Abstracts – 3/2014

STUDIES

Awards for user-friendliness: the Certified Library title
and the Quality Prize for Libraries

SKALICZKI Judit

As a definitive part of the information society and the cultural sector in the 21st century, it is the most important task of libraries to serve users and to contribute to the development of social processes and human activities. This task can only be fulfilled if they are aware of the needs of society and of library users, and meet the relevant expectations. To this end, librarians and library managers have to apply the approach, methods and techniques of quality management, of which self-assessment is an integral part. In 2010, the Common Assessment Framework for Libraries (abbreviated in Hungarian as KKÉK) was developed in Hungary based on the Common Assessment Framework (CAF) model of the European Foundation for Quality Management. In 2013, the Ministry of Human Capacities founded two awards recognizing the quality work and user-friendliness of libraries, based on KKÉK. These awards (the Certified Library title and the Quality Prize for Libraries) are given upon submitting proposals, and are the two highest professional honours for libraries at the moment.The problems of collecting and acquisitions in the National Széchényi Library

RÁCZ Ágnes

In spring 2014, the staff of the National Széchényi Library launched a series of discussions about the current state of the national library and its future. The forum’s agenda included the library‘s main tasks, problems of collection development and preservation, requirements of cataloguing, as well as services and research. The theme of the first meeting was the future of libraries in general, while the second one covered the problems of collection development. At the meeting, the author of this article grouped her considerations into the following broad themes: 1) the scope of the national library’s collection, the national library as a collection of national literature, subjects and completeness; 2) legal deposit; 3) Hungarica materials; 4) the national library as a special library; 5) the types of publications to be collected; 6) the financial background of collection development.

The main task of the national library is to collect Hungarica materials, complemented – to a varying degree in different periods – with collecting universal and special materials. Nowadays, instead of aiming to develop a comprehensive collection, an evaluative selection seems more realistic, resulting in an increased responsibility of the acquisitions librarian. Legal deposit copies do support acquisitions, although there is a large number of publications not deposited, and their acquisition is getting more and more difficult with time. Nevertheless, we should be aware that legal deposit in itself cannot meet the acquisitions needs of the national library. The author indicates that depositing fewer copies would be sufficient for cataloguing and archiving the national imprint, and this smaller number of copies could also serve as an incentive for publishers to meet their deposit obligations. Legal deposit requires increasing storage space, this is why the author suggests that in some cases it would be sufficient to retain archival copies only. Hungarica materials represent the best known and least problematic area of acquisitions. The national library performs special library tasks in the field of a) literary science, linguistics and history, as well as in the field of b) library and information science. Collecting in the latter poses no problems, but collecting the disciplines mentioned as first is accompanied by a lot of difficulties (regarding e.g., the acquisitions budget, reference tools, documentation etc.).The most serious problem is still the extremely low amount of acquisitions budget.

Acquisition of digital materials in the Map Collection of the National Library

KISS Eszter

Changes resulting from the digital era appear in the Map Collection of the National Library first of all in the field of acquisitions: the library receives hardly any digital maps, and the amount of printed maps arriving as legal deposit copies has considerably decreased.

There was a paradigm shift in the production of maps: the cartographic approach was replaced by the IT-based approach. Today, instead of maps, large amounts of spatial data are collected, which serve as data source to compile maps according to individual needs. The Map Collection of the National Library should not function in the digital age as a map archive, but as a service centre supplying information and metadata. This paper presents the considerations determining acquisitions for the map collection; in addition to considerations related to Hungarica materials, discusses the criteria of regional and subject relevance, the frequency of acquisitions, as well as cataloguing levels and the media to be acquired. Since the rules about the legal deposit of digital maps are yet to be accepted, the National Library concludes bilateral agreements with selected producers of cartographic data. The librarians-cartographers must pay attention to requesting metadata (including the properties of image files, project documentation, visualization tools and software), as well as to the acquisition of data sets in standard formats.

