PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore recent trends in the application of Web 2.0 and Library 2.0 features as exemplified through university library web sites around the world.Design/methodology/approachThe top 100 universities from the ranked list of 200 provided on the Times Higher Education web site were considered for collection of data and from this list a selection was made of 57 of these universities. This selection was based on whether the site was in English and whether it had at least one Web 2.0 feature. For each of these universities their web sites were visited and data on their Web 2.0 features (such as Blogs, RSS, Instant Messaging, Wikis and the like) were collected and analyzed.FindingsResults reveal that 37 university libraries use RSS feeds for dissemination of library news, events and announcements and 15 university libraries provide blog space for users. Whereas wiki is the least applied Web 2.0 technology, with only one university using it, Instant Messaging is another most widely applied feature with 37 libraries already providing reference service through it. Podcast (used in three libraries) and Vidcast (used in six libraries) are yet to become popular facilities to be offered in university library web sites.Research limitations/implicationsThe study is based on the university ranking for 2007, as the World Top 200 Universities 2008 was not published until October 2008 when this article was being finalized. However, this does not affect the outcome of the Web 2.0 features being utilized by the universities.Originality/valueMost of the earlier studies on the subject deal with Web 2.0 tools and how they could be used in the library context. The present paper, however, provides concrete evidence of the application of Web 2.0 in university libraries. As such it should prove of interest to all types of libraries, even though its context is university libraries.

Of late, social tagging has become popular trend in information organisation. In context of digital resources the tags assigned by users also play vital role in information retrieval. For information discovery the ‘terms’ used to retrieve the results also depend upon the ‘relevancy’ or ‘weightage’ of the keywords. This study investigates ‘relevancy ranking’ of terms used in the full text of the resource. The common words present in both full text of the article and social tags were considered for the study by employing TF-IDF statistical technique and Jaccard similarity test. The results show that it is possible to assign ‘weight’ to keywords for better results and also determine the significant tags assigned by the user. The Jaccard similarity coefficient test adopted to understand the word similarity between full text words of an article and marine social tags. This work reveals the social tags can enrich metadata for information retrieval.

The study examines Indian and South Korean mechanical engineering research output on several parameters including growth, research communication in core journals, and geographical distribution of publications, share of international collaborative publications at the national level as well as across subjects and characteristics of high productivity institutions, authors and cited papers. The study focuses on the articles published by India and South Korea, and indexed in Science Citation Index - Web of Science for the period 2011 to 2015. India has produced 11,041 papers in the mechanical engineering field, and received 44,307 citations and South Korea produced 8,585 papers and received 34,437 citations in the field during the period 2011 to 2015. The study suggests the need to increase the pace of Indian and South Korean scientific research and improve their quality. It also suggests to build competence and knowledge base to help bridge the scientific and technological gap with leading countries.

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The purpose of this study is to examine the quality of catalogue records in the top five management institutes in India. The present study attempts to investigate the error rate found in the catalogue records of five management institutes by comparing with bibliographic records of Library of Congress (LoC). The study analysed the accuracy of 293 catalogue records. The errors in the data were listed and categorised as major and minor errors. The finding shows that while LoC records are absolutely error free, the quality of catalogue records of management institutes, on the other hand, was far from acceptable level. 1093 errors from 251 records were found amounting to 4.35 errors per record. These results show that there is a need for libraries in India to take up the bibliographic data entry more seriously than ever before.