Academic Librarianship and Information Research
Year:2015 | Volume:49 | Issue:1 |Papers Count:7

Purpose: The present paper aims to explore the relationship between the two concepts of Self-efficacy as an important and powerful psychological construct in human behavior and Social-Cognitive Theory and Information Literacy as a primary prerequisite of living in information society and life-long learning. Methodology: A literature review in such disciplines as psychology, education, communication, sociology, information and computer sciences is presented. Findings: Self-efficacy could highly impact interest, effort, hardworkingness, enjoyment, self-regulation, and performance. Self-efficacy could be seen as a factor of social and network competency, success, educational and professional satisfaction and an overcoming element to some fears like social and technology phobias. Information Literacy could highly be dependent on effective issues like self-efficacy. Some research show a high significant relationship between self-efficacy and information seeking behavior. Information Literacy Self-efficacy is related to factors like age, sex, educational level, experience, English language knowledge, and job. Information Literacy Self-efficacy has largely been investigated in Turkey. Originality/Value: Self-efficacy is developed by Albert Bandura as the most cited psychologist and the fourth celebrated person in psychology. It has a remarkable impact on Information Literacy which unfortunately has not been fully investigated in Information Science especially in Persian language. The present paper pioneers in Persian language which systematically reviews the role of self-efficacy in information literacy and seeking.

Purpose: Using both ideational and social influences’ indicators, this study tries to identify and analyze the most influential researchers in iMetrics. To do so, the researchers used a combination of H family indices (h-index, g-index, and contemporary h-index) and co-authorship centralities (degree, betweenness, and closeness) for calculating ideational and social influences, respectively. Methodology: The study uses a bibliometric methodology as well as social network analysis approaches. The initial data of this study, which comprises 5944 records in the field of iMetrics during 1978-2014, have been retrieved from Web of Science. UCINet and BibExcel software have been used to calculate centrality measures and h-index; g-index and contemporary h-index have been measured manually within Excel. Once all measures have been calculated, researchers used SPSS and LISREL statistical software packages. Findings: Findings indicated that there is a significant correlation between social influence indicators and researchers’ performance. Moreover, the results of LISREL uncovered a significant correlation between ideational indicators and social ones. Regarding individual researchers’ profiles, which are based on all six indicators including h-index, g-index, contemporary h-index, degree centrality, betweenness centrality, and closeness centrality, it seems that “ Leydesdorff” and “ Kousha” are the most influential iMetric researchers globally and nationally, respectively. Originality: Based on the findings revealed in this study, it seems that using balanced and compound bibliometric indicators has the capability to provide a relatively fair and clear insight on researchers’ influence in a specific field. In this way, it is possible to create individual profiles for all of researchers in that field. So that the result could be used for important decisions such as tenure and promotion committees, granting research projects, and the like.

Purpose: The purpose of the current study is to present a strategic analysis of the current state of the National Library in "marketing-production" framework that would result in presentation of the proposed strategies based on SWOTmatrix. Methodology: At first, by applying content analysis on interviews with 13 library specialist employees, the SWOT elements were extracted. Then, by using questionnaire and ranking elements, and also by using matrix of strategic position evaluation, library's strategic position in the field of production is determined and SO, ST, WO, and WT strategies are provided. Findings: Library's strategic position in the category of the production is offensive. Some of the proposed strategies include: optimizing the training space of library, optimizing the power of content, services, digitization and access, strengthening qualitative capabilities of services, better using of interactive and legal opportunities, strengthening processing capabilities, strengthening publish capabilities, using different methods of collection development, using marketing campaigns, moving to educating other libraries, using more logical filters to identify researchers, developing cooperation and joint activities between Archives and the National Library, and use more and more sophisticated resources to provide services.

