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Introduction. The ability to read and interpret different types of text can be significantly impacted by neuropsychiatric disabilities, which affect cognitive abilities. This paper explores and reviews previous studies within library and information science on neuropsychiatric disabilities in relation to reading practices. Method. Searches were performed in LISA and LISTA to identify research on readers with neuropsychiatric disabilities. Results were screened and 14 peer reviewed articles were chosen for inclusion. Utilising content analysis, the examined articles were deductively and inductively categorised according to the following themes: impairment, user group and context, research design, assistive technologies for reading, reading for information seeking, reading for evaluation, and reading, self-efficacy and identity.Findings. Most articles address dyslexia. The majority of studies have been conducted in educational settings and have an experimental research design. Six studies address assistive technologies for reading, the remaining eight concern reading in relation to information practices.Conclusion. There is an imbalance in the types of impairments that have been addressed in previous research. Few studies concern everyday reading practices and more research outside of educational contexts is needed. Furthermore, there is a lack of research that delves deeper into the experiences of readers with neuropsychiatric disabilities.

Purpose: As social infrastructures, public libraries are increasingly recognised as providing more than access to books and information; librarians’ work is importantly centred around practices of care. However, the ways in which they provide care is poorly researched, let alone conceptualised. This paper explores how this important part of librarians’ daily work is practiced through the lens of infrastructuring. Design/methodology/approach: The paper first theoretically discusses the concepts of social infrastructuring, care and tinkering. Then, it turns to ethnographic research conducted in the public library networks of three European cities – Vienna (Austria), Rotterdam (the Netherlands) and Malmö (Sweden). The paper comprises empirical materials from all three countries and unpacks 16 librarians’ daily working routines of care through participant observations.Findings: The empirical analysis resulted in three modes of social infrastructuring in public libraries: (1) maintaining, (2) building connections, and (3) drawing boundaries. Practices of care are prominent in each of these infrastructuring modes: librarians infrastructure the library with and via their care practices. While care practices are difficult to quantify and verbalise, they are valuable for library patrons. By using the concept of tinkering, the article conceptualises librarians’ infrastructuring enactments as crucial community-building aspect of libraries.Originality: By focusing on the enactment of social infrastructuring, the paper goes beyond a descriptive approach of understanding public libraries as important social infrastructures. Rather, the paper unpacks how libraries come into being as infrastructuring agencies by highlighting what librarians do and say. Our international study articulates the importance of care practices in public libraries across different national contexts.

Denna rapport behandlar Högskolan i Halmstads andel av öppet tillgängliga publikationer, (fortsättningsvis benämnt som OA), kostnader kopplade till dessa och hur publiceringsmönstret för högskolans forskare såg ut under 2023. Allt detta sammantaget ger en bild över hur långt Högskolan i Halmstad har kommit på vägen mot öppen tillgång till vetenskapliga publikationer, som ska vara genomförd senast 2026, enligt målbilden i de forskningspolitiska propositionerna från 2016 och 2020. 2023 publicerade högskolans forskare totalt 284 artiklar och 38 böcker eller kapitel i böcker. Mellan 2022 och 2023 ökade andelen öppet tillgängliga artiklar med nio procent från 75 till 82 procent. Böcker och kapitel i bok minskade under samma period med 52 procent från 27 till 13 procent. Rapporten sätter särskilt fokus på de så kallade låsta artiklarna, dvs artiklar som kräver publiceringsavgifter för att publiceras OA. Detta är av intresse eftersom en del av svaret på hur högskolan ska nå så nära 100% OA som möjligt, kan antas ligga där. Av 48 låsta artiklar 2023 hade 25 externa korresponderande författare och 23 hade korresponderande författare verksamma vid Högskolan i Halmstad. Av dessa hade elva artiklar kunnat betalats inom befintliga L&P-avtal (läs- och publiceringsavtal), och tolv artiklar hade kunnat betalats av akademierna, vilket motsvarar en kostnad på 275 207 kronor. I rapporten konstateras att orsakerna till att L&P-avtalen inte nyttjats är flera: (1) att externa korresponderande författare affilierade till lärosäten utan L&P-avtal är satta som kontakt i förlagens system, trots att befintlig HH-korresponderande författare funnits, (2) att korresponderande författare har ändrats under produktionsstadiet, (3) att dubbelaffilierade författare har valt annan affiliering utan L&P-avtal och (4) att HH-korresponderande författare inte har kunnat beläggas som anställda på HH. Publiceringsavgifter förbetalas inom L&P-avtal. Genom att ovanstående publikationer int, Beslutsfattare: Catta Torhell, bibliotekschef, Högskolebiblioteket i Halmstad

