the open digital services; and open relationship between digital services such as axes of online education in librarianship.

Objectives and design of the online information service, which has been implemented by the Chat Service Work Team for the Library of the Universidad de Málaga , are presented. Main outcomes and conclusions are also highlighted.

The practice of evidence-based medicine becomes necessary for the health professional trying to keep up. The vast amount of information available to be selected, analyzed and synthesized to facilitate decision making based on good quality information. Systematic reviews are the type of study that performs this function, and their development must work at different stages, one of which is the search for information, work should ideally be done by a librarian with the training necessary for that process . This paper describes the methodology used by the Biomedical Library of the Catholic University of Chile to meet your institution's researchers who require support in this area.

Instant messaging has been widely adopted by librarians as a means of expanding reference and outreach services to library users. At the University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD) Library, staff use Libraryh3lp, a low-cost solution created by and for librarians, to connect with patrons 24 hours a day across multiple platforms. Learn how to reach your patrons using customized chat widgets embedded in your library website, databases, or online research guides. We will also discuss usability issues and assessment and present free tools that can improve the chat experience, including screencasting programs, URL shorteners, and macros.

Reference services and reference collections in academic libraries are going through significant changes. In this paper, some of the issues prevalent today in building and maintaining digital reference collections will be discussed, such as: presentation and organization, marketing, use, and selection of digital reference resources.

With the proliferation of the social web, questions about information quality and optimization attract the attention of IS scholars. Question-answering (QA) sites, such as Yahoo!Answers, have the potential to produce good answers, but at the same time not all answers are good and not all QA sites are alike. When organizations design and plan for the integration of question answering services on their sites, identification of good answers and process optimization become critical. Arguing that ‘given enough answers all questions are answered successfully,’ this paper identifies the optimal number of posts that generate high quality answers. Based on content analysis of Yahoo! Answers’ informational questions (n=174) and their answers (n=1,023), the study found that seven answers per question are ‘enough’ to provide a good answer.

This work aims at discussing the built-in Zotero that strengthens as social software and therefore extends its possibilities for collaborative learning. Among the new features are the groups that allow collaborative networking between students-teacher-community, share bibliographies, find people with common interests in a subject, etc.

The emergence of the Internet has greatly expanded the possibilities of access to reference information in libraries, as the source volume exceeds the limits of existing physical collection of works from their collections. Of course, this can cause the user is overwhelmed by the large amount of information they have at their disposal, which he is not always able to assess and process properly. Given this difficulty, he finds it convenient to leave these tasks in the hands of generic search engines, whose algorithms (more or less complex) do not always return results tailored to their real needs. In this situation, the reference librarian should add to their ability to select relevant sources of information management software tools most appropriate to allow the reader the necessary autonomy in their search for information.

Course on the academic publication system and the results it generates expressed in the different types of academic documents.

The developments of information and communication technologies shape the way libraries, and more specifically higher education libraries, are organized and provide their services. The traditional reference service is reinvented in a digital component. The awareness of the advantages and the importance of this service availability today and predictably in the future, suggest the reflection on current reference service situation in Polytechnic Institutes, and the contribution to its knowledge and development. In the empirical part of this study a survey was sent to all Polytechnic Institute libraries and its schools. The research is based on the reference services which Polytechnic Public Higher Education libraries provide, even if almost all institutions assume having one or two active reference services, these being identified, often, as traditional or digital. This mediation of the information professional has not been neglected in the digital reference service. The analysis of the collected enquiries' results showed that, despite almost all the libraries which filled them have a Traditional Reference Service, only very few provide digital reference services.

Assuming that public information is now a working tool for libraries (and their users), this paper tries to describe its distinctive characteristics in the Italian reality. After recalling the freedom of information legal tools and having given a picture of the supply of public information network, the paper focuses on the policies developed in our country, the contradictory results arising from the phenomena that characterize the Government information on the net and the possible role of different types of libraries.

Information sources in science and technology specialist lack adequate systems for managing, cataloging and automated representation. This is because managers approach prevail bibliographic bibliographic description above consideration of institutional information source and documentary. In order to experience a new management model information sources based on their analytical study, the program is designed CUMULUS bringing new solutions to treat documentary sources and semantic relationship with third party resources. The resulting system is able to organize information sources with a description and comprehensive control of their authorities and articulate their semantic retrieval, making it a new tool to handle the source and assist in the education and training of future filmmakers.

The paper looks into the need for developing full text digital archives and libraries with programmes that can process Indian vernacular languages. Use of local scripts becomes inevitable in the creation of Information systems for digitized palm leaves, manuscripts and other local documents. Also discusses about the importance of conceiving an alternate algorithm for digital archives that is capable of searching and retrieving individual pages rather than whole documents, which is the current fashion among international packages like GreenStone, DSpace, Eprint, etc. Traces out the historical development of the package 'Nitya Archives' which can be used to create multi lingual digital archives in Indian languages and describes in detail the major projects implemented using it.

