Thesis (Ph. D.)--Stanford University, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references.

The Wake Forest University Art Collection consists of nearly 1300 works of art of various media dating from the fifteenth century to today that are divided into nine distinct collections. Assessing the current state of the Collection, this thesis project evaluates the art historical significance of the Collection using select museum quality works of art and then proceeds with a discussion of collections management, including the topics of acquisition, accession, and risk management. Environmental conditions in Collection facilities are measured against widely accepted museum standards. Use of the Collection as an educational resource by the University and surrounding community is compromised by a variety of factors, including issues of accessibility and security. General recommendations to improve the current state of the Collection include adapting collections management policies and procedures to standard museum practices and the creation of a permanent museum space and staff.

Music services, media players and managers provide support for content classification and access based on filtering metadata values, statistics of access and user ratings. This approach fails to capture characteristics of mood and personal history that are often the deciding factors when creating personal playlists and collections in music. This dissertation work presents MusicWiz, a music management environment that combines traditional metadata with spatial hypertext-based expression and automatically extracted characteristics of music to generate personalized associations among songs. MusicWiz’s similarity inference engine combines the personal expression in the workspace with assessments of similarity based on the artists, other metadata, lyrics and the audio signal to make suggestions and to generate playlists. An evaluation of MusicWiz with and without the workspace and suggestion capabilities showed significant differences for organizing and playlist creation tasks. The workspace features were more valuable for organizing tasks, while the suggestion features had more value for playlist creation activities.

Thesis (M.S.)--University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. / Title from title page (viewed July 25, 2002). Includes bibliographical references (p. 40-42).

Digital collections are ubiquitous. However, not all digital collections are the same. While most digital collections have limited forms of change - primarily creation and deletion of additional resources - there exists a class of digital collections that undergo additional kinds of change. These collections are made up of resources that are distributed across the Internet and brought together into the collection via hyperlinking. This means the underlying collection members are not controlled by the curator of the collection. Resources can be expected to change as time goes on. To further complicate matters these collections can be hard to maintain when they are large, highly dynamic, or lacking active curation. Part of the difficulty in maintaining these collections is determining if a changed page is still a valid member of the collection. While others have tried to address this problem by measuring change and defining a maximum allowed threshold of change, these methods treat all change as a potential problems and treat web content as a static document despite its intrinsically dynamic nature. Instead, I approach the problem of determining significance of change on the web by embracing it as a normal part of a web document's lifecycle, Instead of using thresholds to identify abnormal changes, I determine the difference between what a maintainer expects a page to do and what it actually does. These models are created using a variety of feature extractors to find pertinent information in a page, a Kalman filter to model the history of a page and predict a next version and finally classification of results into either expected or unexpected change. I evaluate the different options for extractors and analyzers to determine the best options from my suite of possibilities. This work is informed by a series of studies on both web pages and potential collection maintainers, observations of the NSDL Pathways, and a ground-truth set of blog changes tagged by a human judgment of the kind of change. The results of this work showed a statistically significant improvement over a range of traditional threshold techniques when applied to the collection of tagged blog changes.

Research paper (M.L.I.S.)--Victoria University of Wellington, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references.

The study seeks to explore the use of electronic information resource in the University of Fort Hare (UFH) Library. The objectives of the study are to determine factors that influence acquisitions of electronic information resources at UFH library, to find out the user’s responses to electronic information resources in the library and identify the challenges faced by UFH library regarding the usage of electronic information resources. The literature review was conducted through an acquisition of electronic information resources in academic libraries, collection development policies of academic libraries in South Africa and application of electronic information resources within South Africa and globally. The study is based on Diffusion of innovation (DOI) theory. The study adopted qualitative and quantitative approaches, and the non-probability sampling-Quota sampling was used for students and purposive sampling technique for librarians and academics. The data was collected with self-administered questionnaires and document analysis. The study found that academics were not fully involved in the acquisition of the library electronic information resources; therefore, there is a lack of communication about the acquisition of electronic resources. The study further reveals that there is usage of electronic information resources; however, there are library users who prefers to use search engines such as google, yahoo etc. It was also identified that there are two important barriers that hinder the use of electronic information resources, i.e. physical and personal barriers. The study recommends that University of Fort Hare library should consider including e resources in the collection development policy. It is also recommended that the library online training/tutorials must be installed on the library website to increase the usage of e-resources. In order to stay relevant and visible, librarians should embrace new opportunities and go beyond the comfort zone of traditional librarian principles.

