Abstract

It is argued that despite the many changes being experienced by research and specialized libraries, and documentation centers, which cause them doubts about their future, there are some certainties that allow these centers to properly address their activities. It is proposed to distinguish between minor and profound changes and it is affirmed that, for information centers, the fundamental change has been to go from a situation in which information was scarce and the time to look for it abundant, to another in which time to look for information is scarce and information is abundant. This should help redirect the activities of the information centers -following M. Buckland- to stop focusing on the ‘information- as-an-object’ to concentrate on the ‘information-as-a-process’. Two consolidated movements should help them to guide their future: the Open Science and the Digital Humanities. Some information products that reflect a change in the ways people approach and use information are examined: Museo del Prado’s The Collection, Transcribe Bentham, eBird and Mapa Literari Català. Finally, the author recommends to documentation centers, and specialized and research libraries to guide their services to digitize their heritage collections in an enriched manner, to promote citizen participation, and to create and strengthen communities.

Abstract

International audience; In this paper, an crude oil transportation planning problem for an oil distributor is studied, in which crude oil is transported by tankers and pipelines from an unlimited supply center to a set of customer harbors to satisfy their dynamic demands over multiple periods. In the problem, inventory level and shortage level of crude oil at each customer are limited; both fully loaded and partially loaded tankers are allowed in the transportation of crude oil, and part of the tankers may be rented from a third party. The objective is to determine in each period the schedule of tankers and pipelines and the number of tankers of each type to be rented/returned at the supply center in order to minimize the total logistics cost. After formulating the problem as a mixed integer programming problem, we generalize an existing Lagrangian relaxation approach that only allows fully loaded tanks to one that allows both fully loaded and partially loaded tankers of the problem. Numerical experiments show that the new approach can find a near optimal solution of the problem of large size in a reasonable computation time.