http://tc.eserver.org/publisher/Journal_of_Information_Science A listing of works published by Journal of Information Science in the field of technical communication. en-us Copyright (c) 2005-08 by the EServer. All rights reserved. tclib-editorial@eserver.org (TC Library Editorial Board) webmaster@eserver.org (Geoffrey Sauer) http://tc.eserver.org/images/newlogo.gif http://tc.eserver.org/dir/Journal_of_Information_Science http://tc.eserver.org/32294.html http://tc.eserver.org/32294.html Recently, the need for knowledge management has been drastically increasing so organizations may meet the high level of dynamic, complex business change and uncertainty. In particular, knowledge sharing has been recognized as a critical process through which organizational knowledge can be utilized. For successful knowledge sharing, companies need to capitalize on various socio-technical enablers. The primary objective of this paper is to provide a better understanding of how these enablers can affect knowledge sharing intention and behavior, and explore practical implications for knowledge sharing. For this purpose, the paper proposes a theoretical model to investigate these enablers from a socio-technical perspective. PLS (Partial Least Square) analysis was employed to validate the model. This field study involves 164 users. Furthermore, interviews with experts were investigated for practical implications. Our analysis reveals that social enablers such as trust and reward mechanisms are more important than technical support in isolation for facilitating knowledge sharing. http://tc.eserver.org/32295.html http://tc.eserver.org/32295.html With the overall purpose of improving the information literacy skills of librarianship and information science students, an academic portal specifically centred on abstracts and abstracting resources is proposed. We take the existing literature, together with our knowledge and experience of abstract/abstracting topics and web-based technologies to conceive the research design. The research mainly consists of the selection, assessment and web-display of the most relevant abstracts on knowledge management, information representation, natural language processing, abstract/abstracting, modelling the scientific document, information retrieval and information evaluation. The resulting Cyberabstracts portal presents its products consistently and includes reference, abstract, keywords, assessment and access to the full document. Improvement opportunities for this unique subject-based gateway, representing much more than a mere subject catalogue, are uncovered as the starting point on a planned route towards excellence. http://tc.eserver.org/32296.html http://tc.eserver.org/32296.html The present study examines whether the use of humor in scientific article titles is associated with the number of citations an article receives. Four judges rated the degree of amusement and pleasantness of titles of articles published over 10 years (from 1985 to 1994) in two of the most prestigious journals in psychology, Psychological Bulletinand Psychological Review. We then examined the association between the levels of amusement and pleasantness and the article’s monthly citation average. The results show that, while the pleasantness rating was weakly associated with the number of citations, articles with highly amusing titles (2 standard deviations above average) received fewer citations. The negative association between amusing titles and subsequent citations cannot be attributed to differences in the title length and pleasantness, number of authors, year of publication, and article type (regular article vs comment). These findings are discussed in the context of the importance of titles for signalling an article’s content. http://tc.eserver.org/32297.html http://tc.eserver.org/32297.html Qualitative analyses were used to launch a preliminary exploration of the dominant knowledge organization (KO) trends in the pre- and post-web eras. Data for this study was assembled by searching the Library, Information Science, and Technology Abstracts database for articles that have used the term `knowledge organization' or `information organization' in their titles, abstracts, or descriptors. Taken as a whole, these preliminary results suggest that the content of the KO literature has shifted since the advent of the web. Although classic KO principles remain prominent throughout both eras, the presence of new content areas, such as metadata, denotes a shift in KO trends. In the pre-web era, the literature was related in large part to indexing and abstracting. In contrast, cataloging and classification issues dominate the landscape in the post-web era. The findings from this paper will be of particular use to those interested in learning about upcoming trends in the KO literature. http://tc.eserver.org/32298.html http://tc.eserver.org/32298.html This is the era of social networking, collective intelligence, participation, collaborative creation, and borderless distribution. Every day we are bombarded with more publicity about collaborative environments, news feeds, blogs, wikis, podcasting, webcasting, folksonomies, social bookmarking, social citations, collaborative filtering, recommender systems, media sharing, massive multiplayer online games, virtual worlds, and mash-ups. This sort of anarchic environment appeals to the digital natives, but which of these so-called `Web 2.0' technologies are going to have a real business impact? This paper addresses the impact that issues such as quality control, security, privacy and bandwidth may have on the implementation of social networking in hide-bound, large organizations. http://tc.eserver.org/32299.html