Accessibility of U.S. federal government home pages: Section 508 compliance and site accessibility statements

U.S. federal websites are required to be accessible for people with impairments. However, despite the existing regulations and guidelines, many federal websites continue to be inaccessible, and accessibility policy statements available on federal websites often do not provide any useful information. This paper provides three contributions to the research literature: (1) an accessibility evaluation of 100 federal home pages using both human and automated methods, (2) a content analysis of existing website accessibility policy statements, and (3) a discussion of the relationship between actual Section 508 compliance and the existing accessibility policy statements on a website. The paper concludes with recommendations for improving policy related to Section 508 compliance for websites.     

How do congressional members appear on the web? Tracking the web visibility of South Korean politicians

The web visibility of politicians has substantial implications for the internet and politics. In this regard, the present paper examines the web visibility of South Korea's 18th National Assembly members. This study identifies those members with the highest web visibility and determines the factors affecting their web visibility by using a set of socio-demographic variables indicating web visibility. The concept of web visibility is operationally defined as the number of web mentions of each congressional member. Web mentions of the name of each congressional member were collected across many platforms, including blogs, images, news, and websites, by using a Naver search tool based on the API, and relationships between the web visibility of the members and their socio-demographic attributes (their gender, age, term, constituency, and party affiliation) were analyzed using Kruskal–Wallis, Median, and Mann–Whitney U tests. The most visible politicians in the Korean webosphere had highly qualified political careers and prominence, and the difference in politicians' web visibility depended on their political attributes (their term, constituency, and party), not on their demographic attributes (their gender and age). These findings suggest that politicians who build political power and influence through their political career in the offline world are likely to be more visible in the webosphere. Further, an integrated indicator based on politicians' web visibility status can reflect their “ubiquitous presence” in Korea's digitalized society.     

E-Government readiness index: A methodology and analysis

E-Government has received significant attention as digital technologies transcend private businesses and serve as a basic source of transformation in government functions. One most notable project is the United Nations Public Administration Network (UNPAN) that assesses the e-Government readiness of the 192 member nations according to a quantitative composite index involving website assessment, telecommunication infrastructure, and human resource endowment. However, the UNPAN index, though rich in depth and breadth of data collection, relies on a method that is a simple mathematical average of the values of the variables measured. This paper revisits the UNPAN index and proposes alternative indices based on principal components analysis (PCA). Using the UNPAN survey data, four different versions of the index are presented and the resulting rankings of the nations are examined vis-à-vis the existing ranking. The theoretical and policy implications of the proposed methodology and its results are discussed.     

The forgotten promise of e-government maturity: Assessing responsiveness in the digital public sector

Assessing e-government responsiveness is one of the major gaps in the currently dominant e-government maturity models. While we have a relatively large pool of models focusing on technological and organizational integration from a supply side perspective, measures of responsiveness of e-government systems from a user perspective are still lacking. Replicating a study from New Zealand and Australia, this study explores the response time and quality of e-mail response in Danish local and central governments (N = 175). Despite that Denmark is high ranking in international benchmark studies, we find that one third of central government agencies did not respond at all, and close to 80% of the ministries provided none or incomplete answers. Local government responds faster and provides answers that are more complete and accurate than those provided by central government. Implications for e-government are discussed.     

Understanding the dynamics in e-Participation initiatives: Looking through the genre and stakeholder lenses

Conventionally, e-Participation initiatives are considered to be successful only if users use these services. While the growing body of e-Participation literature has listed and studied challenges and barriers to achieving this end, conceptual clarity on why such projects are considered as failures is yet to be achieved. We argue that this is due to the inadequate understanding of the complex stakeholder dynamics of an e-Participation project. In this paper, we seek to address this knowledge gap by proposing that using stakeholder theory complemented by genre theory provides an interpretive lens to understand the complexities in the development and use of such projects. To illustrate our proposed lens, we apply it to analyze an e-Participation project in Norway at its development and use phases. Our findings indicate that a key factor that influences the success of e-Participation initiatives is high saliency of at least one stakeholder group at various phases of the initiatives. The saliency of stakeholders changes over the life of a project and hence the salient stakeholder also varies. Consequently, it is not essential for the same stakeholder group to be salient throughout, only that some stakeholders remain salient. Our interpretive lens also extends the discourse on stakeholder theory. In traditional management literature stakeholder theory is meant as a tool to identify stakeholders' groups to which management or owner of an organization should pay attention. We show that it is also useful to identify which stakeholder groups will act to protect their interests. Based on our findings, we propose insights into studying and developing e-Participation projects.     

Borrowing demand at local public libraries in Sweden

This research explored the determinants of borrowing demand for print books and media at local public libraries in Sweden for the period of 1995–2007. The role of the Swedish local public libraries seemed to have fundamentally changed during the period analyzed. They have had an increasingly important role to play in equalizing income opportunities. This was only the case for the working part of the population, however. Those outside the labor force, as well as the unemployed—had substantially lower borrowing demand for both print books and media. This fact appears to be one of the more demanding challenges facing Swedish public libraries today, together with the fact that while children are the most frequent borrowers, they become the least frequent borrowers of all age groups when they turn into teens.     

Do RFIDs (radio frequency identifier devices) provide new ethical dilemmas for librarians and information professionals?

This paper provides an analysis of the current and potential ethical implications of RFID technology for the library and information professions. These issues are analysed as a series of ethical dilemmas, or hard-to-resolve competing ethical obligations, which the librarian has in relationship to information objects, library users and the wider social and political environment or state. A process model of the library is used as a framework for the discussion to illustrate the relationship between the different participants in the library system and it is argued that ethical analysis should involve the identification of future developments as well as current issues. The analysis shows that RFIDs do currently pose some dilemmas for librarians in terms of the conflicts between efficient service, privacy of users and an obligation to protect the safety of society as a whole, and that these are likely to become more problematic as the technology develops. This paper is part 2 of a series of papers on RFIDs and the library and information professions.     

我国普通高中课程计划的历史演变

新中国成立以来,我国普通高中课程计划几度演变,总体上满足了社会不断发展及科技进步对普通高中教育提出的客观要求,并表现出一些共同的特点,体现了我国普通高中课程的个性。随着知识经济时代的到来,经济全球化、生活信息化、学习社会化的趋势越来越明显,我国高中教育面临着前所未有的挑战和巨大的社会压力,在制定新的课程方案时,就需要基于传统,并在发展中求创新。     

关于小学教师创造力培养观的研究

作者用有条件筛选和随机抽样相结合的方式,选取了2002年山东省第六届创造教育年会参与交流的小学教师的论文100篇,用内容分析法对它们进行分析,结果发现:小学教师的创造力培养观主要表现在三个方面,即创造力的构成要素、培养创造力的教学方法、培养创造力的环境条件。教师对以上三方面的认识有如下特点:教师基本认同创造力是认知和人格的统一,但在认知因素中多强调创造性思维,相对忽视其他认知因素;教师多运用教师中心的教学方法,倾向于支持学生独立学习的教学方法,忽视学生的合作学习;教师比较重视创设心理安全和心理自由的教学心理环境。根据这些特点,教师培训中应注意:全面、科学地认识创造力;运用并实施创造性教学,实现教学方法创新;扩展认识视野,创设创造教育大环境。