The paper Fundamental methodologies and tools for the employment of webometric analyses defines the most important rules to keep in mind before performing webometric analyses. The paper deals with the two basic elements, that constitutes the foundation for webometric analyses: the documents being analysed, and the tools that are applied for the data collection. The concepts of a citation theory and a link theory are discussed through a study of the current litterature. Different methodologies for uncovering motivations for making references in scientific articles are reviewed and discussed. A methodology for uncovering motivations for making links on webpages is proposed and applied on six researchers' websites at the Royal School of Library and Information Science in Denmark, and on all the institutes at the same institution and at selected institutes at The Technical University of Denmark. The paper further contains a review on the linktopology of the Internet and the current status for the tools available for data collection. Finally, alternative possible tools for applying webometric analyses are proposed. The alternative tools are the Researchindex invented by Lawrence and Giles (Lawrence, Bollacker & Giles, 1999b; Giles, Bollacker & Lawrence, 1998), Kleinberg's HITS algorithm employed in the Clever search engine (The Clever Project, n.d.; Kleinberg, 1998), Proposals for possible extensions to the HTTP protocol to facilitate the collection and navigation of backlink information in the world wide web made by Chakrabarti, Gibson and McCurley (Chakrabarti, Gibson & McCurley, 1999c) and finally Link Agent, a program we have developed for this paper. The program makes it possible to uncover the reciprocal linking webpages, that exist in relation to the outgoing links from a chosen webpage. Keywords: Informetrics, Webometrics, Citation theory, Link theory, Motivations for links, Motivations for references, Search engines, Webometric tools

==Background== In most academic disciplines journals play an important role in disseminating findings of research among the disciplinary community members. Understanding a discipline's body of journals is therefore of grave importance when looking for previous research, compiling an overview of previous research and and in order to make a decision regarding the best place for publishing research results. Furthermore, based on Bradford's Law of scattering, one can assume that in order to be able to compile a satisfying overview of previous research a wide range of journals has to be scanned, but also that there are some 'core' journals which are of more importance to specific disciplines than others. ==Aim== This thesis aims to compile a comprehensive master list of journals which publish articles of relevance to Library and Information Science (LIS). A method to rank journals by their importance is introduced and some key characteristics of the disciplines body of journals are discussed. Databases indexing the disciplines journals are also compared. ==Method== The master list of LIS journals was created by combining the journal listings of secondary sources indexing the field's literature. These sources were six databases focusing on LIS literature: INFODATA, Current Contents, Library and Information Science Abstracts, Library Information Science Technology Abstracts, Information Science and Technology Abstracts, and Library Literature and Information Science, the LIS subsection in three databases with a general focus: Social Science Citation Index, Academic Search Premier, and Expanded Academic ASAP, and the listing of LIS journals from the Elektronische Zeitschriften Bibliothek. Problems related to editorial policies and technical shortcomings are discussed, before comparing: predominant publication languages, places of publication, open access, peer review, and the ISI Journal Impact Factors (JIF). Journals were also ranked by the number of occurrences in multiple databases in order to identify 'core' publications. The number of journals overlapping between databases are estimated and a matrix giving the overlap is visualized using multi dimensional scaling. Lastly, the degree of journals overlapping with other disciplines is measured. ==Results== A comprehensive master list of 1,205 journals publishing articles of relevance to LIS was compiled. The 968 active journals are mostly published in English, with one third of the journals coming from the US and another third from the UK and Germany. Nearly 16% of all journals are open access, 11% have a ISIJIF, and 42% are peer reviewed. Fifteen core journal could be identified and a list of the top fourteen journals published in Germany is introduced. Databases have between five to 318 journals in common and the journal collection shows an substantial overlap with a wide range of subjects, with the biggest journal overlap with Computing Studies, and Business and Economics. ==Conclusion== The aim of compiling a comprehensive list of LIS journal was achieved. The list will contribute to our understanding of scholarly communication within the LIS discipline and provide academics and practitioners with a better understanding of journals within the discipline. The ranking approach proved to be sufficient, showing good similarity with other studies over the last 40 years. The master list of LIS journals has also potential use to further research.

The advent of electronic media into the academic environment has forever changed the way academics communicate, perform their research, and contribute to the production of knowledge.These relatively recent changes in the mode of knowledge production have been theorized by Gibbons (et al; 1994) as a shift from Mode I to Mode II which indicates a move away from knowledge production in traditional research contexts to an environment in which knowledge is created in broader, trans-disciplinary social and economic contexts. Similar arguments have been made in two significant OECD publications (1996, 1997), where the advent of electronic media is considered part and parcel of this shift in the predominant mode of knowledge production. The increasing use of electronic media for communication and the current changes in the ways that knowledge is produced are mutually implicated phenomena, and this introduces a problematic: what is the relationship between print and electronic media with respect to how knowledge is produced in academic environments? In part, this problematic motivates this thesis

