Papers by B Preedip Balaji
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Purpose The purpose of this paper is to analyze the status of policies, legislation and finance w... more Purpose The purpose of this paper is to analyze the status of policies, legislation and finance with respect to public libraries in India. Design/methodology/approach This is a descriptive study based on data collected from literature review and census data on public libraries, along with a field visit of government public libraries at Bangalore. It attempts a critique of existing policies related to public libraries in particular and the culture sector in general, which governs the Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAMs) in India. Findings Of India's 29 states and 7 union territories, 19 states have passed state library legislations, of which only 5 have the provision of a library cess or tax levy and it was found that states with lower literacy rates do not have library legislations. Bihar and Chhattisgarh in 2008 and Arunachal Pradesh in 2009 have recently passed these legislations without a library cess. Few states have progressed with the automation of public libraries, while 16 state libraries continue to function without any such legislation. The legislative process and legal issues involved in policy making, combined with the lack of political consensus and goodwill, have severely constrained the growth, coverage and development of public libraries for people in India. The existing national acts and state library legislations should be reviewed to adapt to changing times and to bring about integrated information services across GLAMs for the public. A RTI query sent to the Ministry of Culture revealed that there is no official data available on the per capita expenditure on public libraries in India. Practical implications In an online-networked environment, all GLAM institutions work towards collecting, preserving and providing access to educational and cultural heritage resources as social capital. However, there is a lack of national policy to govern GLAMs and the government bodies responsible for developing GLAMs are not integrative in their processes. A more holistic framework is required to assess funding needs and to ensure reforms in culture sector. Central government should make it mandatory to have access to public library for every
Library Hi Tech News, 2021
Purpose This paper aims to examine integrated library systems (ILS) and web-scale discovery servi... more Purpose This paper aims to examine integrated library systems (ILS) and web-scale discovery services (WSDS) of the National Institute of Ranking Framework’s (NIRF) top-ranked universities for the “Overall” category in the 2020 rankings. Further, the authors analyse how the ILS-WSDS transitions work in the academic libraries of higher educational institutions (HEIs) in India. Design/methodology/approach The 200 top-ranked institutions in the NIRF rankings 2020 were chosen to evaluate their ILS-WSDS systems available through their library websites. Out of ten categories of NIRF rankings, the “Overall” category was selected as the institutions ranked under this category are discipline-independent and have a minimum of 1,000 full-time students in their undergraduate and graduate programmes. Findings The authors found that Koha is a leading ILS with 52 libraries (26%), followed by LibSys with 18 institutions (9%), SOUL with ten institutions (5%), AutoLib with eight institutions (4%), VTL...
The iSchool movement is not merely a reaction of the information science community to the critici... more The iSchool movement is not merely a reaction of the information science community to the criticism that there is a mismatch between LIS education and needs of the information job market but also represents the growing recognition that there is a need to elevate the status of the discipline in the higher education system to a level on par with other professions/disciplines. This paper attempts to construct the domain of interest to the iSchools by profiling the ongoing and recent research in the iSchools. The profiling is carried out by examining the publications emanating from six iSchools. The findings suggest that there is as yet no clear construct of what constitutes the domain of interest of iSchools. The research profiles of these iSchools also appear to differ significantly. The study also suggests the emergence of certain new information specialities.
Library and Information Science, 2012
ABSTRACT This chapter outlines current developments in Indian libraries, information services and... more ABSTRACT This chapter outlines current developments in Indian libraries, information services and cultural sector collectively highlighting recent trends and developments as India increasingly takes centre stage in the area of libraries and information literacy development. The chapter also provides a critical analysis of library and information science education in India and highlights the need for government strategies and policies related to public libraries. Some 17 federal states and union territories in the Republic of India have no public library legislation and therefore low literacy rates. India needs public awareness campaigns, civic engagement and community developments including the grass-roots empowerment of public libraries. Financial reforms, modernization and federal funding strategies for public libraries are also required to energize cultural organizations and national libraries. A recent major development is the establishment of a National Commission on Libraries following recommendations by the National Knowledge Commission. However, Indian public libraries do not cater sufficiently for the growing youth population or other strata's of Indian society. The growing Indian higher education sector also necessitates information policies for open access, digital preservation and repositories development.