Scholarly selfies

HAJNAL WARD Judit – BEJARANO, William – DUDÁS Anikó

Last year the word „selfie” won the title of „the word of the year” from Oxford Dictionaries. A selfie is a photograph that one has taken of oneself and uploaded to a social media website. Selfies became extremely popular in 2013 on the Internet. So did, albeit in a narrower circle, researcher profiles created by researchers themselves. A researcher profile summarizes an author’s work by listing all publications. The goal of the profile is to highlight an individual scholar or an institution, while promoting the discoverability of their scholarly publications. These pages offer bibliographic data and sometimes full-text articles. Another goal is to complement traditional bibliometric indicators, since conference presentations, book chapters, syllabi, research plans and data are also uploaded in addition to scholarly articles. In parallel with the practices of Hungarian scholars, this paper will present researcher profile platforms mostly used by American scholars (Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic Search, academia.edu, ResearcherGate, Mendeley, etc.). Given that there is an algorithm to forecast the success of selfies (i.e., the number of shares and likes), the authors will review common and different components of these profile options to find out the potential survival of emerging opportunities. With an eye to the perspective of academic libraries, their analysis may be of interest for colleagues who wish to implement or maintain large institutional or national repositories too.

The role of cultural capital in the education of readers. Reading survey in
an urban and a rural school

HEGEDÛS Szabina

With a survey conducted in 2013, the author examined the role of parents, schools and libraries as mediators of culture in the relationship of primary school pupils and reading in an elite school and in a school of a disadvantaged small region. Previously, the biggest competitor to reading used to be watching television, today it is the social media. Pupils’ relationship to books and knowledge is formed primarily by the patterns seen in the home of their parents. Children who grow up in an intellectual family, in balanced and financially safe conditions, are equipped with a cultural capital, which influences their lives as a whole: they fit into society more easily, and are able to respond to the challenges of the information society as well. In a well-functioning school, with non-homogeneous classes, there is a bigger chance to eliminate disadvantages brought from home, but – through a selective function – advantages and disadvantages may be quite as well further increased. The differences between pupils’ reading habits in an urban school with high prestige and in a rural school well reflect the segregating nature of the Hungarian education system, the role of the family background, and the impact of parents.

WORKSHOP

To the materials of the First Hungarian Conference on Bibliotherapy …

VRAUKÓNÉ LUKÁCS Ilona

On May 16, 2014 the Hungarian Reading Association (HUNRA) organized the first national conference of experts on bibliotherapy at the Nyíregyháza County and City Library under the title “The books and tales helped”. The conference was funded by the National Cultural Fund. The themes of papers provided an overview of the evolution of bibliotherapy in Hungary, tackled its psychological background and the related issues of literary theory, presented and analyzed practical experience in the field. Due to time constraints, two important topics were missing from the conference and are discussed here: 1. the case of young people relegated from their family environment and sent to foster care because of psychic and physical abuse (see the article by Asztalos-Varga below), and 2. the role of literature therapy for those in pre-trial detention in jails (see Kovács).

Torn out of the family – bibliotherapy to alleviate the trauma of kids living in children’s group homes

ASZTALOS-VARGA Csilla

Kids living in group homes may have suffered serious mental (and sometimes physical) injuries before being admitted to a children’s home, because the transfer from their homes is a major trauma in itself. As an antecedent, they go through grave traumas destructing their personality: their perception of trust and safety is compromised, their self-esteem has decreased, they view their present as pointless and their future as uncertain. The article presents the specific aspects of bibliotherapy to be applied with this group, and describes the experience gained during bibliotherapy with children aged 12 to 14 at a home for children in Budapest.

 Literature therapy in a prison

KOVÁCS Zsuzsanna

The Eötvös Károly County Library and Cultural Institute, Veszprém organized from an EU grant group sessions for the inmates of the Veszprém County Prison. Five reading groups were started with eight participants in each. The activities took place once a month; on each occasion a novel was discussed. The author of the current article, as the leader of a discussion group, describes the experience gained when discussing three literary pieces. The use of novels in bibliotherapy constituted a new task. The detainees were surprisingly active, they could appropriate these lengthy pieces more than the short stories discussed earlier. They considered it a success that they had read a novel to the end. They were able to better identify with its characters, and, by projecting what they read to their own lives, they could improve their self-knowledge and world view.

