Creativity is a crucial skill for librarians, enabling them to adapt to changes in the digital era and enhance the learning environment. This study examines the predictors of creativity among librarians in the Philippines, focusing on their work environment and personality traits. Using Amabile’s KEYS scale of work environment and the Big Five Personality Traits, data from 106 licensed librarians were analysed through multiple regression. The findings reveal that specific personality traits and work environment factors significantly influence creativity. Results indicate that Openness to Experience and Work Group Support are significant positive predictors, while Neuroticism negatively predicts creativity. Notably, Organisational Encouragement and Sufficient Resources did not have a significant effect on creativity. These results highlight the importance of fostering supportive work groups and managing particular personality traits to nurture creativity among librarians. This study illuminates the unique cultural and organisational dynamics in the Philippines, providing recommendations for enhancing creative practices in libraries. By understanding the interplay between work conditions and personal attributes, this research contributes to the broader discourse on creativity in under-resourced environments and sets the stage for future investigations into harnessing creative potential in librarianship.
Audiovisual collections in Malaysian state libraries help preserve national and regional memory but are highly vulnerable due to fragile media, obsolete playback technologies, and limited digital infrastructure. Film collections in these libraries face increasing threats from fragile media, obsolete playback technologies, and limited digital infrastructure. This study examines current management practices, access conditions, and operational challenges in Malaysian state libraries, and develops an empirically grounded framework to support preservation and access. A qualitative approach was employed, involving interviews with fifteen participants from five Malaysian state libraries representing different geographical regions of Malaysia. The findings reveal four key issues: inconsistent and limited metadata practices; reliance on obsolete playback equipment for VHS, VCD, and DVD formats; declining use and low public awareness; and copyright and resource constraints that hinder digitisation efforts. Despite these challenges, participants expressed strong support for strengthening preservation planning, and enabling controlled digital access. Based on these findings, the study proposes a resource-sensitive DAM framework integrating OAIS-aligned workflow logic, audiovisual metadata standards (PBCore and PREMIS), phased digitisation, and multilingual access considerations. The framework is tailored to Malaysian public library realities and may be relevant to similar resource-constrained public library contexts in Southeast Asia.
The rapid growth of data-intensive research and digital transformation has significantly expanded the data management responsibilities of academic libraries. Academic librarians are increasingly expected to manage, curate and provide data to support institutional reporting, research activities and governance. However, their data-related roles remain unclear and inconsistently defined across institutions. Guided by two research questions, this study adopts a qualitative case study approach using semi-structured interviews with academic librarians from five research universities in Malaysia to examine how librarians' data-related roles are defined and structurally interconnected across the data lifecycle. The findings identify four interconnected roles: data curator, data provider, data custodian and coordinator. These roles form an integrated governance workflow rather than functioning in isolation, with librarians contributing to technical data management, institutional reporting, governance and strategic decision-making. The findings further demonstrate how data move across roles to support reporting, preservation and reuse. This study contributes by proposing a role-based data governance model that explain how data-related responsibilities are embedded and interconnected within academic library contexts, highlighting the need for stronger governance frameworks, integrated systems and continuous professional development.
Book discussions and recommendations can add to the motivation to read and the enjoyment of reading. This may be especially true for younger readers when it takes place in an easily accessible and relatively modern environment, such as TikTok. This article investigates whether BookTok short form videos provide a distinctive contribution in this regard and whether they fit traditional social media theories. A first large-scale descriptive analysis of English-language BookTok was conducted, focusing on successful BookTokers. This covered 41,392 TikToks from 107 BookTokers with 3 billion views and 4 million comments. The results show that BookTok covers a variety of book genres and video formats, frequently with humour. The most successful BookTokers are either traditional influencers (speaking primarily to camera) or creators of the newer Captioned Soundtracked Montages or Mimes (CSMM) format, a term coined here. The success of CSMM videos is not easily explained by existing social media theories. Nevertheless, they may generate parasocial relationships in an unorthodox way through music and empathy through shared book choices, perhaps engaging primarily with more empathetic readers. Its impersonal simple format may also encourage participatory culture interactions. This is the first large-scale analysis of BookTok and the new CSMM format expands on the previously observed “shelfie” video style that focuses on the books rather than the influencer. Recognising the success of CSMM videos with readers may help librarians, authors, content creators and publishers to employ this apparently effective novel format or to recommend appropriate BookTokers.
This study examines how ethical policy adoption functions as a strategic legitimacy mechanism in semi-peripheral publishing environments, focusing on 2,592 open-access journals hosted on T & uuml;rkiye's DergiPark platform. Drawing on institutional isomorphism theory and the framework of strategic legitimacy, the research investigates whether declarative ethical visibility, the publicly accessible presence of ethics policy statements, predicts international indexing outcomes after controlling for institutional maturity and platform prominence. Using nested logistic regression models with extensive robustness checks across four classification algorithms and five resampling strategies, the analysis reports three principal findings. First, ethical signalling operates through "threshold logic": journals that reference international governance bodies have 31% higher odds of indexing (OR = 1.31, p < 0.001), yet cumulative policy intensity contributes negligibly, revealing an "Intensity Paradox." Second, a decoupling of declarative signals from operational practice is evident, as observable ethics manifestations (erratum publication) show no association with indexing (OR = 1.04, p > 0.05). Third, while ethical signalling confers a modest advantage (a 6-10 percentage-point increase), it remains structurally subordinate to the maturity (OR = 3.02) and visibility (OR = 4.05) determinants. These patterns are consistent with the view that ethics policies primarily function as symbolic compliance mechanisms that reduce exclusion risk without guaranteeing selection. The findings highlight critical vulnerabilities in gatekeeping regimes that rely on easily mimicked declarative signals, underscoring the need for process-oriented evaluation frameworks that assess operational practice alongside policy presence.