Library Review, 2012
PurposeThe objective of this paper is to find out the rationale for institutional repository (IR)... more PurposeThe objective of this paper is to find out the rationale for institutional repository (IR) categories, and the challenges in sustainable development of open scholarship to facilitate scholarly communication.Design/methodology/approachThis is a critical study method adopted to find out the categories of IR and various developmental challenges with the aid of related literature.FindingsIR categories and their nomenclature are found to be overlapping when used by repository registries and librarians alike. As the digital objects in the repositories are expanding, with a requirement to store new entities as diverse as linked data and web archives, IR categorization becomes difficult to determine. Even though the growth of IRs in India is phenomenal, concerted research and development efforts to strengthen digital infrastructure and repository solutions in multilingual settings are slow.Originality/valueWith the rapid growth of IRs worldwide, the categories with which these are cl...
2018 5th International Symposium on Emerging Trends and Technologies in Libraries and Information Services (ETTLIS), 2018
Cloud computing technologies have redefined information technology and information management by ... more Cloud computing technologies have redefined information technology and information management by global deployments of infrastructures that are scalable, remotecontrolled and agile. However, various risks arise with using cloud services and technologies and how to mitigate them is not widely known. This article discusses some of the risks and the mitigation strategies.
KNOWLEDGE ORGANIZATION, 2020
Evolution of cities is a subject of research for over a hundred years in the organization of urba... more Evolution of cities is a subject of research for over a hundred years in the organization of urban knowledge systems. Locating five key methodological approaches used by urban scholars and practitioners, this paper demonstrates different relationships between urban studies and classification. Five significant themes form the background of urban studies literature. The first theme sources and literature explore organizing urban materials into sources and literature with a unique dimension of spatiality. The second theme discusses three important facets: scale as a geographic unit of analysis and space as an abstract entity and system as a set of interdependent parts of urban places. The third theme, known as “other” urban, argued for the poor treatment of global south and how it builds inclusivity. The fourth theme, classification and retrieval, investigates the relationship between urban materials and user needs. The last theme, classification schemes, highlights subject treatment o...
Urban is a complex domain, dealing with characteristics of life in cities to meet the needs of ur... more Urban is a complex domain, dealing with characteristics of life in cities to meet the needs of urban society. With a changing demography, spatial and socio-economic conditions, urbanization is experienced in the globalized cities, as half of the world’s population live in large cities and towns in 21st century. There are ongoing debates on positing ‘urban’ in social science, science and technology and in arts disciplines, which interpret and define the meaning of ‘urban.’ However, the existing disciplines are interdisciplinary, intersectional and diversified with various approaches, models and theories to study urbanism. Towards the goal of arriving at the subject treatment of urban, this paper analyzes the domain of urban studies through Library of Congress (LC), Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) and Universal Decimal Classification (UDC) schemes. Through this analysis, we investigate the key disciplines, vocabularies, and diversity of subjects in urban studies.
The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 2021
The purpose of this paper is to analyze the status of policies, legislation and finance with resp... more The purpose of this paper is to analyze the status of policies, legislation and finance with respect to public libraries in India. Design/methodology/approach This is a descriptive study based on data collected from literature review and census data on public libraries, along with a field visit of government public libraries at Bangalore. It attempts a critique of existing policies related to public libraries in particular and the culture sector in general, which governs the Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAMs) in India. Findings Of India's 29 states and 7 union territories, 19 states have passed state library legislations, of which only 5 have the provision of a library cess or tax levy and it was found that states with lower literacy rates do not have library legislations. Bihar and Chhattisgarh in 2008 and Arunachal Pradesh in 2009 have recently passed these legislations without a library cess. Few states have progressed with the automation of public libraries, while 16 state libraries continue to function without any such legislation. The legislative process and legal issues involved in policy making, combined with the lack of political consensus and goodwill, have severely constrained the growth, coverage and development of public libraries for people in India. The existing national acts and state library legislations should be reviewed to adapt to changing times and to bring about integrated information services across GLAMs for the public. A RTI query sent to the Ministry of Culture revealed that there is no official data available on the per capita expenditure on public libraries in India.
