Document Exchange Balance in LIS Professional Virtual Communities: A Study of Two Iranian Email Groups

Abstract

Abstract The purpose of this paper is to show the features of document sharing in library and information professionals’ virtual communities. A novel method is offered to investigate document request and provision through group emails and compare personal and professional contacts. Using different search operators on two major Iranian email groups, IranKIS and LIS, 173 message pairs were identified as document request/ provision transactions during 2015–2016. Directed graphs were built for completed interlibrary document exchange transactions with results showing that 23 % of requests had LIS topics while three universities were distinguished as the hub organizations for document providing. Iranian librarians use email-based communities as a quick and reliable tool to provide documents for library users and themselves. The mixed combination of email exploration and social network analysis offered in this work can be used to visualize document exchange transactions among organizations and cities in virtual communities.