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Daniel 11 is considered an exceptional Biblical text because of its interest in and accuracy about historical and political events in the Hellenistic world. A recent theory suggests that the author was a former Seleucid scribe; another theory posits the use of a Ptolemaic propaganda document. The approach here will be inductive, reading out from the text to adduce evidence that the author of Daniel 11 either used or reflected the attitudes of Ptolemaic narrative, not necessarily because he was pro-Ptolemaic but because it suited his anti-Antiochene purpose. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.

While most English translations render nbzh in Dan 11:21 as "contemptible, vile, despicable," closer examination will demonstrate that this Biblical Hebrew word should be translated as "spurned, scorned, rejected." Once one understands Dan 11:21 accordingly, other ancient sources can be brought to show that this verse states, in its own thinly-veiled code, that before his rise to power, Antiochus IV, son of the late king Antiochus III and brother of the current king Seleucus IV, had been scorned and had not been given appropriate royal honors. This verse should be seen as another element in the evaluation of Dan 11 as an accurate and important historical source for the events surrounding the rise and rule of Antiochus IV. © 2012 by Koninklijke Brill N.V., Leiden, The Netherlands.

As librarianship evolves, it is important to examine the changes that have taken place in professional requirements. To provide an understanding of the current market demand for core competencies of librarianship, this article conducts a semi-automatic methodology to analyze job advertisements (ads) posted on the American Library Association (ALA) Joblist from 2009 through 2014. There is evidence that the ability to solve unexpected complex problems and to provide superior customer service gained increasing importance for librarians during those years. The authors contend that the findings in this report question the status quo of core competencies of librarianship in the US job market.

What is the current state of mobile services among academic libraries of the country's top 100 universities, and what are the best practices for librarians implementing mobile services at the university level? Through in-depth website visits and survey questionnaires, the authors studied each of the top 100 universities' libraries' experiences with mobile services. Results showed that all of these libraries offered at least one mobile service, and the majority offered multiple services. The most common mobile services offered were mobile sites, text messaging services, e-books, and mobile access to databases and the catalog. In addition, chat/IM services, social media accounts and apps were very popular. Survey responses also indicated a trend towards responsive design for websites so that patrons can access the library's full site on any mobile device. Respondents recommend that libraries considering offering mobile services begin as soon as possible as patron demand for these services is expected to increase.

Purpose - This paper aims to explore Web 2.0 technologies usage and trends in the top 100 US academic libraries as exemplified through the academic library websites. Design/methodology/approach - The top 100 universities were selected from the US News & World Report's (USNWR) 2013 ranked list's top 100 of the best colleges in the USA. Content analysis was used in terms of quantitative approach. A checklist was developed as the main research instrument based on other checklists and questionnaires. Each of the selected university library websites was visited within a period of two weeks to explore implementation and usage of web tools, including SNS, blog, RSS, wikis, podcast/vodcast, and social bookmarking/tagging. Findings - All 100 academic libraries had a social media presence on Facebook and Twitter, making SNS the most widely applied Web 2.0 tool. The wild was the least applied Web 2.0 technology, with a 34 percent participation rate. Blog was the second most popular tool with a 99 percent participation rate, followed by RSS and IM/Chat with 97 percent and 91 percent respectively. The vodcast and podcast had 47 percent and 46 percent participation rates respectively, while social bookmarking/tagging were also used by 39 percent of the academic libraries. Research limitations/implications - This study is completely based on publicly available data regarding usage of Web 2.0 applications. Web 2.0 tools used on library intranets were not analyzed for this study. Outcomes suggest that academic libraries are increasingly using Web 2.0 applications to promote themselves, enhance library services, and highlight resources to patrons. Originality/value - This is the first research that draws an overall picture of the usage and trends of Web 2.0 applications in the top 100 US academic libraries. This study demonstrates some noticeable patterns regarding usage, trends, and adoption which are relevant to how Web 2.0 applications are perceived and used within academic libraries. The study provides academic libraries with helpful information to better meet their user needs by effectively applying Web 2.0. Additionally, library managers, librarians and other libraries may also find this research beneficial as they plan to deploy Web 2.0.

Although social data has been investigated and discussed regarding its impact on indexing and retrieval performance on the web, there has been little research conducted on storing or linking social data and identifying bibliographic relationships among social data for further use of social data. In this paper, we discuss our work in progress that aims to develop a social metadata repository which would be an important implication for making social data more valuable and reusable for searching and retrieval. We describe FRBR (Functional Requirements of Bibliographic Records) conceptual model's Entity-Relationship (ER) view on bibliographic relationships and demonstrate how social metadata are encoded in RDA (Resource Description and Access) and how the implicit bibliographic relationships of social data are explicitly represented as RDF (Resource Description Framework) triples (Subject - Predicates - Objects) with links to external sources. We believe that the shareable and linked metadata repository of social data is remarkably significant, not only because it supports the accessibility to related documents, but also because it is clarifying the implicit semantic relationships among social data.

In this study, we attempted to use dwell time on content pages as a predictor of document usefulness, and evaluated the prediction performance in different types of tasks. A user study was conducted to address this research problem. A total of 32 participants conducted searches associated with 4 different tasks, varying along several task type dimensions. In the study, participants were asked to save documents that were useful for the tasks during the searches. Participants' information-seeking activities were recorded. Using the logged dataset, we used the recursive partitioning method to identify the best threshold (cutoff point) of dwell time to predict which pages would be useful, i.e., be saved by the users. We examined the differences in the threshold and compared the prediction performance for each type of task. Our results indicate that the threshold should be developed according to the type of task users are working on. While the prediction performance using dwell time as the only indicator of document usefulness is acceptable for Factual tasks, it is not good for Intellectual tasks. Our results have implications on IR system design.

We report findings on how the user's perception of task difficulty changes before and after searching for information to solve tasks. We found that while in one type of task, the dependent task, this did not change, in another, the parallel task, it did. The findings have implications on designing systems that can provide assistance to users with their search and task solving strategies.