This paper examines critical challenges in preservation, such as infrastructure limitations, technological barriers and resource constraints, and explores potential solutions through collaborative initiatives, standardised reporting and targeted investments. Drawing on existing literature and previous efforts to preserve academic content, including journal preservation and digital content archiving, the paper outlines actionable steps to safeguard the future of scholarly books. A working group was formed to create a comprehensive guide for preservation, providing a framework that will support publishers, libraries and researchers in securing the ongoing availability of digital monographs.
This paper is based upon the OCLC presentation at the February 2025 NISO Plus conference. It describes the organization’s journey to research compliance to the European Accessibility Act (EAA). It focuses on the three major complications that shaped their approach: the tension between internal and external metadata sources, the challenge of translating between different metadata formats, and the balance between controlled vocabularies and descriptive flexibility. Their investigation began with three questions: What metadata does the EAA actually require? How will this information flow through existing supply chains? And where should accessibility data be recorded in MARC records to best serve users. OCLC’s journey unearthed a complex landscape involving questions of trust between publishers and libraries, the limitations of existing standards, and the fundamental tension between textual description and systematic discovery. They hope that sharing these experiences will help other organizations navigate similar challenges more efficiently, while contributing to the broader efforts to standardize accessibility metadata that benefit the entire community of libraries, publishers, and content aggregators.
This paper reports on student perspectives on access to online information resources when conducting an initial search for a school project. Through thematic analysis and user vignettes based on data from 175 students in elementary through graduate school, this paper explores how students determine whether they have access to online information resources, the barriers and enablers they attend to when pursuing access, and the characteristics that influence this process. Results reveal that resource previews, university and library branding, and the word download are generally viewed as enablers of access, while payment cues, learned heuristics around brands and formats, and the need to take extra steps to obtain the full text were barriers that often prevent students from trying to get access even when resources were available to them. Potential influences on individual capacity are also revealed, including experience in high-or low-availability information environments, ability to manage the complex cognitive load of determining access alongside other types of point-of-selection evaluation, a variety of dispositions related to information seeking, and situational factors related to the importance of the information need to the individual. While library staff work diligently to make online resources available, this does not automatically result in students' ability to access those resources. This paper provides evidence to better equip library professionals for constructing their online information systems, collaborating with information providers about their online information systems, and teaching students about converting availability to access.
Using multiple carousels, lists that wrap around and can be scrolled, is the basis for offering content in most contemporary movie streaming platforms. Carousels allow for highlighting different aspects of users' taste, that fall in categories such as genres and authors. However, while carousels offer structure and greater ease of navigation, they alone do not increase diversity in recommendations, while this is essential to keep users engaged. In this work we propose several approaches to effectively increase item diversity within the domain of book recommendations, on top of a collaborative filtering algorithm. These approaches are intended to improve book recommendations in the web catalogs of public libraries. Furthermore, we introduce metrics to evaluate the resulting strategies, and show that the proposed system finds a suitable balance between accuracy and beyond-accuracy aspects.
