The circular continuum of agencies,public libraries,and users: A model of e-government in practice

When e-government first became a viable solution to the dissemination of government information, experts believed that the rise of direct government-to-citizen (G2C) services would improve government transparency, foster civic engagement, and offer new and innovative service possibilities. It soon became clear, however, that not all users received the type of information, instruction, or services that they needed through this arrangement, giving rise to the need for an intermediary in this continuum of interaction. Increasingly, public libraries fulfill this role. Instead of direct government-to-user interaction, government information and services flow through channels from agency to public librarian to user, from user back up to agency, and from agency to user to public librarian. Based upon research conducted in collaboration with public libraries, government agencies, state library agencies, and a national library association in the United States, this paper expands on the idea of these multiple pathways of information and services, offering a practical model of e-government.     

Close encounters of the digital kind: A research agenda for the digitalization of public services

This paper contributes to e-government research by presenting a review and discussion on how digitalization of public services has affected the interaction between citizens and government. We argue for a conceptualization and critical reflection on the nature of the underlying interaction between citizens and public officials - the public encounter - that digital public services are developed to support. We apply a qualitative and hermeneutic approach and illustrate that digital public services change public encounters concerning when, where, and how interactions occur, what each actor does, and the skills required of them. By relating these changes to emerging digital technologies (e.g. data mining, machine learning, sensor technology, and service automation), we illustrate that while these new technologies carry the potential to further digitalize service provision and fulfill the democratic goals of digital government, authorities can apply the same technology to restrict, control, and surveil citizens. Based on a critical discussion on what digitalization might entail for society, we identify problem areas arising from this development and propose a research agenda for understanding this phenomenon further. We raise questions and ethical concerns regarding accountability and reskilling of citizens and public officials as public service provision becomes citizen self-service.     

Resisting by workarounds: Unraveling the barriers of implementing open government data policy

All public values (transparency, accountability, civic participation, and collaboration) of open government could be difficult to achieve without administrators' good implementation. This paper raises concern that perceived risks to OGD accountability lead to undesired strategic resistance. Using a nation-wide government survey data of Taiwanese public servants, this study empirically tests for differences in OGD behaviors between two types of perceived risks (individual accountability vs. organizational accountability). Results find the existence of perceived risks to accountability in the process of data release and positive effects on inducing strategic workaround when implementing OGD policies. These findings shed light on the understanding of practices of open government and contributes to knowledge of administrative behavior.     

Design principles for creating digital transparency in government

Under pressure to fight corruption, hold public officials accountable, and build trust with citizens, many governments pursue the quest for greater transparency. They publish data about their internal operations, externalize decision-making processes, establish digital inquiry lines to public officials, and employ other forms of transparency using digital means. Despite the presence of many transparency-enhancing digital tools, putting such tools together to achieve the desired level of digital transparency, to design entire government systems for digital transparency, remains challenging. Design principles and other design guides are lacking in this area. This article aims to fill this gap. We identify a set of barriers to digital transparency in government, define 16 design principles to overcome such barriers, and evaluate these principles using three case studies from different countries. Some principles apply to projects, others to systems, yet others to entire organizations. To achieve digital transparency, before building and deploying digital solutions, government organizations should build technological and institutional foundations and use such foundations to organize themselves for transparency. The proposed design principles can help develop and apply such foundations.     

Collaborative accountability for sustainable public health: A Korean perspective on the effective use of ICT-based health risk communication