http://tc.eserver.org/32299.html Health informatics concerns the use of information and information and communication technologies within healthcare. Health informatics and information science need to take account of the unique aspects of health and medicine. The development of information systems and electronic records within health needs to consider the information needs and behaviour of all users. The sensitivity of personal health data raises ethical concerns for developing electronic records. E-health initiatives must actively involve users in the design, development, implementation and evaluation, and information science can contribute to understanding the needs and behaviour of user groups. Health informatics could make an important contribution to the ageing society and to reducing the digital divide and health divides within society. There is a need for an appropriate evidence base within health informatics to support future developments, and to ensure health informatics reaches its potential to improve the health and well-being of patients and the public. http://tc.eserver.org/32300.html http://tc.eserver.org/32300.html A review of recent developments in electronic publishing, with a focus on Open Access (OA) is provided. It describes the two main types of OA, i.e. the `gold' OA journal route and the `green' repository route, highlighting the advantages and disadvantages of the two, and the reactions of the publishing industry to these developments. Quality, cost and copyright issues are explored, as well as some of the business models of OA. It is noted that whilst so far there is no evidence that a shift to OA will lead to libraries cancelling subscriptions to toll-access journals, this may happen in the future, and that despite the apparently compelling reasons for authors to move to OA, so far few have shown themselves willing to do so. Conclusions about the future of scholarly publications are drawn. http://tc.eserver.org/32301.html http://tc.eserver.org/32301.html At the time when the Institute of Information Scientists was launched, well established principles of classification, especially faceted classification, provided an excellent springboard for developments in knowledge organization thereafter. The principles of thesaurus construction and use were worked out during the first two decades of the Institute's existence. Up until the end of the 1980s, most practical systems to exploit any of these vocabularies were held on cards, some of them highly ingenious. The subsequent arrival of the desktop computer, soon followed by the growth of networks providing access to an almost unimaginable quantity and variety of resources, has stimulated evolution of the knowledge organization schemes to exploit the technology available. Anecdotes of events and practical applications of controlled vocabularies illustrate this account of developments over the period. http://tc.eserver.org/32302.html http://tc.eserver.org/32302.html This paper seeks to provide a brief overview of those developments which have taken the theory and practice of image and video retrieval into the digital age. Drawing on a voluminous literature, the context in which visual information retrieval takes place is followed by a consideration of the conceptual and practical challenges posed by the representation and recovery of visual material on the basis of its semantic content. An historical account of research endeavours in content-based retrieval, directed towards the automation of these operations in digital image scenarios, provides the main thrust of the paper. Finally, a look forwards locates visual information retrieval research within the wider context of content-based multimedia retrieval. http://tc.eserver.org/32303.html http://tc.eserver.org/32303.html The emergence of research on various aspects of `information behaviour' is explored and its growth as a subject of academic research is documented. The origin of the field as a potential aid to the development of library and information services is noted, as is the transition from this status to that of a subject for research at PhD level and beyond. The development of the field has thus led to a division between the needs of academia for theoretically grounded work, and the needs of the field of practice for guidance for service development. There is, today, a disconnection between research and practice, to a significant extent: early research was undertaken by practitioners but today academic research dominates the scene. Suggestions are made as to how this disconnection can be repaired. http://tc.eserver.org/32304.html http://tc.eserver.org/32304.html This article presents a brief history of the development of ideas about national and organizational information policies, from the first establishment of a UK Ministry of Information in the First World War to the present day. The issues and tensions that have characterized attempts to develop and implement policies on the national and organizational scale are discussed, with particular reference to: the power relations between the parties to them; the relative significance accorded to information technology and information content; the transition from formulating policy to acting on it; and the threats to the survival of those policies that get as far as implementation. In conclusion, the contribution to date of information science to the theory and practice of information policies is assessed, and suggestions are offered on directions for future efforts, in the light of the past of this interesting field. http://tc.eserver.org/32305.html http://tc.eserver.org/32305.html This paper explores the history of `the social' in information science. It