Fakulteten för utbildningsvetenskaper, dnr UTBVET 2023/726

Denna artikel har tagits fram i samarbete mellan Kulturrådet och Digiteket, inom ramen för satsningen Läsfrämjandelyft för folkbibliotek., Läsfrämjarlyftet

Purpose – The purpose is to investigate the professional identity of public library, archive and museum (LAM)professionals in Denmark, Germany, Hungary, Norway and Sweden. Design/methodology/approach – The data have been gathered through the administration of three questionnaires. A comprehensive analysis is conducted to explore the variations in the professionals’perceptions of their professional proximities to the other LAM professions and other related professions, considering demographic factors such as age, education, gender and immigrant background of participants. Findings – Through a lens of micro- and macro-professional identities, the findings underscore both clearly perceived role separation between the LAM professions and notable points of convergence, suggesting opportunities for collaborative efforts. The implications of these discoveries are discussed, offering afoundation for future research endeavors. Originality/value – The study highlights the professions perceived to have the most and least similarity to LAMs based on questionnaire responses, providing valuable insights into the interplay between various professional domains.

Introduction. People face often situations when the available information is fragmentary and epistemically and ontologically different stemming from multiple incongruous systems of knowledge. While this is obvious on the basis of the vast corpus of information behaviour research to date, relatively little attention has been conducted so far to explicate the mechanisms of how people routinely manage to use such unsatisfactory sources in their pursuits. Method. The conceptual paper describes two theoretical concepts identified in the literature. Results. The paper discusses the applicability of the notions of representational exchange and edgework to explain the mechanisms of how people parse together heterogeneous and fragmentary information together in a meaningful whole. Conclusion. The theory of representational exchange explains how people are capable of translating epistemically and ontologically incongruous types of information to work in concert. Edgework describes a type of information work necessary to parse together different forms of previous knowledge and new information with the help of (meta) information and knowledge on the two and their processes of becoming.

Biblioteken vid de svenska universiteten och högskolorna representerar ett lika mångskiftande och brett spektrum som lärosätena själva. Ett bibliotek vid ett traditionsrikt bredduniversitet skiljer sig på många sätt från biblioteket vid en specialiserad högskola. Men dessa skillnader till trots är det samma behov av stöd i kärnverksamheterna som biblioteken arbetar med att bemöta. I Stöd för forskning och utbildning: lärosätesbiblioteken i Sverige samlas texter som beskriver både skillnaden mellan olika lärosätesbibliotek och de gemensamma utmaningar som biblioteken möter, inte minst genom de förändringar som digitaliseringen och omställningen till öppen vetenskap medför för forskning och högre utbildning. Även frågor om hur lärosätenas bibliotek ingår i det allmänna biblioteksväsendet tillsammans med folk-, skol- och specialbibliotek tas upp i antologin. Författarna representerar en bred erfarenhet av verksamheten vid lärosätesbibliotek, både i roller som personal och ledning vid biblioteken och som användare i form av forskare., QC 20240830

This article addresses the underutilization of knowl­edge organization systems (KOS) elements in online library catalogs, hindering effective subject-based search and discovery. It highlights the International Society for Knowl­edge Organization's initiative to develop metadata guidelines for library catalog procurement, focusing on maximizing the value of subject metadata from classification systems and controlled vocabularies. The paper discusses the rationale for quality subject access, proposes desirable search functionalities based on research, explores implementation challenges, and outlines future developments. The conclusion emphasizes the importance of providing quality subject access in digital services and calls for further research on interface design, guideline adoption, KOS evolution, and the impact of language models on subject metadata use. The work underscores the need for applying controlled vocabularies in search interfaces across libraries, archives, and museums while acknowledging the complementary role of alternative approaches like social tagging and automatic indexing. Extensive future research is suggested to implement search functionalities, promote guidelines adoption, enhance KOS evolution, and assess the influence of language models on subject metadata utilization., Erratum available at: https://doi.org/10.5771/0943-7444-2024-4-286