Digital reference service is an emerging trend of traditional reference service. Easily accessible digital reference service has become one of the hallmark of the library and information services. The paper highlights how new visage of traditional reference service is developing as a natural solution to keep pace with comprehensive technological environment. It discusses about the basic concepts, elements of digital reference service and give in detail modes, the advantages, limitations, and some details regarding various digital reference services carried out by several libraries and commercial organistions.

The universe of schools integrated in the public polytechnics located in different geographical areas of Portugal keep in their libraries, documentation centers, documentation services or other designation, all areas of human knowledge. We propose to reflect about the importance of reference services on libraries on public polytechnics and diagnose the existence of reference services in these institutions and how they are offered, traditional or digital. These spaces are privileged to offer this service to the user of the standard service or one that uses new technological tools of digital services environment. The impact felt in the academic community, with the provision of these services will be also subject to thorough analysis and evaluation thereof.

This presentation presents the use of Web 2.0 technologies and information architecture in the information broker’s work in the era of information society promoting participation in the creation and sharing of knowledge. The author presents also its own website ECOLOGICAL Wikidot – Renewable Energy. All collected materials were organized in such a way as to be easily navigated and also reviewed in terms of quality, reliability, and their usefulness for the seeker of valuable materials for their final thesis or to broaden their knowledge about unconventional sources of energy. The website is dynamic, continuously developed by the author of the new valuable sources.

The purpose of this paper is to propose an evaluation method for measuring the quality of World Wide Web reference resources (dictionaries and encyclopaedias) that the Library of the University of León makes available through its Digital Library under the heading “Resources on the internet”. The project undertaken by the Library Working Group on Electronic Resources, consists on evaluating all web resources included in each of the mentioned categories in order to determine their suitability. The results obtained after the quality assessment, will help us to select, among the list of proposals submitted at the beginning, those electronic reference resources more useful for the university community members, discard those which fail to achieve the scoring proposed and recommend other to meet one hundred percent with the parameters outlined

Special libraries have emerged out as efficient information catering organizations with exquisite tools to meet the never saturating demands of the information seekers. Still due to time, budgetary and staff constraints it is not an easy task to provide quality services let alone value added services.Really Simple syndication or Rich Site Summary is a part of push technologies used to speed up on-time and up-to-date information dissemination. In other words it can be said that RSS is a newer version of Current Awareness Service.. RSS feeds are used to share and deliver information spontaneously to the patrons. RSS are either posted on the website or read through RSS readers (eg. Bloglines and Google Reader). RSS in special libraries are used to - update web page contents, alert new additions in the online catalogue, give notifications, inform overdue materials, display new programs and events in the library, create electronic newsletter of the library, reflect press releases and media advisories, display job openings, create reading list, table of contents, provide current awareness and guides etc. This poster would outline what’s and how’s of RSS feeds and their applications in the special libraries. Furthermore sample demonstration of RSS feed creation, editing, downloading and hosting on the web page through freely available RSS feed software will be made.

Based on the ACRL Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education, social networking literacy training prepares librarians from multiple generations for work with new and emerging social applications. These applications impact both library services and users in today's college and research libraries. Librarians must understand these new technologies, before making educated decisions about choosing if or how to implement them in library services they offer. By describing and defining the general concepts for engaging these technologies, the authors suggest practical methods for training library practitioners and students in these participation-rich online competencies. The authors also describe their experiences creating new library services based on social networking literacy, and in training librarians in these competencies. The librarian in charge of implementing social networking services in the Yale Science Libraries since 2007 will share his experiences, and will describe the ways in which these competencies were shared with LIS students at Rutgers University in Spring 2008.

Analysis and historical overview of the reference services that have evolved into web services that take advantage of knowledge of the community. The basic principles of the so-called Web 2.0: continuous improvement and use of collective intelligence,can help to develop the library 2.0 and above all one of the most important services of the library: the reference service

Sapienza Università di Roma has started the service “ask a librarian” (“chiedi al bibliotecario”) since July 2004. For this service, we use a software that permits working directly on the web. Operators are fully involved, they know all questions asked and all answers given. Every operator contributes to the service on the basis of his/her disciplinary competence and personal knowledge. The results are partially good. We received about 600 questions in 1.205 days, and we gave 412 answers. Answers are given very quickly, but they do non cover all questions. Besides, we can not measure answers given by e-mail, in case of software problems.