traces the influence of social scientific thinking on the development of the field's intellectual base. The continuing appropriation of both theoretical and methodological insights from domains such as social studies of science, science and technology studies, and socio-technical systems is discussed. http://tc.eserver.org/32306.html http://tc.eserver.org/32306.html This paper is a personal take on the history of evaluation experiments in information retrieval. It describes some of the early experiments that were formative in our understanding, and goes on to discuss the current dominance of TREC (the Text REtrieval Conference) and to assess its impact. http://tc.eserver.org/32307.html http://tc.eserver.org/32307.html Bibliometrics has changed out of all recognition since 1958; becoming established as a field, being taught widely in library and information science schools, and being at the core of a number of science evaluation research groups around the world. This was all made possible by the work of Eugene Garfield and his Science Citation Index. This article reviews the distance that bibliometrics has travelled since 1958 by comparing early bibliometrics with current practice, and by giving an overview of a range of recent developments, such as patent analysis, national research evaluation exercises, visualization techniques, new applications, online citation indexes, and the creation of digital libraries. Webometrics, a modern, fast-growing offshoot of bibliometrics, is reviewed in detail. Finally, future prospects are discussed with regard to both bibliometrics and webometrics. http://tc.eserver.org/32317.html http://tc.eserver.org/32317.html Knowledge management (KM) is now widely recognized to be important to the success or failure of business management. Seeking to better understand the determinants of the evolution of KM, this study focuses on two main problems: (1) whether firms change their KM processes over time to improve KM effectiveness as well as develop their KM practices, and (2) whether socio-technical support results in more mature KM practices. This study draws on the previous literature to identify key dimensions of KM process (knowledge acquisition, knowledge conversion, knowledge application and knowledge protection), KM effectiveness (individual-level and organizational-level KM effectiveness) and socio-technical support (organizational support and information technology diffusion). The evolution of these dimensions is studied in the form of a stage model of KM that includes initiation, development, and mature stages. Data gathered from 141 senior executives in large Taiwanese organizations were employed to test the propositions. The results show that different stages of KM evolution can be distinguished across dimensions of KM process, KM effectiveness, and socio-technical support. Implications for organizations are also discussed. http://tc.eserver.org/32318.html http://tc.eserver.org/32318.html This paper compares two JISC-funded surveys. The first was undertaken by the Rights MEtadata for Open Archiving (RoMEO) project and focused on the rights protection required by academic authors sharing their research outputs in an open-access environment. The second was carried out by the Rights and Rewards project and focused on the rights protection required by authors sharing their teaching materials in the same way. The data are compared. The study reports confusion amongst both researchers and teachers as to copyright ownership in the materials they produced. Researchers were more restrictive about the permissions they would allow, but were liberal about terms and conditions. Teachers would allow many permissions, but under stricter terms and conditions. The study concludes that a single rights solution could not be used for both research and teaching materials. http://tc.eserver.org/32319.html http://tc.eserver.org/32319.html Publication in quality journals has become a major indicator of research performance in UK universities. This paper investigates the notion of `quality journal' and finds dizzying circularity in its definitions. Actually, what a quality journal is does not really matter: agreement that there are such things matters very much indeed. As so often happens with indicators of performance, the indicator has become the target. So, the challenge is to publish in quality journals, and the challenge rewards gamesmanship. Vested interests have become particularly skilful at the game, and at exercising the winners' prerogative of changing the rules. All but forgotten in the desperation to win the game is publication as a means of communicating research findings for the public benefit. The paper examines the situation in management studies, but the problem is much more widespread. It concludes that laughter is both the appropriate reaction to such farce, and also, perhaps, the stimulus to reform. http://tc.eserver.org/32320.html http://tc.eserver.org/32320.html In this research, the development of a 'concept-clumping algorithm' designed to improve the clustering of technical concepts is demonstrated. The algorithm developed first identifies a list of technically relevant noun phrases from a cleaned extracted list and then applies a rule-based algorithm for identifying synonymous terms based on shared words in each term. An assessment of the algorithm found that the algorithm has an 89-91% precision rate, was successful in moving technically important terms higher in the term frequency list, and improved the technical specificity of term clusters. http://tc.eserver.org/32321.html http://tc.eserver.org/32321.html In this article, indigenous knowledge is defined as holistic of all forms of knowledge