Purpose: This paper tries to analyze and visualize the co-authorship network of institutions in 1351 papers published in 7 knowledge and information science journals in Iran from 1387to 1391. Methodology: In this paper, we use scientometric and social network analysis to study the collaboration network of institutions. The overall structure of the network was investigated using a few macro-level metrics like density, connectedness, clustering coefficient, components, mean distance and diameter. Additionally, centrality metrics including degree centrality, betweenness centrality, closeness centrality, eigenvector, number of adjacent nodes as well as productivity measure were adopted to analyze the performance and status of institutions in the network. UCINET software was utilized for data analysis. Results: Findings of the study revealed that the majority of papers (68. 8%) are multi-authored and publications by two authors are the most common type of co-authorship (45. 22%). Based on the findings, 63. 4% of publications in 7 journals were published through inter-institutional collaboration, which shows that Iranian KIS researchers tend to collaborate more with researchers from other institutions. The co-authorship network of institutions in Iranian KIS papers includes 218 vertices and 1002 cross-institutional collaboration links. Considering all centrality and productivity measures, University of Tehran, Shahid Chamran University of Ahwaz, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Islamic Azad University-Science and Research Branch, Islamic Azad University-Hamedan Branch and National Library and Archives of Iran occupy the topmost positions. Additionally, with a low density of 0. 019, the co-authorship network of institutions in KIS demonstrates a low cohesion. Originality: visualizing the scientific collaboration network of institutions in KIS provides a useful schematic of invisible colleges which might be used for the design of future collaborative activities.

Objective: The purpose of this research is to present an analysis of links of these indicators. Methodolgy: This research is a scientometric study including 37 countries that have had more than 100 H-Index from 1996 until 2010 in SciMago. These countries were studied in 3 different clusters. The data were gathered from WoS, SciMago, UNESCO, OECD and World Bank databases. Excel and SPSS are used to analyze the data. Also, the research questions and hypotheses are responded through Pierson Correlation Test. Findings: The findings show a positive correlation between two batches of gross domestic expenditure on R&D indicators and the quality of scientific publications. Also, there is a direct relationship betweent the citation indices, as the most important indicator that affects the quality of scientific publications. Originality: Searching through countries shows that there is a relationship between gross domestic expenditure on R&D and the quality of scientific publications. So, this study has been an attempt to analyze this issue.

Objective: The aim of the study was to assess the status of knowledge and skills in using references services based on Kovacks view (critical thinking, analysis questions, interviewing, organizing information, finding reference resources, and mastery of advanced tools) in terms of staff’ s views or the Mazandaran public university library. Methodology: This study is of descriptive– survey type. The population consists of management and public librarians of Mazandaran public University. Sampling method is random stratified sampling. Data collection method is researcher-built questionnaire and the reliability was calculated with Cronbach's alpha coefficient (%80). Data analysis was done by SPSS 16 software. Findings: Findings demonstrated that Kovacks view is effective on knowledge and skills of reference librarians in Mazandaran Public university libraries and the average of all the components is higher than average and in a good condition. The most and least favorable components are "mastery of advanced tools" and "organization information", respectively. Also, there was not a significant difference among librarians’ views based on demographic variables (i. e. gender, measure of study, background of employment, graduation degree, and type of work in library) in Mazandaran Public University libraries. Originality/Value: Kovacks view integrates critical thinking aspects with field's information-seeking tools and helps to develop skills and knowledge synergy reference librarian. Reference librarians can develop their skills in references service and accelerate access and disseminate information to client.

Purpose: The main purpose of this study is to identify the relationship between Techno-Stress and the organizational commitment of librarians in libraries of governmental universities of Tabriz. Methodology: This is a survey using correlation method and the population includes all librarians in governmental universities of Tabriz. Questionnaires of techno-stress designed by Ragu-Nathan et al. (2002), and organizational commitment designed by Allen and Meyer (1997) have been used for gathering data. Results: The findings show that there is a positive and significant correlation between Techno-stress and organizational commitment among librarians of Tabriz governmental universities libraries. There isn’ t any relationship between techno-stress and demographic characteristics of Librarians of Tabriz governmental Universities Libraries. Also, the results show that there isn’ t any relationship between organizational commitment and demographic characteristics of Librarians of Tabriz governmental Universities Libraries; the only relationship was between education variable and organizational commitment. Originality: Development of information technologies leads to the formation of stress between the staff of the organizations. Techno-stress is effective in reducing the organization commitment as an important and effective measure in the management of human resources. A study of the relationship between Techno-stress and the organization commitment is necessary because of the increasing use of technology in libraries.