Facilitating access to archives via metadata creation and enrichment can be a monumental task for large archival collections. The past decade has witnessed an increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to assist in these tasks in automatic or semi-automatic workflows (Colavizza et al., 2022). While technologies such as named entity recognition and topic modeling are useful in many different archival contexts, they have found special relevance for colonial archives and archives pertaining to underrepresented communities. Recent projects have for example explored the possibilities of using AI and ML to optimize information discovery in under‑utilized, Holocaust‑related records (Carter et al., 2022), extract mentions of underrepresented people in Dutch colonial records (Luthra et al., 2023), and transform Indigenous and Spanish colonial archives originating from Mexico into Linked Open Data repositories (Candela et al., 2023). This paper presents, firstly, an overview of current state-of-the-art approaches for AI in archives, and secondly, a project in progress intended to align with the three first goals of the ongoing InterPARES Trust AI project (Duranti et al., 2021): to identify specific AI technologies that can address critical records and archives challenges; determine the benefits and risks of using AI technologies on records and archives; and ensure that archival concepts and principles inform the development of responsible AI. The opportunities offered by these technologies are contrasted with the risks of using automated approaches in general and AI in particular for improving access to archives. The paper also discusses a related approach for increasing discoverability in collections, i.e. semantic search, and compares the pros and cons of these approaches. Furthermore, the potential uses of generative pre-trained transformers (GPTs) for both indexing and retrieval, and the risks associated with these, are addressed. Bringing th

iSchools PhD Seminar Series April 3 2024

PurposeIn order to estimate the value of semi-automated subject indexing in operative library catalogues, the study aimed to investigate five different automated implementations of an open source software package on a large set of Swedish union catalogue metadata records, with Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) as the target classification system. It also aimed to contribute to the body of research on aboutness and related challenges in automated subject indexing and evaluation.Design/methodology/approachOn a sample of over 230,000 records with close to 12,000 distinct DDC classes, an open source tool Annif, developed by the National Library of Finland, was applied in the following implementations: lexical algorithm, support vector classifier, fastText, Omikuji Bonsai and an ensemble approach combing the former four. A qualitative study involving two senior catalogue librarians and three students of library and information studies was also conducted to investigate the value and inter-rater agreement of automatically assigned classes, on a sample of 60 records.FindingsThe best results were achieved using the ensemble approach that achieved 66.82% accuracy on the three-digit DDC classification task. The qualitative study confirmed earlier studies reporting low inter-rater agreement but also pointed to the potential value of automatically assigned classes as additional access points in information retrieval.Originality/valueThe paper presents an extensive study of automated classification in an operative library catalogue, accompanied by a qualitative study of automated classes. It demonstrates the value of applying semi-automated indexing in operative information retrieval systems.

WASP-HSBlog Posts

The opportunities offered by artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) for the archive sector have been addressed in several scholarly articles in recent years. Some of the articles describe projects (e.g. Carter et al., 2022; Han et al., 2022) featuring a collaboration between archivists, generally defined for this paper as persons working in the archival sector, and technologists, defined as persons with a professional technical background. Some other archival projects have been undertaken by computer scientists or digital humanities scholars without the involvement of archivists (e.g. Luthra et al., 2022). Providing a qualitative angle, some articles have looked at digital archivists’ opinions on the implementations of AI techniques in archives (e.g. Cushing & Osti, 2023). Finally, more general articles have been published, both by archivists and technologists on how AI may be implemented in the archival sector (e.g. Colavizza et al., 2022; Hutchinson, 2020; Sabharwal, 2017). This paper presents a qualitative analysis of how the perspectives of archivists and technologists on AI in archives are presented in a selection of recent articles. The selection includes both articles describing case studies, such as project descriptions and interview studies, as well as literature reviews. The articles are categorized according to the type of project described or suggested: articles written from an archival perspective, articles written from a technologist perspective, and articles that describe or propose joint projects run by archivists and technologists in cooperation. Differences can be observed in these research articles regarding 1) how archival expertise is valued, 2) the proposed importance of archival theory for successful AI implementation and 3) the degree of influence ascribed to the archivists in collaborations. The results indicate that viewpoints clearly differ depending on the professional role and background of the contributors to the a

Fiction is a challenging genre for automatic theme identification. Unlike other types of documents, such as physics academic papers, fiction does not always name the concepts it addresses, but rather implies them through subtle clues. Fiction also uses metaphors intentionally to convey deeper meanings. To make Swedish LGBTQ+ fiction more accessible, the Queerlit database (https://queerlit.dh.gu.se/) provides subject indexing by information professionals. They use the QLIT thesaurus (based on Homosaurus) for LGBTQ+ themes and Swedish Subject Headings (SAO – Svenska Ämnesord) for non-LGBTQ+ themes. The indexing is comprehensive and retrospective, assigning terms to previously published Swedish fiction. This work aims to determine to what degree and under which conditions is it possible to automatically assign subject index terms from QLIT, in order to estimate the usefulness of automatic tools to support subject indexing conducted by information professionals. This process may require a large number of training documents which are not available (the entire Queerlit database has about 2000 works indexed and QLIT has about 800 terms, while SAO is much bigger). Therefore, another approach will be explored – whether automatically extracted terms from the texts provide the potential to complement existing, professionally assigned terms from QLIT and SAO. We experiment with zero-shot classification transformers and topic modeling. The proposed paper will present the intermediate results of different methods applied to available texts from the QLIT database. It is important to note that the project is currently in an exploratory phase and that the presentation is intended to showcase how different approaches have both failed and succeeded. We also intend to highlight areas of possible applicability specifically from the perspective afforded by the QLIT thesaurus, i.e., the appropriateness of the methods for Swedish LGBTQ+ fiction. We will also discuss the challenges and limi

