Ranking of field association terms using Co-word analysis

Information retrieval involves finding some desired information in a store of information or a database. In this paper, Co-word analysis will be used to achieve a ranking of a selected sample of FA terms. Based on this ranking a better arranging of search results can be achieved. Experimental results achieved using 41 MB of data (7660 documents) in the field of sports. The corpus was collected from CNN newspaper, sports field. This corpus was chosen to be distributed over 11 sub-fields of the field sports from the experimental results, the average precision increased by 18.3% after applying the proposed arranging scheme depending on the absolute frequency to count the terms weights, and the average precision increased by 17.2% after applying the proposed arranging scheme depending on a formula based on “TF∗IDF” to count the terms weights.     

Collaborative information seeking: A field study of a multidisciplinary patient care team

Multidisciplinary teams are an essential aspect of modern organizational work. These teams often work in information-rich environments but little is known about their collaborative information seeking (CIS) behavior. We have been studying the CIS behavior of teams in the context of medical care. We conducted an ethnographic field study of a multidisciplinary patient care team in an emergency department to identify (a) team information needs and (b) situations that trigger collaborative information seeking activities. We identified seven categories of information needs as expressed by questions asked by team members. The majority of questions focused on medical information, but there were a larger than expected percentage of questions focusing on organizational information. We also identified three triggers for CIS activities. These triggers are: (1) lack of expertise, (2) lack of immediately accessible information, and (3) complex information needs. The questions and triggers highlight the importance of face-to-face communication during CIS activities and how CIS activities could lead to interruptive workplaces. We also discuss organizational and technical implications for supporting CIS behavior of teams.     

Agency problem, institutions, and technology policy: Explaining Taiwan's semiconductor industry development

Taiwan has made significant progress in the semiconductor industry with government agencies and bureaucrats as the driving forces over the past 30 years. Taiwan's impressive achievement in the semiconductor industry clearly indicates that the government failures and agency problem usually associated with deep government involvement did not occur in Taiwan. Why is that the case? This paper proposes a principal-agent framework for technology policy and applies the framework to discuss the institutional arrangements through which bureaucrats were controlled effectively in executing the semiconductor industry policies in Taiwan. By analyzing the institutional and organizational arrangements Taiwanese leaders made to mitigate the agency problem, this paper brings bureaucrats into the popular developmental state theory and emphasizes that the success of state intervention should not be taken for granted, and it also brings politics into technology policy analysis and stresses the importance and complexity of agency problem in technology policy.     

From “time pass” to transformative force: School-based human rights education in Tamil Nadu, India

This article presents data collected at the level of practice to highlight one non-governmental organization's approach to human rights education and how household-, school-, and community-level factors mediated student impact. Findings suggest that a variety of factors at the three levels contribute to the program's successful implementation in government schools serving marginalized students (where most HRE programs are in operation in India today). These responses emerge along a continuum from ‘time pass’—a commonly used term in India for anything that does not directly contribute to greater performance on high-stakes exams—to ‘transformative force’, wherein students internalize knowledge and values related to human rights and take action based on it. Responses to HRE were characterized in four areas and representative examples are provided of each: (1) personal changes; (2) attempts to intervene in situations of abuse; (3) reporting (or threatening to report) abuse; and (4) spreading awareness about human rights.     

Beyond Learning and Teaching in Preschool Free-Play Centers in Daliat el-Carmel-Isfiya

This article describes a group of Druze preschool and kindergarten teachers from Northern Israel who participated in an in-service course in their community. The focus of the training experience was to improve the social climate of the classroom by implementing a life-world approach. Analysis of their reports shows that the children’s meaningful learning, improved emotional coping with ordinary hardships, and mutual social support are a product of intervention that involves multiple, interrelated activity channels: staff collaboration, guided small group discussions, informal discussions, cooperation with parents and community agents, and free play. Each activity channel is associated with a compatible, dominant, learning modality and a predominant interpersonal process—free play, for example, is mainly associated with free inquiry and discourse among children, whereas group activity is also likely to be associated with learning guided by educators.     

A cue or two and I'll trust you: Determinants of trust in government organizations in terms of their processing and usage of citizens' personal information disclosed online

This article discusses the results of a large-scale Internet survey (with 1156 respondents) that investigated the cues and factors that could positively influence Dutch Internet users' trust in government organizations in terms of their usage and processing of citizens' personal data. Confidence in online privacy statements, as indicated by the results of this study, significantly influences trust in government organizations among Dutch Internet users with and without previous e-government experience. Among those with e-government experience, the quality of their online government transaction experience and a positive government organizational reputation can also increase their trust in government organizations, specifically in terms of how they process and use citizens' personal data.     

Establishing the value of socially-created metadata to image indexing

There have been ample suggestions in the literature that terms added to documents from Flickr and Wikipedia can complement traditional methods of indexing and controlled vocabularies. At the same time, adding new metadata to existing metadata objects may not always add value to those objects. The potential added-value of using user-contributed (“social”) terms from Flickr and the English Wikipedia in image indexing is compared with using two expert-created controlled vocabularies—the Thesaurus for Graphic Materials and the Library of Congress Subject Headings—without those social terms. Experiments confirmed that the social terms did add value, relative to terms from the controlled vocabularies. The median rating for the usefulness of social terms was significantly higher than the baseline rating, but was lower than the ratings for the terms from the Thesaurus for Graphic Materials and the Library of Congress Subject Headings. Furthermore, complementing the controlled vocabulary terms with social terms more than doubled the average coverage of participants' terms for a photograph. The relationships between user demographics and users' perceptions of the value of terms were also investigated, as well as the relationships between user demographics and indexing quality, as measured by the number of terms participants assigned to a photograph. Participants with more tagging and indexing experience assigned a greater number of tags than did other participants.     

The co-evolution of e-government and public libraries: Technologies,access, education,and partnerships

While many studies have discussed the impacts of electronic government (e-government) on public libraries, little research has considered the extent to which the current federal government's implementation of e-government relies on the public technology access, training, and support provided by public libraries. A range of data and policy materials are drawn upon in order to illuminate the co-evolution of public libraries and e-government. Beginning with a discussion of the development of e-government and its impacts in public libraries, the access, goals, and challenges of e-government are detailed as they relate to libraries, and the areas in which current implementations of e-government would not be possible without public libraries. Based on the explorations of the co-evolution of e-government and public libraries, key policy issues are offered that require reconceptualization in order to better support the interrelationship between e-government and public libraries.     

Patrick Geddes and Museum ideas in Dundee and Beyond

One of the first things Patrick Geddes did on taking up the post of Professor of Botany at University College, Dundee was to establish a botanical museum. Throughout his life museums were of great importance to him, and were central to his theories as an educationalist. The Outlook Tower in Edinburgh was the most famous demonstration of these theories, but this short introductory paper also looks at less well known aspects of them, such as his ground-breaking paper to the Museums Association conference in Dundee in 1907, his unpublished book.

Museums

Actual and Possible, and his attempts to win the directorship of the Edinburgh Museum of Science and Art.