The sustainability of public health practices requires collaboration between the government and its citizens. On the government's side, social media can provide a conduit for communicating health risk information in an effective and timely fashion, while also engaging citizens in informed decision-making. On the citizen's side, information communication technology (ICT)-based practices cannot function unless citizens recognize and act on their responsibility to actively engage with government social media platforms. Despite an increasing interest in understanding the adoption of ICT practices and e-government services for health risk communication, there remains a crucial need for a comprehensive framework to explain which factors determine citizen use of digital government resources. The purpose of this study is to investigate how to increase government accountability for motivating citizens to engage in ICT-based health risk communication, thereby attaining sustainable public health practices through collaborative governance.By integrating trust and health risk information into the e-government adoption model (GAM), this research examines factors that influence citizens' likelihood of using government social media resources. Survey data from 700 Korean citizens were analyzed using structural equation modeling. The results indicated that individuals with higher social media competency are more likely to (a) seek risk information through social media and (b) perceive the government's social media sites as easy to use. Consistent with the GAM, intentions to use the government's social media sites for information and interactions appear to increase as citizens perceive more value in using them regarding information quality, ease of use, functional benefit, and security. Furthermore, perceived trust in the government's social media resources appears to function as a mediator of this process. Initial trust in the government is an important determinant of perceptions of its digital resources. Citizens who trust the government tend to evaluate new initiatives positively and are more likely to accept and make use of them.The results of this study can inform policy design and implementation by elucidating the mechanisms that determine citizens' adoption and usage of digital government services. Theoretically, this work expands the GAM to include health risk communication and adds empirical evidence to the small yet growing body of knowledge of e-government initiatives. These findings also highlight the importance of public trust in the government, as this encourages citizens to seek health risk information and assistance from the government. Overall, the data and model generated in this investigation represent an important step toward the successful and sustainable modernization of public services.     

Information governance,records management,and freedom of information: A study of local government authorities in England

In many democratic states political rhetoric gives weight to increasing public participation in and understanding of the political process; (re)-establishing public trust in government decision making; increasing transparency, openness, and accountability of public authorities; and, ultimately, improving government decision-making on behalf of citizens. Access to the public record and freedom of information (FOI) are mechanisms which help to facilitate the accountability of public authorities. Many jurisdictions have introduced legislation related to these mechanisms, and the UK government is no exception with its enactment of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in 2000. University College London (UCL) ran a research project over 12 months in 2008–2009, funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council. The research project examined what the impact of the UK FOIA had been on records management services in public authorities, especially local government. This article reports on some of the findings of the study. It considers how FOI compliance and records management functions are organized in local government and the role of information governance which is emerging as an umbrella for such functions. It draws some conclusions about the contributions that records management services make to the ability of local authorities to comply with the FOIA and identifies some ways in which user experience may be affected by the management of records.     

The impact of functional decentralization and externalization on local government transparency

Local governments are increasingly establishing functional decentralized agencies, such as autonomous organizations, public companies, foundations and public business entities to provide public services. Furthermore, they are also introducing the private sector, contracting out public services to a private company and creating mixed companies. Our aim is to analyze the effect of functional decentralization and externalization (outsourcing or contracting out) processes on public transparency levels, since theoretically, they are aimed toward good governance and accountability. To do so, we use a sample composed of the 110 largest Spanish cities for the period 2008–2010. The results show that decentralized agencies, especially public companies and foundations, impact positively on levels of public transparency. However, there is no evidence that suggests that the introduction of the private sector, using outsourcing and mixed companies, affects the transparency of local governments.     

Problems and Changes in Digital Libraries in the Age of Big Data From the Perspective of User Services

Based on the investigation of the position of user service for constructing digital libraries in the big data era, this paper points out that not only data resources of modern digital library have the characteristics of big data, but also the existing library services need to use big data methods to achieve reform and innovation, including resource transferring, resource utilization, social identity, thinking innovation. We focus on the importance of user services and types of big data resources that digital libraries can utilize, which include big data within libraries such as user behavior data and digital literature resource, and other big data outside libraries such as scholarly big data. We also examine the problems and potential of digital libraries in the age of big data relative to data, technology, services, and users. Using existing big data resources and considering the characteristics of current users' needs from the perspective of users, more effective ideas and methods to improve existing services in digital library can be put forward. At the same time, it is the personalized need of users in the age of big data that constitute the driving factor for the development of digital library from resource-sharing service to user-oriented service.     

