Library Automation and Digital Libraries Questions and Answers

Answer: B

OPAC stands for Online Public Access Catalogue.

An OPAC is the computerised catalogue of a library that readers can search themselves, at a terminal in the library or over the web, by author, title, subject or keyword. It replaced the card catalogue in most libraries and usually shows whether an item is on the shelf or on loan.

The point of the catalogue is that it is searched online, live against the library's database, so 'Offline' is the opposite of what it is. 'Open' and 'Onsite' are plausible-sounding words but not the expansion of the acronym, and an OPAC is often used off site.

Answer: A

Koha was developed at Katipo Communications Ltd., New Zealand.

Katipo, a Wellington firm, wrote Koha in 1999 for the Horowhenua Library Trust, and it went live in January 2000 as the first open source integrated library system. Its name is the Maori word for a gift.

The University of Waikato, also in New Zealand, developed Greenstone, the digital library software, which is the trap here. MIT Libraries and Hewlett-Packard Labs developed DSpace, the institutional repository software. The Wikimedia Foundation runs Wikipedia and MediaWiki and has no part in Koha.

Answer: B

LOCKSS is an initiative of Stanford University.

LOCKSS, 'Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe', was started at Stanford University Libraries in 1999 by David Rosenthal and Vicky Reich. Participating libraries each keep a copy of the e-journal content they subscribe to on their own servers, and the copies check and repair one another, so the content survives the loss of any one copy or publisher.

MIT Libraries is associated with DSpace, the University of Waikato with Greenstone, and the University of Southampton with EPrints; none of them started LOCKSS.

Answer: A

The library automation software developed by INSDOC is Granthalaya.

INSDOC (the Indian National Scientific Documentation Centre, now part of NISCAIR) developed Granthalaya as an integrated library management package for Indian libraries, covering acquisitions, cataloguing, circulation and serials control. Its name is the Sanskrit word for a library.

The other three came from elsewhere. Maitrayee was developed by CMC Ltd, LibSys is the commercial package of LibSys Ltd, and Libman is another commercial package. None of them is an INSDOC product, so only Granthalaya fits.

Answer: A

The handling of concurrent users falls under performance.

When libraries evaluate automation software, performance covers how well the system works under load: response time, speed of searching and transactions, and the number of users it can serve at the same time without slowing down.

The other criteria are about different things. Customization is how far the software can be adapted to local practice, support is the help, training and updates provided by the vendor or community, and integration is how well its modules work together and with other systems.

Answer: A

OpenDOAR was developed by the University of Nottingham and Lund University.

OpenDOAR, the Directory of Open Access Repositories, was launched in 2005 as a joint project of the SHERPA team at the University of Nottingham in the UK and Lund University in Sweden. Lund was already known for the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), and OpenDOAR did for repositories what DOAJ did for journals.

The other pairs had no part in it: Stanford is associated with LOCKSS, MIT with DSpace, and UNESCO and IFLA with library policy rather than this directory.

Answer: B

The archive with equal numbers of librarians and publishers on its board is CLOCKSS.

CLOCKSS (Controlled LOCKSS) is a not-for-profit dark archive of scholarly e-content, run jointly by the academic publishing and library communities. Its governance gives librarians and publishers equal representation on its board, and the content is released only when a trigger event occurs.

LOCKSS is the Stanford-based software and programme on which CLOCKSS is built, run by libraries for themselves. Portico is a preservation service of the not-for-profit ITHAKA, and PMC (PubMed Central) is the US National Library of Medicine's full-text archive. None of them has the equal-representation board.

Answer: C

The trigger events are when the publisher no longer offers back issues and when a publisher ceases to publish a title, so the answer is (i) and (iii) are correct.

Dark archives such as CLOCKSS and Portico hold content that stays closed until a trigger event makes it unavailable from the publisher. Recognised triggers include a publisher ceasing operations, ceasing to publish a title, no longer offering back issues, and a catastrophic, sustained failure of the publisher's platform.

A library stopping its subscription, or refusing to pay, is a matter of that library's own access rights, governed by its licence. It does not trigger release of the archive to everyone, so the options with (ii) or (iv) are wrong.

Answer: B

The correct matching is a-ii, b-i, c-iv, d-iii.

• PhpMyLibrary was written by Polerio T. Babao III in the Philippines.
• Koha, the first open-source integrated library system, was developed in New Zealand by Katipo Communications (printed 'Kapito').
• ABCD was developed by BIREME with the Flemish Interuniversity Council of Belgium.
• NewGenLib was developed by Verus Solutions Pvt. Ltd. of Hyderabad.

Koha with Katipo is the pair to know. Only one option gives b-i; the near miss (a-ii, b-iv) gives Koha to BIREME.

Answer: A

The answer is Both (A) and (R) are true.

Assertion (A) states the premise of linked data: data sets published with URIs, RDF and standard vocabularies, and linked to one another, can be uniformly accessed and interpreted, which makes it possible to integrate and share knowledge across sources.

Reason (R) is also true: because the interface is uniform, a query can combine several linked data sets and so answer more complex questions than any one of them could alone. With both statements true, every option that marks one of them false is wrong.