Theoretical analysis of the concepts of work and manifestation for moving image materials was carried out, and both concepts were defined. Research was done on the frequency of occurrence of moving image manifestations, on the types of difference that can occur from one moving image manifestation to another, and on the kinds of visible indicators, accessible to catalogers, that are associated with these differences. It was found that continuity, i.e. intellectual and artistic content, varies frequently, 39 per cent of the time; an additional seven per cent of works have added subsidiary matter, and an additional 12 per cent of works have differences in language and sound track. In other words, a total of 58 per cent of the works sampled had at least one instance of difference in intellectual and artistic content between two items. Only eight per cent of the works in the sample were mentioned as having manifestations in standard reference sources such as Maltin. Visible indicators and physical format are very unreliable indicators of actual difference in intellectual and artistic content; 48 per cent of the time, visible indicators vary with no underlying difference in continuity; 23 per cent of the time, continuity varies with no difference in visible indicators. Length differences of three minutes or more are the most reliable indicators of actual difference in intellectual and artistic content. Of the titles with difference in continuity, 72 per cent of these manifestations were detectible by means of length difference. This corresponds to previous findings for books which indicate paging is the most reliable indicator of true differences in manifestation. Findings mean that catalogers need not create nearly as many separate records for the same work as they do under current practice. Fewer records for the same work would also benefit users, who could more easily select the most suitable manifestation of the work they seek if new records were made only for known differences in either intellectual and artistic content or in identification. Since catalogers cannot identify manifestation variation in two items that are no more than two minutes different in length, film scholars and preservationists must watch all available items representing a particular film work before they can be sure they are aware of all manifestation variations that may occur.

This study represents one attempt to make use of relations expressed in text to improve information retrieval effectiveness. In particular, the study investigated whether the information obtained by matching causal relations expressed in documents with the causal relations expressed in users' queries could be used to improve document retrieval results in comparison to using just term matching without considering relations. An automatic method for identifying and extracting cause-effect information in Wall Street Journal text was developed. The method uses linguistic clues to identify causal relations without recourse to knowledge-based inferencing. The method was successful in identifying and extracting about 68% of the causal relations that were clearly expressed within a sentence or between adjacent sentences in Wall Street Journal text. Of the instances that the computer program identified as causal relations, 72% can be considered to be correct. The automatic method was used in an experimental information retrieval system to identify causal relations in a database of full-text Wall Street Journal documents. Causal relation matching was found to yield a small but significant improvement in retrieval results when the weights used for combining the scores from different types of matching were customized for each query -- as in an SDI or routing queries situation. The best results were obtained when causal relation matching was combined with word proximity matching (matching pairs of causally related words in the query with pairs of words that co-occur within document sentences). An analysis using manually identified causal relations indicate that bigger retrieval improvements can be expected with more accurate identification of causal relations. The best kind of causal relation matching was found to be one in which one member of the causal relation (either the cause or the effect) was represented as a wildcard that could match with any term. The study also investigated whether using Roget's International Thesaurus (3rd ed.) to expand query terms with synonymous and related terms would improve retrieval effectiveness. Using Roget category codes in addition to keywords did give better retrieval results. However, the Roget codes were better at identifying the non-relevant documents than the relevant ones. Parts of the thesis were published in: 1. Khoo, C., Myaeng, S.H., & Oddy, R. (2001). Using cause-effect relations in text to improve information retrieval precision. Information Processing and Management, 37(1), 119-145. 2. Khoo, C., Kornfilt, J., Oddy, R., & Myaeng, S.H. (1998). Automatic extraction of cause-effect information from newspaper text without knowledge-based inferencing. Literary & Linguistic Computing, 13(4), 177-186. 3. Khoo, C. (1997). The use of relation matching in information retrieval. LIBRES: Library and Information Science Research Electronic Journal [Online], 7(2). Available at: http://aztec.lib.utk.edu/libres/libre7n2/. An update of the literature review on causal relations in text was published in: Khoo, C., Chan, S., & Niu, Y. (2002). The many facets of the cause-effect relation. In R.Green, C.A. Bean & S.H. Myaeng (Eds.), The semantics of relationships: An interdisciplinary perspective (pp. 51-70). Dordrecht: Kluwer

In this dissertation I analyze the relationship between social organization and knowledge organization. This analysis is carried out on two levels. The first level consists of three chapters each examining particular perspectives of the relationship. First, in terms of an examination of how communication technologies have shaped forms of social organization. I argue how knowledge organization is constituted by social organization. Second, I further situate knowledge organization in light of Jurgen Habermas theory of the public sphere and argue that his theory can be viewed as a fundamental model of knowledge organization. Third, by drawing on various theories of genre and activity systems, I underpin the connection between social organization in scholarly communication by means of how indexing reflects and responds to the rhetorical activities of scholarly articles. I consider this as how knowledge organization can ascribe cognitive authority to documents. The texts are considered to constitute the mediating link between social organization and knowledge organization. I conclude that this relationship between social organization and knowledge organization must be understood and examined in order to fully account for the role knowledge organization in human activities based on document production and use such as scholarly communication.

