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Academic libraries are increasingly required to provide tangible evidence of their value to the scholarly community. Library responses have developed from early process-focused investigations to develop input and output measures, or user satisfaction studies, that do not provide much evidence of value, to attempting to demonstrate value from different perspectives, depending on the philosophical point of view with which the concept is regarded, for example in economic or social terms. This article attempts to explore a number of theoretical approaches that have been used to inform assessments of value in academic libraries, as well as some practical approaches to consider when undertaking studies of the value of academic library services. 1

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore issues around access and use of subscription electronic journals by African researchers and seeks to bring to the fore the issues academics and researchers face in accessing electronic databases. Design/methodology/approach Donor-funded electronic resources have greatly improved access to essential scientific scholarly information by researchers in developing countries. Yet in Sub-Saharan Africa, researchers and libraries still complain about lack of access to scientific information, and libraries are reported to be struggling to maintain up-to-date scientific information resources. An online survey of academics at the Faculty of Agriculture, University of Zimbabwe was carried out. Findings Results indicated that academics rely on approaches other than library facilities to locate electronic information. Google was the most common approach used in locating subscription electronic journals. Furthermore, there was a need for increased awareness of subscription and donated resources. Programmes such as Research4Life, journal schemes by Education Information for Libraries and the International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications have made an impact on academics’ access to electronic journals. The study established that there was no direct link between access to electronic journals and increased publications. Originality/value Work of this kind has not been done in Africa before. The exploration of the complexities inherent in providing access to electronic journals in a developing country presents an opportunity for both librarians and developmental partners to reflect on the challenges as well as the opportunities that exist in current electronic journal access schemes.

Since the year 2000, the world has witnessed an increased call for improved access to scholarly information. The cost of scholarly content is a major barrier in accessing needed research information. In order to fully contribute to the global knowledge economy, African scholars need to access both global information resources and locally published works. Few studies have focused on the African knowledge production vis-à-vis access to scholarly research information in Africa. This paper examines access to scholarly research information in sub-Saharan Africa. The review focuses on available published works on access to scientific literature in Africa and seeks to understand Africa’s scholarly publishing scene. In the process, challenges and opportunities regarding access to scholarly research information are explored. Three approaches in addressing these issues emerge in literature – namely (i) open access, (ii) donor-funded schemes and (iii) negotiated access schemes for scholarly content. This review shows that these approaches have leveraged information access to the African researchers who now have almost the same levels of access to scientific literature as their peers in the developed world. African governments, institutions, researchers and librarians still need to exploit the potential of open access. There remain, however, infrastructural issues that need to be addressed to ensure that the African scholar enjoys access to current scientific information.

This article examines the use of an electronic journal availability study as a means of measuring access to subscribed journal collections that are needed by faculty members for their teaching and research. As in other disciplines, academics in agriculture are dependent on articles in electronic journals to obtain recent information and to build upon their own research. Empirical evidence is needed to select specific databases, to justify subscriptions, and to meet the research needs of academics. This article presents findings from an electronic journal availability study, which was used to determine the extent to which electronic journal collections met teaching and research needs at the University of Zimbabwe. The study took place between September 2013 and February 2014. A core journal titles list, simulating faculty’s research needs, was retrieved from a library’s electronic journals databases to establish the electronic journals availability rate: a measurement of the availability of the journals from the library’s electronic collections. This study showed an 85.5% availability rate across local collections, with the following results for the donated journal schemes: 63% in Access to Global Research in Africa (AGORA); 47% in Access to Research for Development (ARDI); 51% in Health Internet Access to Research Initiative (HINARI), and 53.5% in Online Access to Research in the Environment (OARE). This electronic journal availability study demonstrates that librarians need continuously to evaluate their collections and to assess whether these meet the needs of their users.

AGRIS is the International System for Agricultural Science and Technology. It is supported by a large community of data providers, partners and users. AGRIS is a database that aggregates bibliographic data, and through this core data, related content across online information systems is retrieved by taking advantage of Semantic Web capabilities. AGRIS is a global public good and its vision is to be a responsive service to its user needs by facilitating contributions and feedback regarding the AGRIS core knowledgebase, AGRIS’s future and its continuous development. Periodic AGRIS e-consultations, partner meetings and user feedback are assimilated to the development of the AGRIS application and content coverage. This paper outlines the current AGRIS technical set-up, its network of partners, data providers and users as well as how AGRIS’s responsiveness to clients’ needs inspires the continuous technical development of the application. The paper concludes by providing a use case of how the AGRIS stakeholder input and the subsequent AGRIS e-consultation results influence the development of the AGRIS application, knowledgebase and service delivery.

The movement to share data has been on the rise in the last decade and lately in the agricultural domain. Similarly platforms for publishing scientific and statistical datasets have sprouted and have improved visibility and availability of datasets. Yet there are still constraints in making datasets discoverable and re-usable. Commonly agreed semantics, authority lists to index datasets and standard formats and protocols to expose data are now essential. This paper explains how the CIARD RING provides a global linked data catalog of datasets for agriculture. The first part of this paper will describe the Linked Data layer of the CIARD RING focusing on the data model, semantics used and the CIARD RING LOD publication. The second part will provide examples of re-use of data from the RING. The paper concludes by describing the future steps in the development of the CIARD RING.

The use of widely-used metadata standards is essential to guarantee the visibility and retrieval of documents stored in open repositories. Attention should be paid to the creation and exchange of meaningful metadata to enhance interoperability amongst repositories and provide value added services. Since 2005 the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) provides the agricultural information management com-munity with standards, services and tools to assist open reposito-ries in benefiting from the advantages offered by Semantic Web publishing. This paper presents the work that FAO carries out in recommending standards for the encoding and exchange of metadata while also reviewing techniques to help navigate within open repositories and services. It talks about how to improve the visibility of repository content and explains the benefits of inte-grating subject vocabulary tools expressed in SKOS. It concludes with a presentation of use cases integrating these recommenda-tions into DSpace and Drupal customizations.