This paper is a précis of a research project conducted in March 2001 for the Master of Library and Information Studies at New Zealandâ s Victoria University of Wellington. The project investigated the perceptions of information professionals (denoting qualified practitioners) in New Zealand regarding applied LIS (Library and Information Studies) research. It was hoped the findings would direct the future production of such research in a way that might promote its use. The project assessed the local situation and attempted to redress an imbalance in the literature created by previous studies focusing on the production, rather than consultation, of LIS research by the practising community. Project participants were asked to indicate their amount of research use; their motivations for and against consulting the research; and their opinions concerning the relationship between LIS research and practice, and how it might be improved. Amounts of research consultation were compared with the following participant variables: Library / information qualifications; Experience, indicated by number of years / months in current position; Library / information centre size; Organisational context of the library / information centre; Involvement in professional activities such as conferences. Anyone wishing to read the original research paper is welcome to contact me using the following email address: kat.turner@library.otago.ac.nz

The paper suggests extensions to SKOS Core to make explicit where concepts in a knowledge organization system have changed from one version of the system to another.

This exploratory study examines the explosive growth and the "bibliometrics" of the World Wide Web based on both analysis of over 30 gigabytes of web pages collected by the Inktomi "Web Crawler" and on the use of the DEC AltaVista search engine for cocitation analysis of a set of Earth Science related WWW sites. The statistical characteristics of web documents and their hypertext links are examined, along with examination of the characteristics of highly cited web documents.

This submission reports on a cross-disciplinary inquiry into topicality and relevance, involving an in-depth literature analysis and an inductive development of a faceted typology (containing 227 fine-grained topical relevance relationships arrayed in three facets and 33 types of presentation relationships). This inquiry reveals a large variety of topical connections beyond topic matching (the common assumption of topical relevance in the field), renders a closer look into the structure of a topic, and induces a generic topic-oriented information architecture that is meaningful across topics and domain boundaries. The findings from the analysis contribute to the foundation work of information organization, metadata development, intellectual access / information retrieval, and knowledge discovery. The typology of topical relevance relationships is structured with three major facets: * Functional role of a piece of information plays in the overall structure of a topic or an argument; * Mode of reasoning: How information contributes to the userâ s reasoning about a topic; * Semantic relationship: How information connects to a topic semantically. This inquiry demonstrated that topical relevance with its close linkage to thinking and reasoning is central to many disciplines. The multidisciplinary approach allows synthesis and examination from new angles, leading to an integrated scheme of relevance relationships or a system of thinking that informs each individual discipline. The scheme resolving from the synthesis can be used to improve text and image understanding, knowledge organization and retrieval, reasoning, argumentation, and thinking in general, by people and machines.

It was from 1895 onwards, the year in which the First International Bibliography Conference was held that the Decimal Classification system began to be implemented on a European scale and started to be disseminated in Spain. The introduction of the UDC scheme was initially subject to numerous difficulties faced by the various initiatives undertaken by individual librarians, but it subsequently received the support of the Spanish Administration. In 1939, the adoption of the UDC was established for all Spanish libraries, by official decree. Although what was stipulated in the decree was the 1934 German version, in practice libraries implemented the latest version of the UDC tables. Finally, from 1989 onwards, the compulsoriness of using UDC to classify collections and catalogues was abandoned, although its implementation in libraries, catalogues and bibliographies remained in most cases. The UDC is taught within the framework of regulated Library and Information Science schools, from both a theoretical and a practical point of view. In Spain, research on the UDC is already quite important: translations, adaptations and versions of the tables have been undertaken and there are also analytical works on different aspects of the UDC system.

The increasing price of electronic journals, indexing and abstracting databases along with the traditional published print subscriptions has forced library community to explore alternative means of subscription. The emergence of library a very promising development in this direction. The Phenomenon of consortia or group of libraries maintaining information resources together has become very common these days, In India, during last few years we witnessed many consortia based subscription. This paper briefly discusses the concept, need, advantages and also the major consortia initiatives in India.

The paper introduces a general digital resource management system. It elaborates on the core design and components of the system. The general digital resource management system was developed based on the Fedora system, and incorporates the concept of virtual collections. The system is composed of seven models: rights management, collection management, resource access, resource tagging, interoperability, and customization.

This item is not the definitive copy. Please use the following citation when referencing this material: Dillon, A. (1988) The role of usability labs in systems design. In: E. Megaw (ed.) Contemporary Ergonomics 88. London: Taylor and Francis, 69-73. Abstract: The issue of usability is a central concern for contemporary system designers and a major focus of research in the domain of HCI. In an attempt to evaluate the usability of products some companies have invested heavily in the the development of so-called "usability labs". Consisting of sophisticated video recording equipment and observation facilities, these laboratories may well be expected to provide insight into the process of interaction that would otherwise remain hidden. Is this in fact the case? Are usability labs the universal panacea for the problems of evaluation? The present paper outlines the advantages and details the limitations of such facilities and argues that the problems lie less with the laboratory and more with the evaluator.

This research uses oral history approach to study an organizational field of information science. The interviews with members of the New Jersey chapter of the national information science organization (ASIST) provided insights into the transformation of this local chapter and information science work since 1975. Their views on the identity of the chapter and their own professional identity in that context, and on the development and maturation of information science field over the past thirty years are considered in the sociology of culture framework. Oral history as a phenomenological method of historical inquiry is here applied as an approach can open new directions for historical inquiry of information science in the national context, understanding the research / practice dynamics, and localization and institutionalization of information science field,

In this paper we explore a method of decomposition of compound tags found in social tagging systems and outline several results, including improvement of search indexes, extraction of semantic information, and benefits to usability. Analysis of tagging habits demonstrates that social tagging systems such as del.icio.us and flickr include both formal metadata, such as geotags, and informally created metadata, such as annotations and descriptions. The majority of tags represent informal metadata; that is, they are not structured according to a formal model, nor do they correspond to a formal ontology. Statistical exploration of the main tag corpus demonstrates that such searches use only a subset of the available tags; for example, many tags are composed as ad hoc compounds of terms. In order to improve accuracy of searching across the data contained within these tags, a method must be employed to decompose compounds in such a way that there is a high degree of confidence in the result. An approach to decomposition of English-language compounds, designed for use within a small initial sample tagset, is described. Possible decompositions are identified from a generous wordlist, subject to selective lexicon snipping. In order to identify the most likely, a Bayesian classifier is used across term elements. To compensate for the limited sample set, a word classifier is employed and the results classified using a similar method, resulting in a successful classification rate of 88%, and a false negative rate of only 1%.