Welcome to Binghamton University (BU) Libraries’ virtual poster, MeeboMe: How Good are We? This poster was created for the "Using Evaluation Data to Change & Improve Virtual Reference" virtual poster session sponsored by the Management of Electronic Resources and Services Committee (MERS), a committee of MARS, for the American Library Association 2008 Annual Conference. The BU Libraries have a history of evaluating and assessing library services and collections. Internally, departments meet regularly to set goals, establish action plans and review progress, and there is library wide strategic planning. Externally, we have gathered feedback from the campus community through a variety of methods such as the LIBQUAL+ surveys, usability studies and pop-up surveys. Most recently, we used surveys and statistics to acquire feedback on a pilot MeeboMe chat reference service. This evaluative data helped us to decide to continue offering the service and brought attention to areas where the service could be improved. This virtual poster provides background information on our implementation of MeeboMe and describes our evaluation methods and explains changes we made based on patron and staff feedback.

Since 2005, the Swiss National Library is working on the expanding of its own virtual reference desk, SwissInfoDesk. A Swiss Virtual Reference Desk with 25 library partners is in process.

Research is divided about the potential of e-service to bridge communication gaps, particularly to diverse user groups. According to the existing body of literature, e-service may increase or decrease the quality of service received. This study analyzes the level of service received by different genders and ethnic groups when public librarians answer online reference queries. Quality of e-service was evaluated along three dimensions: responsiveness, reliability, and courtesy. This study found no significant differences among different user groups along any of these dimensions, supporting the argument that the virtual environment facilitates equitable service and may overcome some challenges of diverse user groups.

Library subject gateways (LSGs) are collections of databases and other information resources, arranged by subject, that have been assembled, reviewed and recommended by specialists, usually librarians. These library developed gateway collections support research and reference needs by identifying and pointing to recommended, academically-oriented web pages. Back at beginning of SGs libraries used to develop such tools by creating HTML coded web pages without using resource management software or any metadata description standards. These days, several open source software that support metadata description standards, data harvesting, web technology standards for SG creation and management have been developed providing the opportunity to every institution to create such a tool alone or in a cooperative with other institutions basis. On top of all such software does not demand any knowledge of HTML coding from the SG editors. THIRA was developed under PLOEGIS: from information to knowledge project (Operational Programme for Education and Initial Vocational Training ΙΙ - OPEIVT ΙΙ) After extensive bibliographic literature review on LSGs a list of mandatory characteristics was developed to define the core features of software the Library was looking for the creation and management of its SG. Based on the characteristics list the project team (both librarians and IT personnel) selected Scout Portal Toolkit because it was virtually turnkey, very inexpensive to maintain and operate, easy for non-technical staff to set up and populate with metadata, conformed to international standards for metadata, data harvesting and web technology. Scout PT comes with a Dublin Core Element Set and it took a few adjustments in order to support the metadata description of the resources held by the Library. Its Controlled Name Flag allows the usage of any thesaurus and its Classification Flag is open to any classification scheme. The project team selected the NDC’s bilingual List of Subject Headings for the subject description of the resources and the Australian Standard Classification of Education to create the Thematic Index. Regarding the technical aspect of the application, extensive additions to Scout’s source code were made in order to meet the requirements of the Library including changes to the database schema. The most fundamental issue was multi-language support (English and Greek) both in the application interface (menus, forms, etc) and in the bibliographical data (support for separate trees for each language). After adding multi-language capabilities to the application, the Library personnel proceeded to translating all forms, views and messages appearing in Scout in Greek. Furthermore, an alphabetic index of resources was added to the browsing options. Since this type of browsing was not provided in the original toolkit, the corresponding index was built from scratch. Finally, changes were also necessary in the metadata fields used in advanced search forms in order to provide the users with additional search options when looking for resources. The initial testing of the application included 311 databases held by the library at that moment. The conclusions drawn of this face highlighted some necessary improvements. These improvements mainly concerned the browsing capabilities offered to users which were initially limited to either resource type or resource thematic description, i.e it was not possible to view resources of a specific type (e.g. databases or electronic journals) for a given topic. In this direction, links were initially added to allow viewing only databases and more elaborate filtering capabilities were subsequently implemented.

The information needs of the modern citizen are satisfied more directly through the organised forms of the “hybrid” libraries as they are now called, which channel information to citizens via systematic research methods and retrieval channels. The library of TEI of Western Macedonia in its effort to cover the modern need for systematic and selective information has developed a multi-subject portal based on the ROADS open source software, written in Perl language. ROADS was a very good project which could become an excellent package for creating subject gateways with only a few improvements where needed.

The article presents the definition of virtual reference service and guidelines of implementing and maintaining reference services (preparing for virtual reference service, provision of service, organization of service, privacy). Advantages and disadvantages of services which allow patrons and librarians to communicate are reported. Web sites of American, European and Polish academic libraries are explored and several methods of providing reference assistance are presented.