Proactivity in digital public services: A conceptual analysis

Public organizations are looking for new ways to use digital technologies to increase the efficiency of their internal processes and improve their interactions with clients, whether citizens or businesses. In response, scholars suggest that public organizations be proactive in digital public services such that the organizations approach their clients, rather than the other way around. In the most extreme form of proactivity, clients do not have to do anything to receive a public service. Although various examples of proactive public services are in use, how proactivity changes the conceptual understanding of digital public services remains unclear. Therefore, we derive the changes that proactivity causes in a conceptualization of digital public service by means of a conceptual analysis through the lens of a seminal theoretical work on proactivity. The results indicate that proactivity can ensure equal accessibility to a subset of public services, rely on more comprehensive integration of IT systems on the back end, and change how value is co-created in the service process. We formulate the changes as propositions that future work can investigate empirically and discuss proactive digital public services as a way to reduce clients' administrative burden. We contribute to theory by clarifying the conceptual changes in digital public services that proactivity invokes and call for joint research by scholars of public administration, information systems, and service management to relate the research streams of administrative burden and proactive digital public service.     

Data science empowering the public: Data-driven dashboards for transparent and accountable decision-making in smart cities

Dashboards visualize a consolidated set data for a certain purpose which enables users to see what is happening and to initiate actions. Dashboards can be used by governments to support their decision-making and policy processes or to communicate and interact with the public. The objective of this paper is to understand and to support the design of dashboards for creating transparency and accountability. Two smart city cases are investigated showing that dashboards can improve transparency and accountability, however, realizing these benefits was cumbersome and encountered various risks and challenges. Challenges include insufficient data quality, lack of understanding of data, poor analysis, wrong interpretation, confusion about the outcomes, and imposing a pre-defined view. These challenges can easily result in misconceptions, wrong decision-making, creating a blurred picture resulting in less transparency and accountability, and ultimately in even less trust in the government. Principles guiding the design of dashboards are presented. Dashboards need to be complemented by mechanisms supporting citizens' engagement, data interpretation, governance and institutional arrangements.     

Defining digital transformation: Results from expert interviews

Digital transformation approaches outside the public sector are changing citizens' expectations of governments' ability to deliver high-value, real-time digital services. In response to the changing expectations and triggered by supranational agreements, governments are changing their mode of operation to improve public service delivery, be more efficient and effective in their designs, and achieve objectives such as increased transparency, interoperability, or citizen satisfaction. However, beyond the availability of consultancy reports, there is little systematic insight into the way that public administrators themselves are currently defining digital transformation in their own day-to-day practices, how they are approaching digital transformation projects, and what their expected outcomes are. We provide an empirically-based definition of digital transformation derived from expert interviews and develop a conceptual framework with reasons for, processes to, and expected outcomes of digital transformation in the public sector.     

基于用户需求的图书馆用户满意实证研究

通过对图书馆用户满意和用户需求的研究成果进行梳理,分析图书馆用户满意的构成维度、影响因素、用户需求特征,以及用户需求与满意之间的关系;从需求角度出发,构建图书馆用户满意度模型.采用问卷法对高校图书馆和公共图书馆的用户进行调查以收集原始数据,采用结构方程模型进行模型验证.研究发现:用户需求与感知的不一致会直接影响其对图书馆的满意度;图书馆用户整体满意度由信息资源满意、信息服务满意、信息系统满意组成,这三种满意度分别都会正向影响图书馆整体满意度;信息资源满意会正面影响信息系统满意,信息服务满意会正面影响信息资源满意,而信息系统满意也会正面影响信息服务满意.     

Open data innovation: Visualizations and process redesign as a way to bridge the transparency-accountability gap

Open government data has led to public policy innovation in pursuit of various expected benefits. One of the intended goals of open data innovation to improve transparency and accountability. However, our current understanding of open data innovation and its ability to generate transparency and accountability is limited, particularly with regard to empirical evidence. In this paper, we describe how a state agency redesigned its organizational processes around visualization tools and how such efforts helped bridge the transparency-accountability gap by enhancing the understandability and usability of open government data. We conclude that open data innovation does not stop with the adoption of an open data policy, but rather involves an ongoing cycle of improvements through which the organization responds to its various stakeholders' use of open data, thereby increasing usefulness of those datasets and, subsequently, improving overall accountability.     