At the crossroads. A survey of five library journals of national importance

JÁVORKA Brigitta – TÓTH Máté

The reduced grant funds for publishing Hungarian library journals endangers their publishing in print. The editors of Hungarian library journals of national importance (Könyv és Nevelés; Könyv, Könyvtár, Könyvtáros; Könyvtári Figyelő; Könyvtári Levelező/lap and Tudományos és Műszaki Tájékoztatás), together with the Hungarian Library Institute’s researchers, conducted a joint online questionnaire survey to inquire about the opinions of readers about the print and electronic versions, the familiarity with the journals’ profiles, and the ideal online journal. The survey conducted in May 2014 revealed that the respondents are familiar with the profiles of journals, and claim that the journals offer a good coverage of readers’ needs. In response to open-ended questions the respondents provided substantial additions to the profiles; a majority named hybrid use, i.e., parallel access both in print and online, as preference. Electronic-only publishing is not yet considered desirable by the majority of respondents, but they did not entirely reject it. Users would expect a well-usable electronic journal to have a clear, well structured online interface, a good search function, interactivity, web 2.0 applications and attractive design, and, at the same time, an opportunity for individual printing on demand in a quality similar to print. As eventual developments continue to depend on funding, the question remains whether electronic publications are really as cost-effective as claimed by the promoters of this transfer to electronic.

FROM OUR PAST

Sixty years of the journal Könyvtári Figyelő. Part 1. (1955–1968)

POGÁNY György

The author presents the history of the journal by a combination of content analysis and conclusions drawn from quantifiable data about editing practice. The history of the journal is divided into four periods: from 1955 to 1958, from 1959 to 1968, from 1969 to 1990, and from 1991 to 2013.

The first period is characterized by the evolution of so-called socialist librarianship. At that time the journal was engaged in documentation and published mainly abstracts and translations. Professional issues were presented with a strong ideological emphasis, promoting the ideal of the educating library. It was an objective to present foreign librarianship – mainly in the socialist countries –, but – thanks to a conscious editorial decision – the practice of western countries was described as well, although in a lesser volume. The second phase was characterized by uncertain editorial principles: with either the documentary role or original professional publications dominating. By 1969 the principles of editing have consolidated and today’s structure has been established. The journal belonged in the seventies to the Centre for Library Science and Methodology (KMK) and to the National Library and Documentation Board (OKDT) and developed into a high-standard professional forum, transmitting the ideas of professional reform. The year 1991 brought new content and new form again: the earlier independent abstracting journal (KDSZ) was integrated as a separate section, while the Studies section started to extensively publish the findings of Hungarian library research. The past few years are characterized by a proliferation of financial troubles, a decrease of funding.

Book art and book lovers between the two world wars

FARKAS Judit Antónia

It became fashionable to produce, purchase and collect art books in Hungary after World War I, and with that, the conditions, institutional system and professional forums of the bibliophile and book art movement also evolved. The increasing interest in book art and bibliophilism was manifested also in a growing number of exhibitions of fine books after 1920. The exhibitions were arranged by professional organizations – the Hungarian Bibliophile Society, the Hungarian Society of Book Artists and Advertising etc. – in close cooperation with the acknowledged personalities of the book profession (e.g., Imre Kner, László Reiter), with the Hungarian Museum of Applied Arts and the National Széchényi Library. The collections of bibliophiles were regularly presented at exhibitions in Hungary. The current study provides an overview of the book-related exhibitions in Hungary and abroad, which contributed, through promoting contemporary Hungarian art books and book collecting, to getting the achievements of early 20th-century printing, publishing and books art acknowledged.

PERSONALIA

Erik Vajda (1930-2014). Obituary

BERKE Barnabásné

Between 1963 and 1990 Erik Vajda was a leading staff member of OMIKK (the National Technical Information Centre and Library). In the period 1990 through 1996 he acted as manager of the technical libraries’ shared cataloguing system. From 1997 to 2001 he worked as project manager of the Hungarian National Shared Catalogue (MOKKA). His main fields of interest included reference, information retrieval systems and languages, as well as library standardization. He was President of the Association of Hungarian Librarians (MKE) and founder and chair of MKE’s Technology Libraries Section.