Weeding is one of the central tasks of collection management at academic libraries but is often not prioritized. Digital collections are constantly growing and soon there will be a need to manage these resources. This master thesis explores the general state of weeding and e-resource weeding to uncover how these practices are understood and enacted at Swedish academic libraries, while also introducing the term e-weeding. A mixed method study was conducted and both quantitative and qualitative content analysis were performed on policy documents and interview transcripts respectively. Sentiments, opinions and current practices surrounding weeding and e-weeding at Swedish academic libraries were investigated and discussed. It was observed that most policy documents did not mention practices that could be understood as e-weeding, but some presented guidelines for print weeding. From the interviews, respondents had no consensus around a definition of e-weeding but practices commonly thought of as digital collection management could be tied to this term. In addition, print weeding was considered by respondents as more acute than e-weeding due to the intangible nature of digital resources. Lastly, it was revealed that criteria used for print weeding could sometimes be used for evaluating digital resources, although unique aspects of e-resources need to be considered. Nevertheless, respondents were open to the idea of e-weeding their digital collections in the future.

In times when many natural history museums experience financial cuts, it is important to show why museums matter, what they can offer, and what they mean for both the public and the scientific society. The collections are the heart of the museum and they need to be well-managed in order to attract visitors (both researchers and public). Curation of collections is an essential part of the museum operation but it may be affected by understaffing and/or lack of physical space. If collections in need of curation (especially old collections) are left unattended, they may lose their scientific value.     This project was done in order to show the importance of curation and its possibility to increase the value of a collection. The aim of this project was to show that a thoroughly explored and well curated collection becomes more accessible and interesting for internal and external sources and thereby the scientific and public value increases. This was conducted as a case-study of the collection of subfossil lemurs at the Museum of Evolution, Uppsala University. The collection was catalogued, its historical background was studied, and the old collection description was reviewed. The collection catalogue produced (Appendix D) has increased the availability and scientific value as it is now easier to get an overview of the collection, the catalogue include updated anatomical and taxonomical specimen descriptions, it is possible to administer loans on collection specimens, and the catalogue data can be published in accessible databases. The historical background (Appendices A and B) has shown that the collection has connections to other Swedish museum collections in Stockholm, Gothenburg, Malmö, and Lund. It is possible to use the information in the historical background in an eventual exhibition. This has increased the public value. However, it is possible to further increase both the availability and the value of the collection and some suggestions are given. / Denna uppsats handlar om kurering, alltså om omhändertagande av samlingar som finns på museer. Det finns många olika typer av museer, t.ex. naturvetenskapliga museer, historiska museer, konstmuseer, friluftsmuseer och hembygdsmuseer. Detta arbete är främst inriktat mot naturvetenskapliga museer med paleontologiska samlingar och varför det är viktigt att de finns och varför de ska tas om hand. Vidare visas hur en samling kan bli mer lätttillgänglig och hur dess värde kan höjas genom att noggrant kureras, katalogiseras och utvärderas.     Projektet utfördes som en fallstudie av den samling av subfossila lemurer som finns på  Evolutiosmuseet i Uppsala. I den sammanställning som gjordes av samlingens historiska bakgrund framkom det att folkskoleläraren Bertil Ljungqvist samlat in materialet under en expedition till Madagaskar mellan åren 1926 och 1930. På denna expedition samlades även zoologisk, botaniskt och kulturella föremål in. Dessa föremål finns idag utspridda på olika museer i Uppsala, Stockholm, Göteborg, Malmö och Lund. Det historiska bakgrund som sammanställdes i detta projekt kan användas av dessa museer om materialet ska ställas ut. Alla förmål i samlingen av subfossila lemur har fått uppdaterade beskrivningar i den nyskapade katalogen. Katalogen gör det möjligt att på ett enkelt sätt få en överblick av samlingen, det är nu även möjligt att låna föremål och samlingen är ett steg närmare att publiseras i en databas. I och med detta projekt har samlingen blivit mer tillgänglig, den är lättare att använda i olika sammanhang och därmed kan även sägas att värdet av samlingen har ökat. Dock finns det stora möjligheter att ytterliggare öka både värdet och tillgängligheten.

<p>Collection development in academic libraries is going through technology-driven changes relating to the new information technologies ,e.g. -Electronic databases, the Internet and CD-ROM's, joint published materials and audio-visual resources. Libraries are also facing declining budgets and spiralling costs. This research project looked closely at what collection development is and the impact it has on service rendering to undergraduates at the University of the Western Cape. It is also aimed at establishing if the librarians that formulate these policies understand what they (Collection Development Policies) are, and what they should entail.</p>