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Presents the result of the calculated IS! equivalent Impact Factor, Relative Diffusion Factor (RDF), and Journal Diffusion Factor (JDF) for articles published in the Medical Journal of Malaysia (MJM) between the years 2004 and 2008 in both their synchronous and diachronous versions. The publication data are collected from MyAis (Malaysian Abstracting & Indexing system) while the citation data are collected from Google Scholar. The values of the synchronous JDF ranges from 0.057 - 0.14 while the diachronous JDF ranges from 0.46 - 1.98. The high diachronous JDF is explained by a relatively high number of different citing journals against the number of publications. This implies that the results of diachronous JDF is influenced by the numbers of publications and a good comparison may be one of which the subject of analysis have similar number of publications and citations period. The yearly values of the synchronous RDF vary in the range of 0.66 - 1.00 while diachronous RDF ranges from 0.62 - 0.88. The result shows that diachronous RDF is negatively correlated with the number of citations, resulting in a low RDF value for highly cited publication years. What this implies in practice is that the diffusion factors can be calculated for every additional year at any journal level of analysis. This study demonstrates that these indicators are valuable tools that help to show development of journals as it changes through time.

Explores the use of an assessment instrument based on a model named library information systems security assessment model (LISSAM) to assess the 155 status in special and public libraries in Malaysia. The study aims to determine the implementation status of technological and organizational components of the LISSAM model. An implementation index as well as a scoring tool is presented to assess the IS safeguarding measures in a library. Data used was based on questionnaires distributed to a total of 50 individuals who are responsible for the information systems (IS) or IT in the special and public libraries in Malaysia. Findings revealed that over 95 of libraries have high level of technological implementation but 54 were fair poorly on organizational measures, especially on lack of security procedures, administrative tools and awareness creation activities.

Philology studies are often associated with traditional methods of teaching and learning. This study explores the possibility of e-learning adoption amongst Malay manuscripts learning community. The Soft System Methodology (SSM) is used to guide the investigation. SSM emphasises on understanding the problem situations faced by Malay manuscript learning community and expresses the situations in rich pictures. The manuscript learning community comprises lecturers, students and researchers in the field of philology. Data were gathered from interviews, focus group discussions and observations. Academy of Malay Studies, University of Malaya is the case study setting, focusing on lecturers who teach and students who enrol in a philology course as well as doctoral students researching on manuscript studies. The findings highlight problems faced by the various stakeholders and propose solutions in the form of a conceptual model for a collaborative electronic platform to improve teaching and learning as well as utilizing digitized manuscript surrogates held in a digital library of Malay manuscripts.

This paper describes the growth of Open Access (OA) repositories and journals as reported by monitoring initiatives such as ROAR (Registry of Open Access Repositories), Open DOAR (Open Directory of Open Access Repositories), DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals), Directory of Web Ranking of World Repositories by the Cybermetrics Laboratory in Spain and published literature. The performance of Malaysian OA repositories and journals is highlighted. The strength of OA channels in increasing visibility and citations are evidenced by research findings. It is proposed that libraries champion OA initiatives by making university or institutional governance aware; encouraging institutional journal publishers to adopt OA platform; collaborating with research groups to jumpstart OA institutional initiatives and to embed OA awareness into user and researcher education programmes. By actively involved, libraries will be free of permission, licensing and archiving barriers usually imposed in traditional publishing situation.

It is a common fallacy to assume that undergraduates are skilled in finding and evaluating resources for their various learning needs. Information professionals need to find out strategies and courses of action undertaken by undergraduate students in order to perhaps improve information literacy skills or user education programmes. This qualitative study uses the diary, emails interaction and in depth face to face interview approach involving 14 final year Computer Science and Information Technology undergraduates whom shared their information search and use process. The objectives of this study are to find out the followings: (a) the decision on deciding research topics by final year students; (b) the sources and channels of information they use and prefer; (c) the utility of libraries and librarians; (d) the use of the Internet; (e) the search strategies adopted; (f) their thoughts on intellectual property and ethical issues. Among the main information sources used were the Internet, books and previous final year project reports. They also seem to rely a lot on their friends and lecturers as their source of information. Very few used journal articles, seminar papers or other sources. An understanding of their information seeking behaviour patterns is the focus of this paper. Informants' thoughts and feeling on the library services and the ethical use of information will be shared.

The internationalization characteristics of two Malaysian journals, Bulletin of the Malaysian Mathematical Sciences Society ( indexed by ISI) and the Malaysian Journal of Computer Science ( indexed by Inspec and Scopus) is observed. All issues for the years 2000 to 2007 were looked at to obtain the following information, (i) total articles published between 2000 and 2007; (ii) the distribution of foreign and Malaysian authors publishing in the journals; (iii) the distribution of articles by country and (iv) the geographical distribution of authors citing articles published in the journals. Citation to articles is derived from information given by Google scholar. The results indicate that both journals exhibit average internationalization characteristics as they are current in their publications but with between 19 -30 international composition of reviewers or editorials, publish between 36-79 of foreign articles and receive between 60-70 of citations from foreign authors.

This paper describes the digital library of historical resources, a research project which involves building a testbed for the purpose of developing and testing new collaborative digital library functionality and presents an initial analysis of the digital library's public use on the web. The digital library is modeled to focus on serving secondary students information needs in conducting history projects. As such, in the implementation of the digital library, the use of online resources would be an integral part of history project based learning activities. Students should be enabled to access digital resources, create and publish their own documents in the digital library and share them with others. As a testbed system, the collaborative digital library known as CoreDev has demonstrated its capabilities in serving an educational community as has been reflected by the positive feedback on the functional requirements from 44 users. Over 75 of the respondents in the user survey considered themselves capable of using the digital library easily. The beta tester demographics (n = 105) indicate that the digital library is reaching its target communities.