emanating from an indigenous community. The critical relevance of local science and technology information (STI) databases in the development and sustainability of Africa's indigenous knowledge is discussed. It is advocated that local African STI databases should be considered required development infrastructures because they will provide information resources that are more adequate for national planning and management than their international counterparts. Furthermore, the various stakeholders and their roles are identified and the policy environment of STI databases in Africa examined. Constraints notwithstanding, local databases for African STI resources are envisaged to enhance global distribution and sharing of Africa's indigenous knowledge. http://tc.eserver.org/32322.html http://tc.eserver.org/32322.html This paper challenges the popular notions of tacit and explicit organizational knowledge and argues that its philosophical underpinnings derived from Gilbert Ryle are problematic due to their logical behaviourist perspective. The paper articulates the philosophical problem as the neglect of any role for the mind in organizational activity and the representation of mental activity as purely a set of behaviours. An alternative realist philosophy is advanced taking into account the potential of adopting a number of competing philosophical perspectives. The paper forwards a realist theory of organizational knowledge that moves beyond the surface behaviours of tacit and explicit knowledge and argues that collective consciousness and organizational memory play primary and deeper roles as knowledge processes and structures. Consciousness is not a Hegelian world spirit but rather a real process embedded in people's brains and mental activity. Further, the paper argues that organizational routines provide the contingent condition or `spark' to activate organizational knowledge processes. The implications of this model are explored in relation to the measurement of intellectual capital. The theory developed in this paper represents the first attempt to provide a coherent philosophically grounded framework of organizational knowledge that moves organizational theory beyond neat conversion processes of tacit and explicit knowledge. http://tc.eserver.org/32323.html http://tc.eserver.org/32323.html As a measure of information shared between two fuzzy pattern vectors, the fuzzy information proximity measure (FIPM) plays an important part in fuzzy pattern recognition, fuzzy clustering analysis and fuzzy approximate reasoning. In this paper, two novel FIPMs are set up. Firstly, an axiom theory about the FIPM is given, and different expressions of the FIPM are discussed. A new FIPM is then proposed based on the axiom theory of the FIPM and the concept of fuzzy subsethood function. Two concepts based on the idea of Shannon information entropy, fuzzy joint entropy (FJE) and fuzzy conditional entropy (FCE), are proposed and the basic properties of FJE and FCE are given and proved. Finally, classical similarity measures such as dissimilarity measure (DM) and similarity measure (SM) are studied, and two new measures, fuzzy absolute information measure (FAIM) and fuzzy relative information measure (FRIM), are set up, which can be used as measures of the proximity between fuzzy sets A and B. http://tc.eserver.org/32324.html http://tc.eserver.org/32324.html Well reported research published in conference and journal abstracts is important as individuals reading these reports often base their initial assessment of a study based on information reported in the abstract. However, there is growing concern about the reliability and quality of information published in these reports. This article provides an overview of research evidence underpinning the need for better reporting of abstracts reported in conference proceedings and abstracts of journal articles; with a particular focus in the area of health care. Where available we highlight evidence which refers specifically to abstracts reporting randomized trials. We seek to identify current initiatives aimed at improving the reporting of these reports and recommend that an extension of the CONSORT Statement (Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials), CONSORT for Abstracts, be developed. This checklist would include a list of essential items to be reported in any conference or journal abstract reporting the results of a randomized trial. http://tc.eserver.org/32325.html http://tc.eserver.org/32325.html Mining association rules from large databases of business data is an important topic in data mining. In many applications, there are explicit or implicit taxonomies (hierarchies) for items, so it may be useful to find associations at levels of the taxonomy other than the primitive concept level. Previous work on the mining of generalized association rules, however, assumed that the taxonomy of items remained unchanged, disregarding the fact that the taxonomy might be updated as new transactions are added to the database over time. If this happens, effectively updating the generalized association rules to reflect the database change and related taxonomy evolution is a crucial task. In this paper, we examine this problem and propose two novel algorithms, called IDTE and IDTE2, which can incrementally update the generalized association rules when the taxonomy of items evolves as a result of new transactions. Empirical evaluations show that our algorithms can maintain their performance even for large numbers of incremental transactions and high degrees of taxonomy evolution, and are faster than applying contemporary generalized association mining algorithms to the whole updated