The Electronic Library, 2019
Purpose This paper aims to explore recent trends of how Web 2.0 applications were used in 75 acad... more Purpose This paper aims to explore recent trends of how Web 2.0 applications were used in 75 academic libraries in Asia through their library websites. Design/methodology/approach The Times Higher Education Asia University Rankings 2016 was considered for this study and out of 200 top universities ranked, 75 universities were selected for data collection. Using a multi-method approach, this study evaluated key design elements, library service platforms and website content of each academic library website, examining their site features, Web 2.0 types and applications. The criteria for selecting the websites were first the website was in English and second had Web 2.0 applications integrated into the main website. For the ranking of websites, a library web service index was developed, benchmarking from these groups – resource discovery tools, Web 2.0 applications, e-resources, mobile applications, library guides, digital reference services and digital inclusion – as indicators. Findin...
Publications, 2019
Digital scholarship and electronic publishing within scholarly communities change when metrics an... more Digital scholarship and electronic publishing within scholarly communities change when metrics and open infrastructures take center stage for measuring research impact. In scholarly communication, the growth of preprint repositories as a new model of scholarly publishing over the last three decades has been one of the major developments. As it unfolds, the landscape of scholarly communication is transitioning—with much being privatized as it is made open—and turning towards alternative metrics, such as social media attention, author-level, and article-level metrics. Moreover, the granularity of evaluating research impact through new metrics and social media changes the objective standards of evaluating research performance. Using preprint repositories as a case study, this article situates them in a scholarly web, examining their salient features, benefits, and futures. Moves towards scholarly web development and publishing on the semantic and social web with open infrastructures, c...
Library Hi Tech News, 2018
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to present an integrated literature review exploring the nat... more Purpose The purpose of this paper is to present an integrated literature review exploring the nature of responsive, semantic and interactive Web 3.0 technologies applicable for academic libraries. Design/methodology/approach The authors conducted an integrated review of the literature combining a strategy of automated and keywords search. The main source for identifying the studies are Emerald Library Studies and Information & Knowledge Management eJournals, Web of Kn.edge and Library, Information Science & Technology s (EBSCO) databases. To this end, a sample of (n = 140) studies was analyzed to characterize the Web 3.0 trends and its applications based on theme, years and document types. Findings A review of literature reveals that Web 3.0 needs evaluation as to what extent they are integrated, deployed and mainstreamed into library services and in information management practices. It is important to develop a conceptual framework that explores the linkages of Web 3.0 technologies...
This paper describes to construct faceted ontologies for domain modeling. Building upon the facet... more This paper describes to construct faceted ontologies for domain modeling. Building upon the faceted theory of S.R. Ranganathan (1967), the paper intends to address the faceted classification approach applied to build domain ontologies. As classificatory ontologies are employed to represent the relationships of entities and objects on the web, the faceted approach helps to analyze domain representation in an effective way for modeling. Based on this perspective, an ontology of the music domain has been analyzed that would serve as a case study.
Knowledge Organization, 2015
She has contributed to UNESCO's Global Open Access Portal (GOAP). She is on the advisory board of... more She has contributed to UNESCO's Global Open Access Portal (GOAP). She is on the advisory board of Universal Decimal Classification and a co-chair of the interest group on Agricultural Data at the Research Data Alliance. She has participated in EU funded projects including LivingKnowledge, AgInfra and worked as consultant to UNESCO and UNFAO. Dr. Madalli's interest is in the area of knowledge organization and application of facetization in information systems, information infrastructures, digital libraries, semantic web technologies, faceted ontologies, and multilingual information services. Preedip Balaji is currently an associate librarian at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements, Bangalore, India. He holds a masters degree in library and information science and was associated with the DRTC, Indian Statistical Institute as a senior research fellow. His research interests lie in the semantic web, digital libraries and knowledge organization. Amit Kumar Sarangi is an ICT doctoral student at the University of Trento, Italy since November 2013. He completed his MS in library and information science from DRTC (Indian Statistical Institute). As a part of his PhD thesis, he is currently working towards building data models as well as developing vocabulary for knowledge representation of bibliographic entities. His research interests also include knowledge organization for the bibliographic universe.