We are currently in a phase where it seems that new applications for large language models (LLMs) in general and generative pre-trained transformers (GPTs) in particular are tested every day. Examples are as diverse as automated data mining for building energy management (C. Zhang et al., 2024), evaluating the accuracy of differential-diagnosis lists for clinical vignettes (Hirosawa et al., 2023), and human-machine-augmented intelligent vehicles (J. Zhang et al., 2023). They can also be used to extract structured information from unstructured text (Söderström, 2023). This poster presents a pilot study on one such application, the potential use of OpenAI’s ChatGPT for automatic subject indexing of archival documents in Swedish, Swedish LGBTQ fiction and Chinese fiction. The accuracy of the assigned subject index terms is compared with the output from ANNIF (Suominen et al., 2022), an established automatic subject indexing software used in libraries. The results display an impressive degree of accuracy for the subject index terms assigned by ChatGPT, but challenges have been identified in all three document types. For example, the appropriateness of the terms for historical text is highly questionable at times. The terms assigned by ANNIF, in contrast, are drawn from a controlled vocabulary, which ensures that they have been manually selected as suitable subject index terms. The pilot study shows that it is feasible to run the index terms suggested by ChatGPT through ANNIF to get index terms from a controlled vocabulary while harnessing ChatGPT’s state-of-the-art natural language understanding. This presents intriguing opportunities for implementing GPTs in the archival/library cataloging workflows. Semi-automatic approaches and manual checks are still to be preferred, however, in order to maintain the authenticity of the generated metadata.

Presentation vid seminarium Humlab/Várdduo11 april 2024

Purpose. The challenges to healthcare caused by the COVID-19 pandemic forced hospital librarians to develop their abilities to cope with change and crises, both on a social level and an organisational level. The aim of this study is to contribute to knowledge about how hospital librarians developed library services during the pandemic and how these changes contributed to building information resilience in the healthcare organisation. This paper also seeks to explore how resilience theory, and specifically the concept information resilience, can be used within library and information science (in LIS) to investigate resilience in the library sector. Design/methodology/approach. Nine semi-structured interviews with librarians were conducted at four different hospital libraries in four different regions in Sweden between March and May 2022. The empirical material was analysed through an interaction between the tzheoretical perspective and the empirical material through a thematic analysis. In each theme, specific resilience resources are identified and analysed as components of the information resilience developed by hospital librarians. Findings. The results show that hospital librarians contribute to several different information resilience resources, which support information resilience in the healthcare organisation. Three aspects characterize the qualities of resilience resources: access, flexibility, and collaboration. The findings suggest that the framework for analysing information resilience used in this study is well suited for studying the resilience of libraries from both organisational and informational aspects. Originality/value. The analysis of information resilience on an organisational level presents a novel way to study resilience in the library sector.

Has something been lost in the move towards federated searching and relevance ranking in academic library search interfaces? The richness of metadata and other knowledge organisation systems (KOSs) such as classification schemes and controlled vocabularies is often not featured in library management system (LMS) procurement. The ISKO Scientific and Technical Advisory Committee (STAC) has set up a working group to develop a set of guidelines for academic and research libraries that are planning to procure an LMS. The purpose of the guidelines is to enable users to benefit from the intellectual effort that has been invested in assigning metadata to electronic resources. This paper reports on progress of the working group in its review of the literature and the plans for consultations with stakeholders.

This article reports conclusions from a three-year research project on Swedish public libraries. The focus of the project is on librarians experience of libraries mission to promote democracy when democratic norms and values are challenged politically by radical right populism. Results of a longitudinal survey point to stability and lack of political interest over time, but increased societal polarization causes several ethical dilemmas for librarians. Examples of illegitimate political influence and librarians adapting to changes in the political climate call for renewed discussions on the professional role and understandings of democracy in library practice.

Debatt: Äntligen kom den: regeringens lagrådsremiss som ska stärka elevers rätt till skolbibliotek. Vi som utbildar blivande bibliotekarier gläds över remissen som i linje med forskning visar skolbibliotekets och skolbibliotekariers betydelse för elevers lärande. Samtidigt konstaterar vi att en lagändring också måste följas av riktade satsningar på landets bibliotekarieutbildningar för att förverkligas, skriver 16 biblioteksforskare., 2 juli 2024