database. http://tc.eserver.org/32326.html http://tc.eserver.org/32326.html In this article, theories of human judgement and decision making are reviewed and their use by library and information science researchers examined. A different perspective on judgement and decision making is offered by the field of naturalistic decision making (NDM) and the implications of this approach are considered for an expanded understanding of how judgements and decisions are made during information seeking. This discussion is illustrated by a case from a recent empirical investigation into how judgements of enough information are made in the workplace. The article concludes with a critical evaluation of the NDM approach. It is argued that NDM, a recent development in decision theory, offers a new perspective from which to investigate judgements and decisions during information seeking. http://tc.eserver.org/32327.html http://tc.eserver.org/32327.html This study investigated use of collaborative recommendations in web searching. An experimental system was designed. In the experimental system, recommendations were generated in a group report format, including items judged relevant by previous users, search queries and the URLs of documents. The study explored how users used these items, the effects of their use, and what factors contributed to this use. The results demonstrate that users preferred using queries and document sources (URLs), rather than relevance judgment (document ratings). The findings also show that using recommended items had a significant effect on the number of documents viewed, but not on precision or number of queries. Task difficulty and search skills had significant impact on the use. Possible reasons for the results are analyzed. Implications and future directions are discussed. http://tc.eserver.org/32328.html http://tc.eserver.org/32328.html The typical structure of a scientific report involves highly standardized sections. The key concept of a scientific report is the reproducibility of results. Because not only clarity but also conciseness is a tool for the advancement of science, a new format using nested tables is proposed with the aim of improving the design of short reports in scientific journals, namely short communications, short technical reports, case reports, etc. This format is based on the ergonomic philosophy of visual encyclopaedias (one topic, one page) and on the quality system of the Deming's cycle (plan--do--check--act) for continuous improvement. This new editing tool has several advantages over existing forms, because it provides quick and ergonomic, reader-friendly research reports that, at the same time, would render a saving in terms of available space and publishing costs of the printed version of scientific journals. http://tc.eserver.org/32329.html http://tc.eserver.org/32329.html This paper addresses the influence of two competing views of social identity on knowledge integration. One view sees social identity primarily as a coherent characteristic of organizations, which can leverage knowledge integration by unconditional cooperative behaviour, shared values, mindsets, trust, and loyalty. The opposing view considers social identity as multiple and fragmented. This fragmented view emphasizes the problematic nature of social identity for knowledge integration and states that social identity is an additional barrier to knowledge integration in organizations. The aim of this paper is to examine these competing accounts and to develop insight into the underlying mechanisms that lead to the different effects of social identity on knowledge integration. Two polar case studies illustrate the different effects of a coherent versus multiple identity on knowledge integration and the need for a coherent company-wide social identity, instead of a multiple community or group based social identity, to leverage knowledge integration in organizations. http://tc.eserver.org/32330.html http://tc.eserver.org/32330.html This paper describes a new concept-based multi-document summarization system that employs discourse parsing, information extraction and information integration. Dissertation abstracts in the field of sociology were selected as sample documents for this study. The summarization process includes four major steps — (1) parsing dissertation abstracts into five standard sections; (2) extracting research concepts (often operationalized as research variables) and their relationships, the research methods used and the contextual relations from specific sections of the text; (3) integrating similar concepts and relationships across different abstracts; and (4) combining and organizing the different kinds of information using a variable-based framework, and presenting them in an interactive web-based interface. The accuracy of each summarization step was evaluated by comparing the system-generated output against human coding. The user evaluation carried out in the study indicated that the majority of subjects (70%) preferred the concept-based summaries generated using the system to the sentence-based summaries generated using traditional sentence extraction techniques. http://tc.eserver.org/32331.html http://tc.eserver.org/32331.html This paper seeks to contribute to the ongoing research in knowledge management (KM) by presenting a study conducted in six public service agencies in Singapore. The study was guided by three research foci, namely, (1) to elucidate the nebulous nature of KM initiatives, (2) to uncover the motivation behind KM measurement and (3) to identify the various elements of a KM initiative that can be measured. Data collected from the public service agencies revealed that KM initiatives were generally