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Details a Library Association one‐day workshop aimed to raise among librarians and to encourage senior managers of and information services to devise appropriate strategies coping with the process of demographic change on the Library Service (LIS) workforce. Covers issues for the LIS including gender, graduates and returners to work and on solutions proposed. Concludes that it will become that library schools reduce their drop‐out rates after if employers are to fill the posts which become available.

Discusses some of the management problems faced by Romanian libraries as they move through a period of adjustment.

The history of the university libraries of Romania correlates with the history of university structures to which they belong. During almost 50 years of totalitarianism, the Romanian libraries suffered a long period of international isolation and a continuous diminution of their collections from an informative point of view. The negative effects of this half century also exercised a bad influence over some other activities of the libraries (the quality of services and personnel, and on the other hand the quality of equipment and even the buildings), and finally decreased the level of their involvement in university life. Although the financial possibilities offered to libraries after the Revolution from December 1989 have grown considerably, no significant changes have been made from the structural point of view and no modernization policies have been established. To integrate the university libraries among the other goals of higher education, suggests that a proper strategy must be established, e.g. the promotion of a law for Romanian libraries; the adoption of a statute for Romanian librarians and documentalists; the setting up of a National Council of libraries; the planning of education to be closely correlated with the planning of libraries; the adoption of a national programme for the building of university libraries; the adoption of a national automation programme for the university libraries; the setting up of an evaluation system for university libraries.

For Romanian contemporary society, libraries are its heritage and the future. The arguments are historical – no one can live without history: contemporary – present dimensions of our life are linked to the quantity and quality of knowledge; and prospective – to speak of the future means to discuss the fundamental potential of Romanian society, including the libraries′ treasures. Argues that to ensure the future development of Romanian libraries it is necessary to: publish a white paper on Romanian libraries; promote and adopt legislation for Romanian libraries; elaborate and adopt a statute for librarians; construct and put into action a staged national programme for the building of libraries; project a staged automation for the national library system; and help the professional organizations of librarians.

Describes the re‐establishment of a department of librarianship and information science at Bucharest University, Romania. Discusses some of the problems and dilemmas encountered and gives details of the curriculum and courses taught. Ends by assessing what has been achieved and outlining aims for the future.

Social marketing is based on general marketing principles and strategies aimed at selling products and services to consumers with the purpose of changing an existing action; changing individual or group behavior, attitudes or beliefs; and reinforcing desired behaviors. The purpose of the study is to assess the acceptance of social marketing by librarians in post-Communist Romania within the context of this country's efforts to adopt democratic values into its social system. The study also uses the social marketing concept as an idea that requires change in attitudes and behaviors about the nature of librarianship. In so doing, it can be used as means of understanding the willingness of Romanian librarians to accept change. During the Communist regime, the librarians acted as tools that supported the dissemination of the totalitarian government's views. Fifteen years after the collapse of Communism they continue the struggle to implement principles of participatory management. However, visible changes in Romanian librarians’ mentalities, attitudes, and behaviors are still to come. A group of 74 librarians in attendance at a conference responded to a survey questionnaire based on the Social Marketing Scale (SMS) designed to determine the participants’ acceptance and willingness to support social marketing within their institutions. Results reveal that on the surface, social marketing was rejected by the sample group studied. The study suggests that, if social marketing is to play a role in Romanian librarianship, Romanian librarians must first accept the concept that libraries are important institutions and that libraries play a vital role in a democratic society. Once Romanian society begins to perceive the library as an information agency, knowledge and experience in social marketing must be gained so that the administrative and institutional will to pursue social marketing can be encouraged. Romanian libraries continue the process of redefining themselves within the country's transition to a civil society.

Developing countries in the former Soviet-bloc region have received little attention by Western researchers of libraries. This study attempts to broaden this limited knowledge concerning librarianship in Eastern Europe by offering some insight into the culture of Romanian libraries and the Romanian librarians’ readiness for change as they faced and continue to face the transition from an autocratic cultural and governmental system to a more open and democratic society with Romania's admission to the European Union as of 1 January 2007. The study uses “social marketing” as one means of ascertaining the degree to which Romanian librarians are willing to accept change.

As international users increase rapidly, multilingual systems have become a very important service for global users. The purpose of this paper is to design and implement an ontology‐driven medical information retrieval (OMIR) system by building a medical ontology based on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) medical records.

A traditional cataloging scheme is used as a navigation menu in the CDC system. This traditional cataloging scheme is transformed to a unique medical ontology for global users in the OMIR system. An experimental study was conducted on both an ontology‐driven medical information system (OMIR) and the CDC system.

The medical ontology can be used to filter out unsuitable resources based on semantic relationships. In addition, the recommended resources can be categorized and provide the patron with different languages to access resources. The OMIR system provides better relevancy and shorter search times compared with alternative systems.

The OMIR system is currently implemented for medical resources from the CDC. The developed method may also be applied to other domain areas.

This paper represents a practical method of building a multilingual medical information retrieval system and explains the functional use of ontological knowledge. This study provides insights into medical information seeking performance on the medical database systems.

The evolution of technologies has unleashed a wealth of challenges by generating massive amount of data. Recently, biological data has increased exponentially, which has introduced several computational challenges. DNA short read alignment is an important problem in bioinformatics. The exponential growth in the number of short reads has increased the need for an ideal platform to accelerate the alignment process. Apache Spark is a cluster-computing framework that involves data parallelism and fault tolerance. In this article, we proposed a Spark-based algorithm to accelerate DNA short reads alignment problem, and it is called Spark-DNAligning. Spark-DNAligning exploits Apache Spark ’s performance optimizations such as broadcast variable, join after partitioning, caching, and in-memory computations. Spark-DNAligning is evaluated in term of performance by comparing it with SparkBWA tool and a MapReduce based algorithm called CloudBurst. All the experiments are conducted on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Results demonstrate that Spark-DNAligning outperforms both tools by providing a speedup in the range of 101–702 in aligning gigabytes of short reads to the human genome. Empirical evaluation reveals that Apache Spark offers promising solutions to DNA short reads alignment problem.

This paper aims to present a systematic approach in the literature survey related to metal additive manufacturing (AM) processes and its multi-physics continuum modelling approach for its better understanding.

A systematic review of the literature available in the area of continuum modelling practices adopted for the powder bed fusion (PBF) AM processes for the deposition of powder layer over the substrate along with quantification of residual stress and distortion. Discrete element method (DEM) and finite element method (FEM) approaches have been reviewed for the deposition of powder layer and thermo-mechanical modelling, respectively. Further, thermo-mechanical modelling adopted for the PBF AM process have been discussed in detail with its constituents. Finally, on the basis of prediction through thermo-mechanical models and experimental validation, distortion mitigation/minimisation techniques applied in PBF AM processes have been reviewed to provide a future direction in the field.

The findings of this paper are the future directions for the implementation and modification of the continuum modelling approaches applied to PBF AM processes. On the basis of the extensive review in the domain, gaps are recommended for future work for the betterment of modelling approach.

This paper is limited to review only the modelling approach adopted by the PBF AM processes, i.e. modelling techniques (DEM approach) used for the deposition of powder layer and macro-models at process scale for the prediction of residual stress and distortion in the component. Modelling of microstructure and grain growth has not been included in this paper.

This paper presents an extensive review of the FEM approach adopted for the prediction of residual stress and distortion in the PBF AM processes which sets the platform for the development of distortion mitigation techniques. An extensive review of distortion mitigation techniques has been presented in the last section of the paper, which has not been reviewed yet.