RESEARCH ON INFORMATION SCIENCE AND PUBLIC LIBRARIES (PAYAM-E-KETABKHANEH (LIBRARY MESSAGE))
Year:2009 | Volume:15 | Issue:1 (56)|Papers Count:10

This study uses LibQUAL questionnaire in order to evaluate the overall service quality in the public libraries of Qazvin. A random sample of 381 users was drawn from the users of the public libraries of Qazvin and the questionnaires were distributed among them. Omitting incomplete questionnaires, a total of 355 questionnaires were analyzed. Results showed that the services provided by the public libraries were above the minimum level that users expected but did not reach a level of high quality. A factor analysis revealed five factors that have the most impact on users’ evaluation of service quality. Two of them were staff’s willingness to offer services, and information resources and their availability.

This article studies the factors influencing user satisfaction with online services of information units in the central libraries of Tarbiat Modarres University and University of Tehran. A total of 300 questionnaires were distributed among MSc and PhD students of the two universities. About 40 percent of respondents were from Engineering Faculty and about 30 percent were studying in Humanities Faculty. The respondents included 76.7 Master students and 20.3 percent PhD students. The majority of respondents were male (86.5%), and only 10.5 percent were female. The results revealed that six factors including network data transfer speed, information up datedness, number of retrieved documents, familiarity with search strategy, number of searching databases, and relevancy of retrieved documents had positive impact on user satisfaction. But no connection was found between user satisfaction and librarian's assistance in searching. In the end, a few suggestions are made for improvement of services.

Information Technology has uncountable advantages for organizations and their dependent institutions. Michael Porter, a University Professor at Harvard Business School, developed the Value Chain Model in 1985. According to this model, proper activities in productive organizations could be divided to primary activities and support activities. Primary activities are those that have value added character. Managers of special libraries -with regard to the importance of libraries as part of the infrastructures of any generative organizations- are concerned with using IT to increase productivity. In this paper, generalization of the value chain model to the activities of special libraries, as well as the effects that IT could have on each of the main activities of the chain are discussed.

This article aims to find a set of appropriate features that a Web Content Management Systems (WCMS) should have for managing Iranian library website. Firs, using a checklist prepared by the researcher, features of some of the best university library websites of the world (in US, UK, Canada, and Australia) were studied. The results of this stage then were used to modify the checklist. In the next stage, the modified checklist was used to evaluate some of the existing WCMSs. Finally, Iranian university library websites were evaluated using the checklist. The results of the first phase showed that 44.40% of features and elements existed in the best world university library websites. Results of the second phase showed WCMSs in the market do not have 25% of the required elements of university library websites. And the results of the third phase showed that only 20% of elements and features existed on the Iranian library websites.

This article reports the results of a content analysis of Masters dissertations of four branches of the Islamic Azad University in the field of Library and Information Science (LIS). The four branches were: North Tehran branch, Tehran's Science and Research branch, Ahvaz's Science and Research branch, and Hamadan branch. The aim of the study was to find out about the subject trends of the dissertations during 1993-2007 periods, as well as to show the distribution of the dissertations with regard to the year of writing, gender, number of pages, research methodology, and references. In total, 524 dissertations were examined. The results showed that the average number of pages was 107-137, about two third of the dissertations were written by female students, and survey was the most used research method. Questionnaire was the most used tool for data collection. Persian language resources accounted for about 70.06 percent of the references of the dissertations. The most popular subject for the dissertations was ‘libraries and information centers’ and the least popular subject was ‘preservation of library material’.

This article evaluates the criteria used for journal selection in Persian Journal Citation Reports (PJCR)- Regional Information Centre for Science and Technology. Using a checklist, PJCR criteria were evaluated against the criteria The results of the study showed that PJCR complies with criteria.

The focal question in informatology is that of the nature of information. Luciano Floridi and Rafael Capurro are two philosophers that try to answer to the question “What is Information?”. Floridi traces the question in the framework of philosophy of information. Floridi suggests that information is “true well-formed meaningfull data”. According to Floridi, we haven’t such thing as pure data in itself. Information is alwaysrestricted to a certain level of abstraction. On the other hand, Capurro tries to answer to the question with regard to Heidegger’s existential hermeneutics. According to Capurro, information is a dimension of human existence that roots in Dasein’s “being-in-the-world-with-others”. Capurro says that information is dependent to the horizons of meanings in which Dasein is embedded. With regard to this existential analysis, Capurro emphasizes on hermeneutic-rhetoric character of information science; Angeletics in his own terms. A very important idea that Floridi and Capurro agree on it, is that information is always ontologically committed, i.e. it is always restricted to a certain horizon of meanings. Finally the implications of Floridi and Capurro's thoughts are discussed with regard to LIS.