top-down and technology-focused. Project management and the need to quantify the value of KM initiatives drove KM measurement. The measurement indicators adopted by the agencies encompassed four elements of measurement: activities, knowledge assets, organizational processes and business outcomes. In conclusion, this paper highlights two practical implications for the design of a KM measurement regime and suggests a number of possible directions for further research. http://tc.eserver.org/32332.html http://tc.eserver.org/32332.html This paper examines a large number of failed queries submitted to a web image search engine, including real users' search terms and written requests. The results show that failed image queries have a much higher specificity than successful queries because users often employ various refined types to specify their queries. The study explores the refined types further, and finds that failed queries consist of far more conceptual than perceptual refined types. The widely used content-based image retrieval technique, CBIR, can only deal with a small proportion of failed queries; hence, appropriate integration of concept-based techniques is desirable. Based on using the concepts of uniqueness and refinement for categorization, the study also provides a useful discussion on the gaps between image queries and retrieval techniques. The initial results enhance the understanding of failed queries and suggest possible ways to improve image retrieval systems. http://tc.eserver.org/32333.html http://tc.eserver.org/32333.html Archival science, like other disciplines, is evolving into more specific interdisciplinary subfields. To determine this intellectual structure of archival science, the text mining method was used. The data were 432 articles from 2001 to 2004, and we produced 43 clusters of documents using the within-group average method in SPSS. Then we generated pathfinder networks of 43 clusters and grouped them into seven subject categories: digital libraries and digital archiving technologies, online resources and finding aids, archives and archivists, legal and political issues, electronic records and technical issues, records and information management, and e-mail and information professionals. Finally, these seven subject categories were merged into three sectors: digital library, archives and RIM (Business). This study describes dynamic change in the 2001—4 research themes from traditional single-subject areas to emerging, complex subject areas. These results also show that research areas in archival sciences have much growth potential and will continue to expand. http://tc.eserver.org/32334.html http://tc.eserver.org/32334.html This paper describes the process of creating a controlled vocabulary which can be used to systematically analyse the copyright transfer agreements (CTAs) of journal publishers with regard to self-archiving. The analysis formed the basis of the newly created Copyright Knowledge Bank of publishers' self-archiving policies. Self-archiving terms appearing in publishers' CTAs were identified and classified, then simplified, merged, and discarded to form a definitive list. The controlled vocabulary consists of three categories describing `what' can be self-archived, the `conditions' and the `restrictions' of self-archiving. Condition terms include specifications such as `where' an article can be self-archived; restriction terms include specifications such as `when' the article can be self-archived. Additional information on any of these terms appears in `free-text' fields. Although this controlled vocabulary provides an effective way of analysing CTAs, it will need continual review and updating in light of any major new additions to the terms used in publishers' copyright and self-archiving policies. http://tc.eserver.org/32335.html http://tc.eserver.org/32335.html Much research has been done on the favourable influence of social environment and social networks on knowledge production. The aim of this article is to design a theoretical framework where both information behaviour (IB) research and social capital (SC) research are integrated. Integrating these areas is seen as an advantage when focusing on the social construction of knowledge, and a model is proposed to illuminate sources and consequences of social capital and knowledge sharing. This framework will function as a basis on which to build when the authors proceed with a number of empirical studies involving the university context, social networks of the unemployed, and virtual networks of young people. http://tc.eserver.org/32336.html http://tc.eserver.org/32336.html The paper explores the interrelation and differences between the concepts of occupational community, community of practice, online community and social network. It uses as a case study illustration the domain of UK university web site production and specifically a listserv for those involved in it. Different latent occupational communities are explored, and the potential for the listserv to help realize these as an active sense of community is considered. The listserv is not (for most participants) a tight knit community of practice, indeed it fails many criteria for an online community. It is perhaps best conceived as a loose knit network of practice, valued for information, implicit support and for the maintenance of weak ties. Through the analysis the case for using strict definitions of the theoretical concepts is made. http://tc.eserver.org/32291.html http://tc.eserver.org/32291.html An increasing number of robots harvest information on the world wide web for a wide variety of purposes. Protocols developed at the inception of the web laid out voluntary procedures