The digital cage: Administrative exclusion through information architecture – The case of the Dutch civil registry's master data management system

This article analyses the unintended consequences of master data management systems in the administrative state for the access of citizens to public services and benefits. We analyse the case of the Dutch civil registry, in which hundreds of (semi-)public organisations use the information from the civil registry to determine whether people are eligible for their services. We use the framework of administrative burdens and administrative exclusion to show that this system turns the consequences of mutations in registration into a black box, produces legal contamination by forcing its own address definition upon user organisations, reduces the discretionary space of street-level bureaucrats to handle social complexity and unintended consequences of the system, and creates a behavioural incentive in which municipalities are pushed into the role of enforcers rather than registers. The result is a ‘digital cage’: an exclusionary infrastructure that hinges on information architecture instead of Weberian rules and procedures. These findings increase our understanding of master data management systems, emphasise the importance of understanding information architecture as an ethical issue, and help us develop a new vocabulary for understanding and studying administrative burdens as part of a bureaucratic infrastructure.     

Discerning the effect of privacy information transparency on privacy fatigue in e-government

Privacy information transparency is generally considered desirable and should be enabled and upheld. It has gained increasing attention giving the emergence of new information technologies and their affordances for e-governance and governments. This study examines the proposition that privacy information transparency is amiable to mitigating privacy fatigue in e-government. The study identifies the antecedents of privacy information transparency of an e-government website, and its influence on privacy fatigue manifested in emotional exhaustion and cynicism. A survey conducted in Cyprus harnessed user responses, and the data analyzed using a partial least square structural equation analysis method. Findings reveal that; (1) user data collection and data use information aspects of online privacy significantly impact privacy information transparency; and (2) privacy information transparency positively impacts both cynicism behaviour and emotional exhaustion. This study extends the concept of privacy fatigue into e-government and contributes to an empirical evaluation of its relationship with privacy information transparency.     

Transparency,participation, and accountability practices in open government: A comparative study

In a comparative national study addressing the fiscal domain, we explored relationships between socio-cultural, political, economic, and government conditions and concepts critical to open government, defined as (a) budget transparency (b) participation in budget processes, and (c) accountability information. We found that democracy, human capital, and budget document disclosures are consistently related to transparency, accountability, and the involvement of the Supreme Audit Authority with the public. E-participation and commitment to the Open Government Partnership are each related to particular measures of transparency and accountability. Gross domestic product was negatively related to particular measures of transparency and accountability. Only democracy was related to public participation in budget discussions with the executive, and that was a minimal effect.     

基于情景模型的数字图书馆个性化服务研究

由于web环境下用户的个性化需求具有易变性、动态性和情景敏感性等特征,个性化服务的提供越来越需要情景模型的支持.目前,基于情景模型的数字图书馆个性化服务主要通过个性化检索和个性化推荐两种方式实现.将情景模型运用于数字图书馆个性化服务,还需要注意和解决用户情景捕捉的准确性、服务提供的适用性、用户安全与隐私、用户模型与情景模型的结合以及数字图书馆各种资源的整合与集成等问题.图3.     

The Impact of Digital Resource and Service Use on Urban Residents in New England Public Libraries—A Survey Report

Today, access to digital information is essential to patrons using public libraries, whether they have contact with computers at home, work or school or whether the public library is their only contact. In order to evaluate and ultimately enhance public library digital resources and services, it is critical for administrators, librarians and digital information architects to recognize the impact their current digital offerings have on users. This study utilizes a survey to gauge the perceptions of patrons who use digital resources and services in six urban New England public libraries as part of ongoing research into digital information access in public libraries in the United States from the perspective of users.