Cristina Faba-Pérez and Lara María Infante-Fernández
The purpose of this paper is to analyze the type of content disseminated by school libraries through social media and what topics are the most commonly used, to discover if, in…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to analyze the type of content disseminated by school libraries through social media and what topics are the most commonly used, to discover if, in addition to topics concerning libraries, information with a wide social scope is also disseminated.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper reviews the use of social media as well as the implementation of a content analysis on the most used 2.0 platforms, to locate which content is the most relevant in the school libraries of public secondary schools in Extremadura.
Findings
In the Extremadura region of Spain, the results of the 752 publications posted during the period 2014-2017 by the libraries of the 86 public secondary schools on six selected social media platforms generated a total of 4 categories and 14 subcategories, and point to a predominance of topics related to encouraging and promoting reading and writing, and to the library’s support function for both the classroom and the school. However, shortcomings are detected in content related to social aspects of special interest, such as bullying or education in equality.
Originality/value
The originality of this paper lies in the fact that although there are some works on the analysis of the content of the social web of libraries in general, especially university libraries, the same does not apply to the evaluation of social media in school libraries, and much less about the analysis of social media content in these types of libraries.
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Luis Serrano Pérez and Cristina Faba-Pérez
The purpose of this research study was to seek new forms of public libraries helping with the integration of migrants. It comprises a comprehensive and up-to-date bibliographic…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this research study was to seek new forms of public libraries helping with the integration of migrants. It comprises a comprehensive and up-to-date bibliographic review and an empirical study involving the librarians and native and migrant users of public libraries in Spain leading to the design of guidelines for library services targeted at migrant users that can help foster the integration of this group of the population.
Design/methodology/approach
The bibliographic review analyses studies of whether migrant users see the public library as a place of meeting and interchange as well as a fundamental institution providing them with services, meeting their information requirements and offering them challenges and projects. The empirical investigation contrasts this theoretical information by administering three questionnaires (one for librarians, one for native users and one for migrant users, with a total of 45 items) focused on the relationship between public libraries and migration. A total of 20 public libraries over the territory of Spain were selected in accordance with diverse criteria, and a total of 233 completed questionnaires were collected.
Findings
The main results of the empirical research indicate that the greatest proportion of migrant users go to Spain’s public libraries on the recommendation of friends and/or relatives. They use them mainly as a place of study, visiting them at least twice a week, even though the representation of collections and specific services for this group is very sparse (only 5% of the collection of the libraries analysed are in a foreign language). On the other hand, the satisfaction expressed towards both the general services of the libraries and the help provided by their librarians is scored highly, getting mean scores of 4.45 and 4.40 out of 5, respectively.
Originality/value
This work not only includes an exhaustive bibliographic review of the relationship between public libraries and migrant users and an empirical investigation carried out in Spain with librarians, native users and migrant users, but also presents a decalogue of guidelines for the design of a range of services focused on the specific needs of the migrant population, thus favouring their integration in the host country.
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Cristina Faba Pérez and Isabel María Sanz Caballero
The purpose of the present work was to design a comprehensive weighted features model for the specific evaluation of archival websites, and to apply it in practice to the…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of the present work was to design a comprehensive weighted features model for the specific evaluation of archival websites, and to apply it in practice to the particular population of Spain's web archives, ranking them in terms of quality based on the features they include.
Design/methodology/approach
The design of the weighted features model is based on two parameters: the weight assigned to each feature according to its relevance for information retrieval from archival websites, and the archival website's degree of compliance with that feature.
Findings
The results of the practical application of the model to the case of Spanish web archives showed that, contrary to prior expectation, factors which are intrinsic to the geographical region of Spain that the archive belongs to, such as economic level or degree of commitment to specific archival legislation, do not directly influence its website's quality ranking. Instead, the authors conclude that the population of archival websites presents its own particular behaviour.
Originality/value
There has been a general lack of research specific to the analysis of the features of archival websites. The present work represents a certain advance in this regard in its proposal of a comprehensive weighted model of indicators for the specific evaluation of archival websites.
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Cristina Faba-Pérez and Ana-María Cordero-González
– The purpose of this paper was to check the validity of Bradford’s Law in the contemporary world of academic electronic mailing lists.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper was to check the validity of Bradford’s Law in the contemporary world of academic electronic mailing lists.
Design/methodology/approach
The present research study applied Bradford’s Law to academic electronic mailing lists to determine: whether, on the Internet, mailing lists and the posts sent to them follow the same distribution as scientific journals and the articles published in them with respect to the original form of Bradford’s Law; and whether the behaviour of the Bradford distributions differs depending on the type of academic discipline (social studies or sciences) and subject category (documentation and education, medicine and life sciences) to which the list belongs. As a prior step, the utility of mailing lists was analysed during the 10-year period of 2002-2011, together with their expected future in terms of ratifying the applicability of the Law.
Findings
The results showed that, in general, electronic mailing lists are continuing to be used, and that Bradford’s Law is indeed satisfied, especially in the science subject categories, coherent with the fact that Bradford’s Law in cybermetrics holds only for fairly narrow (closed) and well-defined (homogeneous) environments.
Originality/value
The originality of the present research study was to check the validity of the historic Bradford’s Law in the contemporary world of Internet.
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Benjamin Vargas-Quesada, Khaldoon Mohammad Oglah Al-Dwairi, Cristina Faba-Perez and Felix de Moya-Anegón
This article aims to display the structure and reveal the web influence of institutions in the MENA zone, in geographic terms (country) and academic terms (universities), by means…
Abstract
Purpose
This article aims to display the structure and reveal the web influence of institutions in the MENA zone, in geographic terms (country) and academic terms (universities), by means of their links.
Design/methodology/approach
Using search engines and webcrawlers designed to gather information about web links, in conjunction with visualization techniques and degree indicators based on social network analysis, the authors achieved their objective and found responses to a series of pertinent research questions.
Findings
There is no direct relationship between the number of university websites and the number of inlinks. Linking between countries in the MENA zone obeys patterns of vicinity and geopolitics. Arab universities are interlinked following trends governed by territorial proximity. There is a strong endogamic tendency, with universities from a single country citing each other, particularly in the case of Saudi Arabia. The authors present the first ranking of web influence in the MENA zone based on network indicators, namely country and university, and their order is corroborated by comparison with other rankings of a webometric or scientometric nature.
Research limitations/implications
Studies of this type cannot be undertaken again, at least not from the web link perspective, as Yahoo!, Google and Bing have since blocked the webcrawlers that attempt to carry out searches of inlinking or co-inlinking between/among sites. Hence, this work can be considered both a pioneer and the last of its kind. The authors do not know if or when it will be possible to again make queries about URLs in webs or, alternatively, in titles.
Originality/value
This is the first visual report of the web structure underlying the countries and universities of the MENA zone. It is also the first time that a country and university ranking of this geopolitical zone has been carried out using network indicators based on web links.
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Cristina Faba‐Pérez, V.P. Guerrero‐Bote and Félix Moya‐Anegón
The study looks at how well the distribution of “sitations” (inlinks received by Web spaces) fits either a power law (of the Lotka type) or a bibliometric distribution for printed…
Abstract
The study looks at how well the distribution of “sitations” (inlinks received by Web spaces) fits either a power law (of the Lotka type) or a bibliometric distribution for printed publications (of the Bradford type). The experimental sample examines the sitations found in a closed generic environment of thematically‐related Web sites – the case of Extremadura (Spain). Two sets of data, varying several parameters, were used. The sitation distributions found were coherent with those described in previous experiments of this type, including in the exponent. The plots of accumulated clusters of sitations and targets, however, did not fit the typical Bradford distribution.