in order to identify robot behaviour, and exclude it if necessary. Few robots now follow this protocol and it is now increasingly difficult to filter for this activity in reports of on-site activity. This paper seeks to demonstrate the issues involved in identifying robots and assessing their impact on usage in regard to a project which sought to establish the relative usage patterns of open access and non-open access articles in the Oxford University Press published journal Glycobiology, which offers in a single issue articles in both forms. A number of methods for identifying robots are compared and together these methods found that 40% of the raw logs of this journal could be attributed to robots. http://tc.eserver.org/32270.html http://tc.eserver.org/32270.html is paper presents early findings of a unique analysis that related questionnaire data to site usage as recorded in the transaction log reports of ScienceDirect, for the same people. Its focus is the differences in the online behaviour of three types of navigational users: those accessing the site via a gateway (either via a reference hyperlink or subject search facility), those using the on site search facility and those employing menus. Towards this end 16,865 sessions were analysed and grouped by navigational entry and compared over three types of online behaviour: the viewing of articles in press (AIP), the number of different journals viewed in a session and the viewing of old material. A strong association was found between form of navigation and behavioural trait. Those using menus were more likely to view AIPs, while those using the search facility were more likely to view a greater number of different journals and were more likely to view older material. This supports a hypothesis proposed by Nicholas et al. (2006) that use of the online searching facility increases the visibility of material irrespective of journal and age and results in a greater use of older material and a more diverse journal use compared to other online and off-line information retrieval methods. Although research has been undertaken on the different strategies that users employ to navigate and find their way around a collection of content (e.g. a digital library), this we believe is the first time the effect of different navigational strategies on outcomes (for example, what is viewed) has been investigated. http://tc.eserver.org/32271.html http://tc.eserver.org/32271.html The study investigates the ways in which people experience information overload in the context of monitoring everyday events through media such as newspapers and the internet. The findings are based on interviews with 20 environmental activists in Finland in 2005. The perceptions of the seriousness of problems caused by information overload varied among the participants. On the one hand, information overload was experienced as a real problem particularly in the networked information environments. On the other hand, information overload was perceived as an imagined problem with some mythical features. Two major strategies for coping with information overload were identified. The filtering strategy is based on the determined weeding out of material deemed useless. This strategy is favoured in networked information environments. The withdrawal strategy is more affectively oriented, emphasizing the need to protect oneself from excessive information supply by keeping the number of information sources to a minimum. http://tc.eserver.org/32272.html http://tc.eserver.org/32272.html This paper argues that metrics can be generated from search transactional web logs that can help evaluate search engine effectiveness. Search logs from the BBC website were analysed and metrics extracted. Two search metrics — the time lapse between searches and the number of searches in a session — were developed to see whether they could measure search success or satisfaction. In all, 4 million search statements by 900,000 users were evaluated. The BBC search engine possessed a number of functional attributes which sought to improve retrieval and these were subjected to the two metrics to help determine how successful they were in practice. There was some evidence to support the proposition that the search outcome metrics did indeed indicate the effectiveness of engine functionality. The authors argue that this result is significant in that the identification of search outcome metrics will pave the way for assessing the effectiveness of site specific search engines and a greater understanding of the effectiveness of search engine functionality. http://tc.eserver.org/32273.html http://tc.eserver.org/32273.html Searching the web is a common activity of web users. English and non-English speakers utilize international or local search engines so as to satisfy their information needs. Most of the attempts at evaluation of search engines focus on English queries and on English document collections. In this paper an evaluation methodology is presented and the capabilities of international and local web retrieval systems using Greek queries are evaluated based on this method. We aim at identifying difficulties and knowledge requirements when using a Greek supporting search engine. The importance of interface localization and the effects of standard information retrieval techniques such as case insensitivity, stopword removal and simple stemming are studied in international and local search engines. The evaluation methodology is applicable to other non-English natural languages as well. http://tc.eserver.org/32274.html http://tc.eserver.org/32274.html Authors of scientific articles in one language are often required to provide abstracts of their papers in a