Editorial

Welcome to the second issue of 2020 of Digital Library Perspectives. We wish to start this editorial by thanking the staff at Emerald, the editorial board and all the reviewers who despite having many other tasks have worked tirelessly with us to prepare and bring you this issue. Emerald has completely renewed the Digital Library Perspectives website with new pages for the editorial team and for the author guidelines. Let us know what you think.

Digital libraries are growing into socio-technical systems that function within organizations and society, to improve their communities and enable them to improve their lives. The subject area of digital libraries as a whole has also evolved over the years, with a move away from purely technical issues toward community applications and the issues of use, effectiveness and impact. Thus, digital libraries are not limited to being organized repositories of digital content but could actively aim to contribute to the achievement of the United Nations’ sustainable development goals (SDGs).

The IFLA/UNESCO Manifesto [1] declares that the mission of the digital library is to help solve the problem of the digital divide, to engage in synergies between cultural heritage institutions and research organizations for empowering communities to access and use information. International associations such as IFLA and ASIS&T, together with UNESCO, are committed to foster professional communities to enhance the contributions that digital libraries can offer for achieving the SDGs. In the previous editorial, we mentioned the COVID-19 pandemic, then, at its first signs, it emerged as a factor that would have a serious impact on various sectors, such as health, the economy and the information world. In recent months, COVID’s impact on digital libraries has been even greater than expected; it has been a catalyzer for digitization, and above all, it has been a test that has highlighted a series of unresolved problems, which are especially related to the digital divide and capacity building. Moreover, the lockdown during the pandemic has made SDGs’ importance even more evident – poverty, health and education needs have been exacerbated. The importance of global cooperation in all sectors is also evident. Attention toward the SDGs has become more urgent, and they must guide the research being conducted in various fields.

Therefore, it is highly likely that research on digital libraries will have to become increasingly oriented by the SDGs, for developing different and multiple aspects that can facilitate their achievement. For this reason, Digital Library Perspectives wants to stimulate research on digital libraries worldwide to facilitate SDGs’ achievement, as included in the UN’s 2030 Agenda.

This issue of Digital Library Perspectives opens with the transcript of various conversations that Juan D. Machin-Mastromatteo had with Jon Tennant in Peru in 2019. The conversation covers highly important and currently debated subjects, such as Plan S and Sci-Hub, but above all, they describe a critical approach for applying the principles of open science and open access to different contexts. Tennant’s untimely death last April surprised and saddened us all; he left his message “open science for better science” as his legacy and an invitation for reflection. Open science is a topic of the highest relevance for knowledge creation, and digital libraries are one of the infrastructure pillars that enable accessing and reusing research results.

In the first research article, by Stanislava Gardasevic, “User driven efforts in creating knowledge graph information system,” she conducts a qualitative investigation of the information seeking behavior of PhD students in an interdisciplinary program, to inform about the functionalities of a proposed system. The results highlight aspects that have not been sufficiently considered, such as personal motivation and projected timelines, which should be carefully taken care of, as they could improve the design of a system. Knowledge graphs could reveal useful system functionalities and facilitate the transfer of tacit knowledge.

Jingyi Wang, Yuan Run and Hongwei Shi present “Emotional state representation and detection method of users in library space based on body posture recognition,” which proposes studying the links between the body posture in the library space with certain reading and information research behaviors. This method can be used for monitoring the information commons space and assess it to redesign university libraries.

Sadiat Adetoro Salau, Georgina U. Oyedum, F.P. Abifarin, S.J. Udoudoh and Jibril A. Alhassan contributed “Performance assessment of electronic theses and dissertations initiatives in Nigeria”; in this article, they have evaluated the development of Electronic Theses and Dissertations repositories in Nigeria, which were among the first digital library projects in the world, but in Nigeria, they did not get the necessary visibility. The authors explore possible reasons behind this gap.

Hero Khezri, Peyman Rezaei-Hachesu and Reza Ferdousi, in their paper “Actionable knowledge with the help of method repositories,” propose a tool for disseminating the research results that are stored in institutional repositories to the professional community, which is not limited to just experts on the subject.

Fayaz Ahmad Loan and Ufaira Yaseen Shah, in “The decay and persistence of web references,” have investigated a very important issue, which is related to the persistence of website citations. They selected five years of contents from the Journal of Informetrics and analyzed the URLs of the websites mentioned in the bibliographic references. They assessed persistence elements, such as age, domain, technical errors and code errors.

The last two papers focus on research about digital information literacy competencies of professionals in Pakistan. Asad Khan presents “Digital information literacy skills of Pakistani librarians: Exploring supply-demand mismatches, adoption strategies and acquisition barriers,” which investigated current skills and related them to cultural barriers (such as poor collaboration with teachers, lack of interest and poor sense of service). The author provides some recommendations on how to overcome these barriers, which is very important to improve everyone’s ability to access information.

Shamshad Ahmed and Tariq Rasheed also focus their research on a better understanding of the digital information competencies of librarians in Pakistan. Their study, “Relationship between personality traits and digital literacy skills: A study of university librarians,” focuses on the personal characteristics of university librarians, which are classified as extroverts and introverts, by providing original research results.

Digital Library Perspectives is published four times a year. We encourage experts and professionals to publish articles on their research and case studies related to digital libraries. We are preparing a forthcoming special issue, “Digital Libraries and COVID-19,” which collects research experiences and case studies that demonstrate the impact of the pandemic and how researchers and practitioners have been able to relaunch digital libraries and keep them alive, demonstrating their value for society.

We also invite you to visit our social media profiles on Facebook and Twitter, to follow our initiatives, news and the call for papers that we communicate through our official Website at Emerald and our other communication channels.