This paper presents findings of a study that investigated the reading preferences and behaviors of university students in Qatar. The study involved a survey of the print versus digital preferences of students in Qatar followed by an observation of the academic reading behaviors of university students using eye tracking glasses for explanatory insight. Results from the survey indicated that students preferred reading course materials and textbooks in print and felt they learn better this way. Results also indicated that language did not play a large part in students reading format preferences, and a large percentage of students only highlighted and took notes when reading in print. This finding was supported by the eye tracking test that showed that most students only used features such as highlighting and taking notes in print format. The eye tracking reading tests revealed some differences in print versus digital reading behaviors, for example that students tended to navigate differently in digital format by skimming and flipping back and forth more than in print, and that participants spent more time concentrating on the print text. As students tended to mimic their print reading behaviors in digital format except for using features, this would indicate that if students were more familiar with digital features then they would use them when reading digitally. Although students may prefer print, the reality is that course materials are increasingly becoming available only in digital format, therefore libraries and publishers can help students by providing both training in how to use features of digital formats and by developing user friendly digital formats that mimic print reading

Purpose – This paper aims to investigate the quality of access to translated fiction published between 2007 and 2011 in six large Canadian public libraries, answering the question about what public libraries can do to help acquaint their readers with international translated fiction. Design/methodology/approach – The article uses the method of bibliographic data analysis based on 2,100 catalog records. Findings – As the results demonstrate, enhanced bibliographic catalog records deliver a wealth of information about translated fiction titles and facilitate meaningful subject access to their contents. At the same time, promotional activities related to translated fiction have room for improvement. Practical implications – Despite the fact that the study focuses on public libraries, its findings will be of interest not only to public but also academic librarians, any librarian tasked with the selection and acquisition of translated fiction, reference and readers’ advisory librarians in any type of library, Library and Information Science students and anyone interested in access to translated fiction. Originality/value – While many recent studies have turned their attention to enhanced catalog records and their role in access, discovery and collection promotion, there are no studies dealing with translated fiction specifically. The article also contributes to seeing an in-depth understanding of bibliographic records and cataloging as part and parcel of reference librarians’ knowledge and skill set, which improves retrieval practices and access provision.

In this paper, we present our approach to improve the performance of open-domain Arabic Question Answering systems. We focus on the passage retrieval phase which aims to retrieve the most related passages to the correct answer. To extract passages that are related to the question, the system passes through three phases: Question Analysis, Document Retrieval and Passage Retrieval. We define the passage as the sentence that ends with a dot ".". In the Question Processing phase, we applied the traditional NLP steps of tokenization, stopwords and unrelated symbols removal, and replacing the question words with their stems. We also applied Query Expansion by adding synonyms to the question words. In the Document Retrieval phase, we used the Vector Space Model (VSM) with TF-IDF vectorizer and cosine similarity. For the Passage Retrieval phase, which is the core of our system, we measured the similarity between passages and the question by a combination of the BM25 ranker and Word Embedding approach. We tested our system on ACRD dataset, which contains 1395 questions in different domains, and the system was able to achieve correct results with a precision of 92.2% and recall of 79.9% in finding the top-3 related passages for the query.

Purpose – The purpose of this article is to make public librarians aware of the wealth of information about translators that is contained in bibliographic records of their own library catalogs so they could use this information for the benefit of readers’ advisory (RA) work involving translated titles. Design/methodology/approach – The article uses the method of bibliographic data analysis based on 350 selected translated fiction titles (and 2,100 corresponding catalog records) from six large Canadian public libraries. Findings – As the results demonstrate, enhanced bibliographic catalog records deliver a wide spectrum of information about translators, which can be used by public libraries to provide more informed and insightful reading advice and to make more sensible purchasing decisions with regard to translated fiction. Practical implications – The study shows how the most readily available tool – a library catalog with its enhanced bibliographic records – can be utilized by public librarians for improving RA practices. It focuses on the rarely discussed translated fiction, demonstrates a sample methodological approach and makes suggestions for implementing this approach by busy public librarians in real-life situations. Originality/value – No recent studies that have investigated enhanced catalog records have dealt with translated fiction. Moreover, while authors/writers are often in the focus of RA studies, translators are often left behind the scenes, despite their crucial role in bringing international fiction to English-speaking readers.