second language, and they use a variety of ways to achieve this. http://tc.eserver.org/32275.html http://tc.eserver.org/32275.html SHIL on the Web is the website of the Israeli Citizens' Advice Bureau. It provides information about rights, social benefits, government and public services and civil obligations. Activity on the site approaches 10,000 pages visited per day. It has interfaces in four languages: Hebrew, Arabic, Russian and English. Logfile analysis of the SHIL website revealed to our surprise that about 60.7% of the requests reaching SHIL from external sites (excluding requests from robots) are from general search engines (e.g. Google and MSN), and users reach a specific page on the site linked from the search results page. This finding seems to indicate that the site is not known well enough to the public. On the other hand the site is very active, thus it seems to serve Israeli citizens well, even without being a well known brand. In this paper we analyzed the external requests coming from search engines. The analysis is based on the 266,295 queries from search engines that reached SHIL during March—October 2005. Studying queries submitted to search engines is a novel technique for analyzing the access patterns to the site and provides a better understanding of the user needs and intentions than analyzing the distribution of the visited pages only. We are not aware of any previous study that analyzed the relation between the query submitted to the search engine and the webpage the user clicked on the search results page. Since search engines provide snippets, when the user clicks on a specific page he already has some information on what is to be found on the page and the user makes a conscious decision to click on the specific result. Thus, this type of analysis provides additional information about the users' actual information needs. http://tc.eserver.org/32276.html http://tc.eserver.org/32276.html The weighted list, known popularly as a `tag cloud', has appeared on many popular folksonomy-based web-sites. Flickr, Delicious, Technorati and many others have all featured a tag cloud at some point in their history. However, it is unclear whether the tag cloud is actually useful as an aid to finding information. We conducted an experiment, giving participants the option of using a tag cloud or a traditional search interface to answer various questions. We found that where the information-seeking task required specific information, participants preferred the search interface. Conversely, where the information-seeking task was more general, participants preferred the tag cloud. While the tag cloud is not without value, it is not sufficient as the sole means of navigation for a folksonomy-based dataset. http://tc.eserver.org/32277.html http://tc.eserver.org/32277.html The viability of KM partly rests on how researchers garner empirical support for their purported theories. One aspect of this would involve the evaluation of the evidence provided in KM research. This paper presents a comparative study of the evidence that is presented in scholarly and professional literature on KM. For this purpose, the paper introduces a typology of evidence to analyze the data obtained from the survey of the literature. The classification based on this typology reveals quantitative differences between the types of evidence put forth in the scholarly and practitioner literature. More interestingly, however, our analysis reveals differences in terms of the questions they ask, the perspective they adopt, and the methods they follow to convince others of the validity of their claims. We explain these differences in terms of the notions of `blackboxing' and `performance' borrowed from actor-network theory. http://tc.eserver.org/32278.html http://tc.eserver.org/32278.html Copyright issues are significant for worldwide information sharing, while mutual understanding about the commonalities and differences among international copyright law articles is difficult due to the diversity of legal knowledge representation. The goal of our research is to propose an appropriate methodology and capture a uniform conceptual model that will provide semantic level representation for processing and modelling international legal knowledge using ontological technology. This paper proposes a preliminary intention-oriented legal knowledge model as a pivotal model that, from the viewpoint of intention behind the law, manages and models legal knowledge derived from international law documents. We develop a domain ontology — international copyright law ontology, which is used as a fundamental conceptual framework to maintain consistency among diverse legal knowledge representations. http://tc.eserver.org/32279.html http://tc.eserver.org/32279.html Longitudinal studies of web change are needed to assess the stability of webometric statistics and this paper forms part of an on-going longitudinal study of three national academic web spaces. It examines the relationship between university inlinks and research productivity over time and identifies reasons for individual universities experiencing significant increases and decreases in inlinks over the last six years. The findings also indicate that between 66 and 70% of outlinks remain the same year on year for all three academic web spaces, although this stability conceals large individual differences. Moreover, there is evidence of a level of stability over time for university site inlinks when measured against research productivity. Surprisingly, however, inlink counts can vary significantly from year to year for individual universities, for reasons unrelated to research which undermines their use in webometrics studies.