Library Hi Tech News, 2017
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to study the relationship between public libraries, literatu... more Purpose The purpose of this paper is to study the relationship between public libraries, literature festivals (litfests) and reading habits in Chennai and Bangalore to understand publishing, reading and the role of public libraries to improve reading and learning among public. Design/methodology/approach A field visit to select book fairs and litfests in Chennai and Bangalore was undertaken in 2015 and 2016 to collect data. A predesigned questionnaire was used for data collection at the festivals to establish the correlation among the libraries, bookshops, book fairs and litfests. A sample of n = 445 responses were received. Findings The findings suggest that 47 per cent of the respondents do not have any kind of library membership, and most (n = 154) of the respondents say they own an electronic device for reading. In total, 25 per cent say reading books is one of the top leisure activities, and distance (31.7 per cent) hinders people from visiting libraries for reading. Eighty per...
Library Hi Tech News, 2021
This paper aims to examine integrated library systems (ILS) and web-scale discovery services (WSD... more This paper aims to examine integrated library systems (ILS) and web-scale discovery services (WSDS) of the National Institute of Ranking Framework’s (NIRF) top-ranked universities in India. The 200 top- ranked institutions in the NIRF rankings 2020 were chosen to evaluate their ILS-WSDS systems available through their library websites. At the core of technology adoption, for the ILS to WSDS transitions, the uptake is found to be rather slow.
Publications , 2019
Digital scholarship and electronic publishing among the scholarly communities are changing when m... more Digital scholarship and electronic publishing among the scholarly communities are changing when metrics and open infrastructures take centre stage for measuring research impact. In scholarly communication, the growth of preprint repositories over the last three decades as a new model of scholarly publishing has emerged as one of the major developments. As it unfolds, the landscape of scholarly communication is transitioning, as much is being privatized as it is being made open and towards alternative metrics, such as social media attention, author-level, and article-level metrics. Moreover, the granularity of evaluating research impact through new metrics and social media change the objective standards of evaluating research performance. Using preprint repositories as a case study, this article situates them in a scholarly web, examining their salient features, benefits, and futures. Towards scholarly web development and publishing on semantic and social web with open infrastructures, citations, and alternative metrics—how preprints advance building web as data is discussed. We examine that this will viably demonstrate new metrics and in enhancing research publishing tools in scholarly commons facilitating various communities of practice. However, for the preprint repositories to sustain, scholarly communities and funding agencies should support continued investment in open knowledge, alternative metrics development, and open infrastructures in scholarly publishing.
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to analyze the status of policies, legislation and finance w... more Purpose The purpose of this paper is to analyze the status of policies, legislation and finance with respect to public libraries in India. Design/methodology/approach This is a descriptive study based on data collected from literature review and census data on public libraries, along with a field visit of government public libraries at Bangalore. It attempts a critique of existing policies related to public libraries in particular and the culture sector in general, which governs the Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAMs) in India. Findings Of India's 29 states and 7 union territories, 19 states have passed state library legislations, of which only 5 have the provision of a library cess or tax levy and it was found that states with lower literacy rates do not have library legislations. Bihar and Chhattisgarh in 2008 and Arunachal Pradesh in 2009 have recently passed these legislations without a library cess. Few states have progressed with the automation of public libraries, while 16 state libraries continue to function without any such legislation. The legislative process and legal issues involved in policy making, combined with the lack of political consensus and goodwill, have severely constrained the growth, coverage and development of public libraries for people in India. The existing national acts and state library legislations should be reviewed to adapt to changing times and to bring about integrated information services across GLAMs for the public. A RTI query sent to the Ministry of Culture revealed that there is no official data available on the per capita expenditure on public libraries in India. Practical implications In an online-networked environment, all GLAM institutions work towards collecting, preserving and providing access to educational and cultural heritage resources as social capital. However, there is a lack of national policy to govern GLAMs and the government bodies responsible for developing GLAMs are not integrative in their processes. A more holistic framework is required to assess funding needs and to ensure reforms in culture sector. Central government should make it mandatory to have access to public library for every
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Papers by B Preedip Balaji