A usability evaluation was carried out of the recently-launched South London and Maudsley NHS Trust library web site using a variety of standard methodologies: content and design evaluation of selected comparable sites, focus groups, a questionnaire survey of library and web development staff, heuristic evaluation, observation testing, card sorting/cluster analysis, and label intuitiveness/category membership testing. All test participants were staff of or providers of services to the trust. Demographic information was recorded for each participant. Unsuccessful attempts were made to evaluate user feedback, and to compare usability test results with usage statistics. Test participantsâ overall responses to the site were enthusiastic and favourable, indicating the scope and content of the site to be broadly appropriate to the user group. Numerous suggestions for new content areas were made by testers. Usability problems were discovered in two main areas: in the organisation of the site, and in the terminology used to refer to information services and sources. On the basis of test results, proposals for a revised menu structure, improved accessibility, and changes to the terminology used within the site are presented.

This thesis looks at a computer-mediated communication (CMC) and publishing system used to facilitate collaborative peer review of multimedia educational objects. The occurrence of electronic scholarly publishing has increased dramatically in recent years due in part to the immediacy and overall reach of the Internet and it’s ability to transmit diverse forms of electronic media. Previous studies indicate, however, that there is a perceived lack of prestige and legitimacy associated with electronic journals as well as electronically enabled peer review. This is due in part to a perceived lack of permanence associated with electronic media, a lack of familiarity with electronic media and a lack of fully developed conventions of citation. New forms of electronically based peer review have been explored that enable a collaborative review process among reviewers and authors, breaking from traditional models where communication channels are mediated through an editor. The ability of CMC to enable collaboration within geographically dispersed communities offers strong motivation for its use. This thesis develops a framework for collaborative peer review based on social capital that suggests an overall benefit for scholarly communities that incorporate collaborative forms of review. An examination is performed of collaborative peer review used in a new journal that features multimedia-rich geoscience educational objects: the Journal of Earth System Science in Education (JESSE). Technical issues surrounding the preparation of these objects for the CMC review environment are discussed and a process model for publishing is developed. A redesign of the toolkit used to prepare objects for the review environment is implemented and task-centered usability assessments are performed. The outcome of these steps suggested a potential for increased legitimacy and prestige of electronic publishing could develop out of a well-designed CMC environment and collaborative review model. It was found that scholars who participated in the peer review perceived a benefit from the collaborative process and that the process was seen as providing a separate service from traditional peer review. On the publishing end, the redesigned toolkit implementation was seen as providing greater accessibility to non-technically oriented users.

Libraries have been involved in technological transformation for several decades, and are now increasingly associated with discourses surrounding the development of a global information society. The information society, however, remains a contested terrain, with a major focus on connectivity to ICTs, and is often linked with technological determinist and technocratic agendas. The library profession and field do not adequately theorize technology in a way that offers a progressive alternative to this dominant information society vision. In light of this context, this dissertation argues for the relevance of critical theory as a framework for guiding and analyzing library technology actions. This confluence of critical theory and library technology studies is named a “critical theory of library technology.” The framework is both a conceptual tool for re-envisioning the roles of libraries in relation to technology, as well as an analytical tool for exploring library technology decisions at various levels of impact. The open source software movement in libraries serves as test case in the application of this framework as a mode of analysis. Prominent library open source projects are discussed, and an in-depth, qualitative case study of Simon Fraser University Library in Canada, a library developing open source software for electronic resource management and electronic journal publishing, is undertaken. Interviews and documentary research are the main sources of data. Findings indicate that while the software projects are nominally open source, the co-developer communities remain limited. Best practices research will have to address areas related to the on-going community development and sustainability of these projects. However, in relation to the critical framework, the library emerges as a model of high investment in the technological skills of systems staff. The case presents a regional example of cooperation that is benefiting smaller client libraries in the regional consortia. Open source ideology, however, appears as just one of a variety of factors behind the deployment of these projects. In the case of the electronic journal publishing software project, an open source/open access ideological orientation is prominent, and the project presents a potentially new model for academic libraries in the support of electronic publishing services.

The UK 2001 foot and mouth disease (FMD) outbreak constituted the biggest crisis ever to affect the UK farming system; it was one of the worst epidemics of its kind in the world. Farmers and rural communities were disrupted and traumatized as FMD spread rapidly through the whole of the country. The crisis unfolded as a series of information and communication problems, primarily from government to farmers with consequences for action in a time of crisis. This study explores the multiple informational needs that faced the Cumbrian farming community, during the crisis. Already geographically remote and isolated farming communities suffered â isolation within isolationâ . As biosecurity measures were implemented to control the spread of the disease, the places where farmers usually meet to communicate and exchange information, either shut down or became inaccessible. It investigates how farmers accessed the information they needed to deal with the crisis and examines the factors which made information seeking difficult. A mixed method approach was used of semi-structured interviews with members of farming house-holds supported by document analysis of a number of publicly available resources. Results highlighted the importance of: changes in information needs at different stages of the crisis; context in which information seeking took place; overlap of information and emotional needs; formal and informal channels of information seeking during the crisis; farmers as information providers as well as information seekers; sense-making approach to information seeking during the crisis; trusted information sources; the need for a mix of ICTs during the crisis; ICTs as a catalyst for innovation during the crisis; place and space and new venues and meeting places for communities in a crisis and providing a local response (The Pentalk Network www.pentalk.org ) to a national crisis.