A farewell to Péterné Fügedi
(1928-2014)

NAGY Anikó

From 1952 until her retirement in 1983 Péterné Fügedi worked as a senior staff member at the National Széchényi Library. In her young years she learned cataloguing at the Book Processing Department, and this knowledge became later useful during her career as a bibliographer. From 1961 she was engaged in tasks related to the current national bibliography. In addition to editing the Hungarian National Bibliography, she was editor of the bibliography of Hungarian bibliographies and of the annual volumes of the Hungarian Bibliography. She took part in the work of national and international standardization organizations (IFLA, ISO, ICSTI), and acted as an expert on localizing international standards. It was under her leadership that the modernization of the national bibliographic system and its automation started.

FROM ABROAD

Mission, programs and challenges of Knowledge Organization

OHLY, Heinz-Peter

(Translated by Tibor Koltay)

Traditionally Knowledge Organization is the ordering of documents on a bookshelf and the indexing of these in a more or less one-dimensional catalogue. Now with the Web, its many and hyperlinked, distributed and heterogeneous sources, the plain terminological approaches are no longer sufficient. Given this, ISKO has to rethink its mission. The new Knowledge Organization, which aims at the Semantic Web 3.0 tries to combine different Knowledge Organization systems by shared metadata and formalized ontologies. While the semantic approaches have quite an opposite approach to the user-driven systems, the future might lay in a combination of logical descriptions, specialized evaluation, and self-organizing principles, what could be named “Self Organizing Knowledge Organization Systems”. There are open questions which need to be solved in future by ISKO and similar organizations. (Original abstract)

From professional information to training based on professional journals

GROMOVA, Olga

(Translated by Ilona Hegyközi)

The private publishing house named 1st September (Pervoe Sentabra) is a unique phenomenon in the Russian system of education. A pedagogical journal and later a publishing house bearing the same name was founded by Simon Soloveichik in 1992, this venture is led by his son today. Annexes to the journals have served as a methodological guidance from the very beginning in different areas of school work. The journal dealing with school libraries, entitled School library (Biblioteka v skole) started at the initiative of the author, 16 years ago. (Today, in addition to or instead of printed issues, the electronic annexes can be ordered at a reasonable price.) The publishing house is sustained without state support, from its own revenues. The venture’s operation is divided into four areas: publishing – 24 journals about methodological issues; accredited training courses – based on the professional journals, offering distance learning too; individual publishing jobs, and exclusive book publishing.

From stacks to the web. The transformation of academic library collecting

LEWIS, David W.

(College and Research Libraries, vol. 74. 2013. no. 2. pp. 159–177.)

(Reviewed by Tibor Koltay)

The existence of a ubiquitous and cheap worldwide communication’s network that increasingly makes documents easily and freely available will require a transformation of academic library collecting practice. It will be driven by a number of specific developments including: the digitization of content; the development of print repositories; the development of e-readers and print-on-demand publishing; the growth of open access; challenges to establish academic publishing organizations; and the growth of new forms of scholarship based on openness and social productivity. If academic libraries are to be successful, they will need to: deconstruct legacy print collections; move from item-by-item book selection to purchase-on-demand and subscriptions; manage the transition to open access journals; focus on curating unique items; and develop new mechanisms for funding national infrastructure. (Original abstract)

BOOK REVIEWS

A versatile book on e-book culture

KEREKES Pál – KISZL Péter – TAKÁCS Dániel: E-könyvészet: a digitális könyvkultúra alapvonásai (Budapest, ELTE BTK, 2013.)

(Reviewed by Tibor Koltay)

Strategies for using and teaching the invisible web

DEVINE, Jane: Going beyond Google again. Strategies for using and teaching the invisible web (London, Facet, 2014.)

(Reviewed by Tibor Koltay)

Information behaviour – evolutionary instinct (A belated book review)

SPINK, Amanda: Information behaviour. An evolutionary instinct (Springer, 2010) (Information Science and Knowledge Management, vol. 16.)

(Reviewed by László Z. Karvalics)

FROM LIBRARY AND INFORMATION SCIENCE JOURNALS

(Abstracts)

Kategória: 2014. 3. szám | A közvetlen link.

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