This study is aimed at to identify and to understand the role of information in what concerns the mobility process of top executives, helping organisations to make the most of their expatriatesâ experiences. The methodological approach chosen was the case study, carried out in an economic group of the Portuguese financial sector with several business operations abroad. Several data collection methods were used, including a questionnaire survey, in-depth interviews and in loco interaction with the expatriates in three different countries. Based on the analysis of expatriatesâ information needs, a typology of information throughout the complete cycle is described and two critical moments are identified. These moments correspond to transitions of expatriatesâ informational spaces: first the moment of arrival to the host country and second, when they return to their home country. The incorporation of expatriatesâ information in the organizational information system, across the various phases of the expatriation cycle, is summarized.

Notions of 'information poverty' and the "information poor" in LIS are examined from a discourse analytical perspective. Foucault's understanding of discourse, as forming the social reality to which it refers, is outlined and the related concept of the statement, as the basic element of discourse, is introduced. 'Information poverty' is examined as a statement in its relation to other statements in order to highlight assumptions and factors contributing to its construction. The analysis is based on close reading of 35 articles published in LIS journals between 1995 and 2005. Four groups of especially productive discursive procedures and themes are identified and discussed: 1. economic determin­ism, 2. technological determinism and the 'information society', 3. historicising the 'in­ formation poor', 4. the library profession's moral obligation and responsibility.

Practical and theoretical researches are equally important in the discipline of library and information science. For providing a better service to users, librarians need to continuously improve problem solving and decision making skills in their workplace. Significant improvement of library service could therefore be fulfilled by studies performed and published by librarians. Consequently, evaluations on research and publishing conducted by librarians could reveal how they contribute to individual career and to the whole field advancement. Contributions to the professional literature, in the perspective of publication patterns, productivity of librarian, article types, research methodologies employed, and research topics, through collaborative by Taiwan and China librarians in selected journals from 1998 to 2002 were examined in this research. Author characteristics, such as production of individual, institutional affiliation, and co-authorship were also statistical analyzed. Three major findings stand out from this study; first, percentage of Taiwan librarian author within the overall author population in selected journals was lower than that in China. Second, â Researchâ type of articles are surprisingly rare in China. And finally, collaborations between librarians or with other professions increased through the years but were not so popular in Taiwan until now. Based on these findings, this study suggests that librarians in Taiwan should constantly pursue working with fellow librarians or other professions, and for China, library and information education should improve training on methodology.

The advances in library net working technology has brought an inexpensive way of distributing and sharing information within the organization as well as libraries located in remote areas.The advantages of Intranet, Extranet and Internet being numerous, includes streamlining of the information processing and management, facilitating information dissemination and enriching communications and collaborations. Attempts have been made to discuss opportunities provided by these three advanced networks enabling librarians and information professionals in efficient collection development, management and serving users with value added information at ease.

Geospatial information technologies revolutionize the way we have traditionally approached navigation and browsing in information systems. Colorful graphics, statistical summaries, geospatial relationships of underlying collections make them attractive for text retrieval systems. This paper examines the nature of georeferenced information in academic library catalogs organized according to the Library of Congress Classification (LCC) with the goal of understanding their implications for geovisualization of library collections.

The domain of scholarly publishing is undergoing rapid change. Change has been instigated and produced by the Internet and open access systems â such as disciplinary and institutional repositories and open access journals. However traditional scholarly publishing is strengthening its hold over prestigious journals thus resisting change. How then does the change come about? An attempt at answering this question led us to examine an institutional repository initiative in a University. As we identified and followed the actors (researchers, research papers, reward systems, institutional repository technology, library staff, RQF, etc.) we saw the emergence of new publishing practices and the forces preserving the old ones. By adopting Actor Network Theory (ANT) we came to understand the materiality, relationality and ambiguity of processes of reassembling scholarly publishing. This paper presents preliminary results and thereby informs a wider debate and shaping of open access and scholarly publishing.

University Libraries, with the dawn of Internet era, are compelled to provide relevant information essential to its end users within a short span of time either from its in-house holdings or from resources available in other libraries. This could be made possible only by way of Library Consortia (LC). This paper discusses the planning of LC among the major Campus Libraries of University of Madras. It identifies the need, prerequisites, problems and solutions involved in consortia formation.

The paper starts with the need of Continuing Education for the LIS professionals in this modern era of information and technology. It narrates the activities of Continuing Education and Professional Development (CEPD) in different developed and developing countries of the world. It enumerates the role of various associations and institutions of India such as ILA, IASLIC, BLA IIMs, ICSSR, AIIMS, which are actively connected with programmes of continuing education. The authors highlight some of the universities and academic institutions of our country which have centres and departments of continu-ing education & critically analyze the work and activities of eight universities of West Bengal based on survey work. The paper suggests some measures to improve the existing conditions and status of con-tinuing education programmes for the university-library professionals of West Bengal.

This paper uses Husserlâ s theory of phenomenology to provide a model for the relationship between user-centered tagging systems, such as del.icio.us, and the more highly structured systems of the Semantic Web. Using three aspects of phenomenological theoryâ the movement of the mind out towards an entity and then back in an act of reflection, multiplicities within unity, and the sharing of intentionalities within a communityâ the discussion suggests that both tagging systems and the Semantic Web foster an intersubjective domain for the sharing and use of information resources. The Semantic Web, however, resembles traditional library systems, in that it relies for this intersubjective domain on the conscious implementation of domain-centered standards which are then encoded for machine processing, while tagging systems work on implied principles of emergence.

Thesauri have been important information and knowledge organisation tools for more than three decades. The recent emergence and phenomenal growth of the World Wide Web has created new opportunities to introduce thesauri as information search and retrieval aids to end user communities. While the number of web-based and hypertextual thesauri continues to grow, few investigations have yet been carried out to evaluate how end-users, for whom all these efforts are ostensibly made, interact with and make use of thesauri for query building and expansion. The present paper reports a pilot study carried out to determine the extent to which a thesaurus-enhanced search interface to a web-based database aided end-users in their selection of search terms. The study also investigated the ways in which users interacted with the thesaurus structure, terms, and interface. Thesaurus-based searching and browsing behaviours adopted by users while interacting with the thesaurus-enhanced search interface were also examined.