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Access to public information (that generated by public institutions) is a right recognized by both European (Unión Europea, 2001) and Spanish legislation (España, 1992; 1997; 2013). The bodies of the Spanish State must to make available to the citizens, free of charge and in a transparent way, all the documents that they generate, unless there are national security reasons. Many national, regional and local governments have created information systems or public information platforms in the form of newsletters or gazettes. The purpose of this paper is to find out how is, on a documentary level, the main informative gazette of Spain, the Boletín oficial del Estado (BOE). The metadata of the published documents are studied and the metadata used for documentary description are analyzed in a deeper way. The results reflect the absence of documentary descriptors in more than 89% of the total documentary BOE' corpus. In recent years this figure has barely exceeded 50%. The paper ends with a few recommendations for improvement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the usefulness of OpenAIRE, BASE, Recolecta, and Google Scholar (GS) for evaluating open access (OA) policies that demand a deposit in a repository. A case study was designed focusing on 762 financed articles with a project of FIS‐2012 of the Instituto de Salud Carlos III, the Spanish national health service's main management body for health research. Its finance is therefore subject to the Spanish Government OA mandate. A search was carried out for full‐text OA copies of the 762 articles using the four tools being evaluated and with identification of the repository housing these items. Of the 762 articles concerned, 510 OA copies were found of 353 unique articles (46.3%) in 68 repositories. OA copies were found of 81.9% of the articles in PubMed Central and copies of 49.5% of the articles in an institutional repository (IR). BASE and GS identified 93.5% of the articles and OpenAIRE 86.7%. Recolecta identified just 62.2% of the articles deposited in a Spanish IR. BASE achieved the greatest success, by locating copies deposited in IR, while GS found those deposited in disciplinary repositories. None of the tools identified copies of all the articles, so they need to be used in a complementary way when evaluating OA policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to present an overview of the reorganisation of the Andalusian Parliament's digital library to improve the electronic representation and access of its official corpus by taking advantage of a document's internal organisation. Video recordings of the parliamentary sessions have also been integrated with their corresponding textual transcriptions. Design/methodology/approach - After analysing the state of the Andalusian Parliament's digital library and determining the aspects that could be improved both in the repository and access mechanisms, this paper describes each component of the developed integrated information system. Findings - A methodology has been developed to tackle the problem and this could be applied to other similar institutions and organisations. Exploiting the internal structure of the parliament's official documents has also proved to be extremely interesting for users as they are directed towards the most relevant parts of the documents. Originality/value - The paper presents an application of an information retrieval system for structured documents to a real framework and the integration of multimedia sources (e.g. text and video) for retrieval purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper, which is part of a parallel study between Mexico and Spain, analyzes the environmental information requests that are made by users in the Spanish public sector bodies. Furthermore, a webcrawler, which was designed for this purpose, analyzes many parameters of the information displayed on the website of 30 environmental public bodies such as the number of documents, providers, types of environmental information, document formats ... Results highlight the use of metatags instead of metadata and descriptor analysis shows a lack of relationship between the requests and the descriptors which are used to identify such information on the Web. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to discover Spanish history students' subjective perception of their information literacy (IL) status in order to find and suggest some academic and individual improvement actions. Design/methodology/approach – The implementation of the IL-HUMASS survey provides diagnostic data on two IL quantitative dimensions (belief in importance and skills self-assessment) and a third qualitative dimension (learning habits) deployed along 26 variables, which are grouped into four categories (search, evaluation, processing, and communication-dissemination of information). Findings – The analysis confirms that variables related to information processing (above all schematising and abstracting information) show high scores of belief in importance and skills self-assessment among students. By contrast, variables related to technological advances (above all the use of bibliographic reference managers) show the worst results. In sum, there is a lack of subjective digital literacy in a set of skills related to the technologies of search, processing and communication of information. Among the less valued skills, independent learning reaches an excessive priority. However, this is really just an isolated learning. Research limitations/implications – The help of classrooms and libraries as learning tools would improve these results. Policy makers and instructors need to improve their role in the learning process by means of more extensive planning processes and the promotion of specific courses, above all on skills related to the technologies of information search, processing and communication. The concept of independent learning needs to be clarified and enhanced. Originality/value – This is a pioneering study that approaches IL from a triple perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evaluating the Information Architecture in an already deployed website is not an easy task. Most evaluation techniques are focused on examining system usability, but this is not the only factor that influences IA. The main technique that deals with IA in already deployed web environments is the Navigation Stress Test (NST). A new methodology makes this technique more informative by taking NST beyond simple notation on paper. This work proposes the use of NST combined with other usability testing techniques such as Thinking Aloud and a usability questionnaire. Eye tracking also has been used to supplement the information obtained from applied techniques. This new methodology has been tested by analyzing a series of websites belonging to Spanish public university libraries. The results of this study show the validity of the approach used, as well as the value that this approach and the use of Eye tracking bring to the analysis of IA compared to traditional NST. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose - This paper endeavours to show the possibilities for thematic description of audio-visual documents for television with the aim of promoting and facilitating information retrieval. Design/methodology/approach - To achieve these goals different database fields are shown, as well as the way in which they are organised for indexing and thematic element description, analysed and used as an example. Some of the database fields are extracted from an analytical study of the documentary system of television in Spain. Others are being tested in university television on which indexing experiments are carried out. Findings - Not all thematic descriptions are used on television information systems; nevertheless, some television channels do use thematic descriptions of both image and sound, applying thesauri. Moreover, it is possible to access sequences using full text retrieval as well. Originality/value - The development of the documentary task, applying the described techniques, promotes thematic indexing and hence thematic retrieval. Given the fact that this is without doubt one of the aspects most demanded by television journalists (along with people's names). This conceptualisation translates into the adaptation of databases to new indexing methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]