Presented is an evolutional development of libraries during the 20th century and rapid changes caused in them at the end of the century. Described is the nature of digital data and development of IC technologies as well as their impact on the transformation process of libraries in the Information Age. Predicted are future trends of the development of academic libraries with regard to the change of their role and activity form in the educational environment. Emphasized is the necessity for application of universal software instruments, according to the users’ needs and expectations as well as recommendations of universal standards.

A structural overview of the evolution of existing academic libraries and of some challenges that this bring to librarians. Library spaces, functions and services have been reconfigured toward the hybrid library, by ones perceive as natural adaptation stage in changing environment, by others as survival strategies, through the opinion that the emerging library is no longer simply a monastery full of books and journals but marketplaces competing for clients. A review of the future of academic libraries that draws initially on a generic model to describe the components of all library systems. On the basis of the trends derived from United Kingdom and US contributions. From this extrapolates scenarios relating to the function of libraries as a collection of resources, as a physical place, its role in organizing information and its service function. So the problem is not that the fundamental purposes of libraries are changing but that the relative importance of different context are shifting.

One of the most important task of the contemporary university libraries is acquisition and dissemination information about scientific publications of the university staff scientific publications. It is important to elaborate cooperation principles between library and the university in the field of cataloguing and disseminating scientific research results as well as care of a name, term, code, etc., under which a bibliographic record may be searched and identified. The example here are organizational solutions of information system of scientific publications in the Main Library of Wroclaw University of Technology. These are based on directives of the University authorities and recognizing the database of university scientific publications creating in the Library as the only source of data. The future tasks of university libraries have to show the direction of integration of their service and the university ones as well as the cooperation with other libraries in Poland to unify and develop the system of information of scientific publications. It will be a source of a proper done citation analysis and appraisal. The libraries should link bibliographic databases of scientific publications with full text sources, OPAC catalogues, repositories of scientific papers and other learning materials available on the Internet. Organized in this way system will be an important link of an exchange of thoughts and consolidation the role of libraries as the centers disseminating and managing scientific information.

The most sustainable online communities are those that allow and encourage their users to have a voice in how the community evolves. The proliferation of online communities with collaborative filtering mechanisms, where user feedback is aggregated to shape future interactions, makes it necessary to understand why participants in online communities value the content they do. Building on the concepts of users as specialists and synthesists developed in previous research, this study examines Answerbag, an online question answering community where users rate one another’s answers to provide collaborative filtering. In this environment, specialists are operationalized as those who claim expertise in a given topic and answer questions without referencing other sources, and synthesists as those who include one or more references to external sources in their answers. The results of the study suggest that within the Answerbag community as a whole, the answers of synthesists tended to be rated more highly than those of specialists, though answers provided by specialists were rated more highly within certain categories. The consequences of differences in the perceived value of information provided by specialists and synthesists are examined, and avenues for future research are discussed.

Due to the growing proliferation of new forms of communication is necessary to design a virtual reference service according to this context. The objective of this work is to present the first tools that we have developed at the library of the Secretaría de Agricultura, Ganadería, Pesca y Alimentos to provide another way of interaction with our users: web form and knowledge base. In the preliminary phase, the information needs are studied through the analysis of loan records, e-mails and in situ loan. Therefore, different ways of interactions and hot topics are presented. The second step is the service design. This includes the development of a web form to submit a request and the subject related questions (knowledge base).

The transformation of collections of traditional academic library in digital or simulated placed the librarian front new occasions and challenges. The internet and specifically the world web lent in the librarian a new role in the management of information with better and more suitable ways. Because his dynamic characteristics as the division, the heterogeneity, the collaboration and architecture, the web brought revolutionary changes in the information access opening new prospects as the academic pictorial libraries that they help in the more effective recuperation and diffusion of knowledge. How would be supposed the academic libraries to see their future in the discovery of information and knowledge services? In the place of existing limited frame that forces the users to visit various scattered sources, the libraries will provide a simulated service of alter-activity with incomparable content and broadness in each type and form of familiar academic content. The academic libraries in this collaborative frame contribute decisive in the creation of open network of distance learning that will offer a alternative solution in the running lists of search engines. This statement presents a model that it helps in the benefit of distance learning in real time in removed users via the facilitations of simulated environment.

Present paper describes multidimensional necessities about the dynamic reference desk to cater quality information needed for academic as well as practice and research needs of consultant doctors, resident medical officers (RMO) and housemen, nursing staff, paramedical staff, panel doctors approved for alternative medicine, Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) students for internship in hospital administration, patients, relatives of Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) employees, etc.