Library Automation and Digital Libraries Questions and Answers

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.

Answer: D

The logical order is (ii) (iv) (iii) (i).

1. Describe the existing library services and technology, so the starting point is known.
2. Assess needs and set priorities, deciding what the new system must do.
3. Evaluate proposals from vendors and select a system that meets those needs.
4. Put the system into place: install, migrate data, train staff.

Planning has to move from the present situation to needs, then to choice, then to implementation. The other options put installing or evaluating a system before the library has assessed what it needs, which is the opposite of planning.

Answer: B

LOCKSS is an initiative of Stanford university.

LOCKSS, 'Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe', was started at Stanford University Libraries in 1999. It is a peer-to-peer digital preservation system in which participating libraries each keep copies of the e-journals and other content they subscribe to, and the copies are compared and repaired against one another.

MIT is known for DSpace, the University of Waikato for Greenstone, and the University of Southampton for EPrints, all repository software. None of them began LOCKSS.

Answer: C

The chronological order is (iii) (iv) (ii) (i): LOCKSS, PMC, KB e-Depot, Portico.

1. LOCKSS: started at Stanford in 1999.
2. PubMed Central (PMC): launched by the US National Library of Medicine in 2000.
3. KB e-Depot: the digital archive of the National Library of the Netherlands (Koninklijke Bibliotheek), operational from 2003.
4. Portico: the e-journal archive launched in 2005, growing out of a JSTOR project.

LOCKSS is the oldest and Portico the newest, which leaves the first and third options; the first puts the KB e-Depot before PMC, so only the third is right.

Answer: B

The discovery tools are (iii) VuFind and (iv) Summon.

Web-scale discovery services provide a single search box over a library's catalogue, subscribed databases and e-journals through a central pre-built index. Summon, from Serials Solutions (now ProQuest), is a leading commercial discovery service, and VuFind is an open-source discovery interface that libraries use in the same role.

Mendeley and EndNote are reference management tools for storing citations and formatting bibliographies; they do not search a library's resources, so codes including (i) or (ii) are wrong.

Answer: A

The keyed agency is OCLC.

EZproxy is the widely used proxy software that lets authenticated library users reach licensed e-resources from off campus. It was created by Chris Zagar of Useful Utilities and acquired by OCLC in 2008; since then OCLC has developed, maintained and distributed it, which is why it is identified with OCLC.

ALA and IFLA are professional associations, and FID was an international federation for documentation; none develops access-management software.