Abstract
Objective - To explore the prevalence of systematic reviews (SRs) and librarians’ involvement in them, and to investigate whether librarian co-authorship of SRs was associated with lower risk of bias.
Methods - SRs by researchers at University of Oslo or Oslo University Hospital were counted and categorized by extent of librarian involvement and assessed for risk of bias using the tool Risk of Bias in Systematic Reviews (ROBIS).
Results - Of 2,737 identified reviews, 324 (11.84%) were SRs as defined by the review authors. Of the 324 SRs, 4 (1.23%) had librarian co-authors, in 85 (26.23%) librarians were acknowledged or mentioned in the methods section. In the remaining 235 SRs (72.53%), there was no clear evidence that a librarian had been involved. Librarian co-authored SRs were associated with lower risk of bias compared to SRs with acknowledgement or no participation by librarians.
Conclusion - SRs constitute a small portion of published reviews. Librarians rarely co-author SRs and are only acknowledged or mentioned in a quarter of our sample. The quality and documentation of literature searches in SRs remains a challenge. To minimise the risk of bias in SRs, librarians should advocate for co-authorship.
Discovery systems allow academic library users to locate a wider range of resources than previous OPACs. However, actual usage of these systems may still be challenging. The main aim of this research is to get a better understanding of the hurdles users face while searching contemporary library systems.This study utilizes a transaction log analysis approach, using popular and zero result queries datasets gathered from the statistics module of a library discovery system. It explores what types of queries users perform, how successful the queries are, and examines underlying reasons for unsuccessful queries. To our knowledge, this is the first academic paper to use data originating from built-in transaction logs of the Oria library discovery system.The analysis shows that queries are often curriculum-related: we could pinpoint a relation with curriculum for 58% of the popular queries, and 28% for the zero result searches. A vast majority of popular queries refer to books, databases and journals, and over half of the queries used the title to locate a resource. 20% of the popular queries turned out to be unsuccessful. Zero result queries typically involve long queries, and in many cases consist of pasted reference citations.Our conclusion is that the examined discovery system is rather sensitive. Whilst this suggests the importance of increasing users' information search skills, it also points to the need for enhancing discovery systems and their underlying metadata. Furthermore, due to the prominence of curriculum-related queries, a better integration of curriculum materials ought to be achieved.
The current experience of using digital libraries is bereft of many of the distinct qualities of exploring and handling items in the physical library space. The main question addressed in this paper is how to bridge the gap between the highly visual experience of browsing physical libraries, and the comparatively impoverished digital library environments. Creating effective applications integrating digital content in physical library spaces requires careful strategies with respect to user experience, content selection, and connections to real-world collections and events. We show collection-centric, event-centric and integrative approaches to creating touch-based applications, and demonstrate how usage data from touch applications can be used for optimization, as well as for inspiration for new applications.
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