Free/Libre/Open-Source Software (FLOSS) in scientific Libraries in Germany : an explorative study with triangulation of quantitative and qualitative Methods

Hintergrund: Free/Libre/Open-Source Software (FLOSS) wird in zahlreichen Anwendungen des täglichen digitalen Lebens eingesetzt. Auch in Bibliotheken findet FLOSS immer öfter Anwendung. Jedoch existieren keine Untersuchungen zur Thematik, weder in einzelnen Aufsätzen noch in der einschlägigen Fachliteratur. Diese Studie versucht, sich der Erforschung dieses Bereichs anzunähern. Methoden: In dieser mit Methoden der qualitativen und quantitativen Forschung erstellten Studie wurden zunächst grundlegende Informationen zur Thematik erarbeitet, mit Hilfe einer Literaturanalyse der Forschungsstand zur Thematik dargelegt und die in Deutschland eingesetzte FLOSS vorgestellt. Anschließend wurden Interviews mit Experten aus Bibliotheken geführt und ausgewertet. Die Dimensionen dieser Interviews wurden mit Hilfe einer Online-Umfrage weiteren Experten aus Bibliotheken in Deutschland vorgelegt. Die abschließende Auswertung erfolgt mit Hilfe einer Triangulation der beiden Methoden. Ergebnisse: Die Studie belegt, dass FLOSS in zunehmendem Maße von wissenschaftlichen Bibliotheken in Deutschland eingesetzt wird. Kernbereich ist hierbei die Suchmaschinentechnologie. Es gibt Hinweise auf ein mögliches Defizit an Kooperation zwischen den Akteuren des Bibliothekswesens, wenngleich FLOSS und damit auch FLOSS-Ökosysteme als strategisches Konzept innerhalb der Personen auf der Ebene des Managements (Direktion, Bibliotheksleitungen) angekommen zu sein scheint. FLOSS stellt aus unterschiedlichen Gründen eine Herausforderung für die Bibliotheken dar. Weiter vermittelt die Studie einen Überblick über die momentan von wissenschaftlichen Bibliotheken in Deutschland eingesetzte FLOSS.Background: Free/Libre/Open-Source Software (FLOSS) is a basic part of our daily digital life. Also in libraries there is a growing number of FLOSS used for different processes. For german scientific libraries there is a deficit in research in this subject, neither in journals nor in specialized books. This study aims to approach this subject. Methods: In the first part of this Study there was fundamental research about the topic and an analysis of the literature to get the current state of resarch. Then, in the mixedmethods part, Interviews with experts from libraries were kept and the outcomes from the interviews were presented to other experts from libraries. At the end there was a triangulation of the qualitative and the quantitative part. Outcomes: The study showed that FLOSS is used by libraries in growing numbers. Core Area is the search engine technology. The study also shows that there might be a deficit in cooperation between the libraries, allthough the management has recognized the strategical concept of FLOSS and FLOSS-Ecosystems. Commitment of FLOSS is a challenge for different reasons. The study gives an overview about FLOSS in german scientific libraries

Collaborative Knowledge Visualisation for Cross-Community Knowledge Exchange

The notion of communities as informal social networks based on shared interests or common practices has been increasingly used as an important unit of analysis when considering the processes of cooperative creation and sharing of knowledge. While knowledge exchange within communities has been extensively researched, different studies observed the importance of cross-community knowledge exchange for the creation of new knowledge and innovation in knowledge-intensive organizations. Especially in knowledge management a critical problem has become the need to support the cooperation and exchange of knowledge between different communities with highly specialized expertise and activities. Though several studies discuss the importance and difficulties of knowledge sharing across community boundaries, the development of technological support incorporating these findings has been little addressed. This work presents an approach to supporting cross-community knowledge exchange based on using knowledge visualisation for facilitating information access in unfamiliar community domains. The theoretical grounding and practical relevance of the proposed approach are ensured by defining a requirements model that integrates theoretical frameworks for cross-community knowledge exchange with practical needs of typical knowledge management processes and sensemaking tasks in information access in unfamiliar domains. This synthesis suggests that visualising knowledge structures of communities and supporting the discovery of relationships between them during access to community spaces, could provide valuable support for cross-community discovery and sharing of knowledge. This is the main hypothesis investigated in this thesis. Accordingly, a novel method is developed for eliciting and visualising implicit knowledge structures of individuals and communities in form of dynamic knowledge maps that make the elicited knowledge usable for semantic exploration and navigation of community spaces. The method allows unobtrusive construction of personal and community knowledge maps based on user interaction with information and their use for dynamic classification of information from a specific point of view. The visualisation model combines Document Maps presenting main topics, document clusters and relationships between knowledge reflected in community spaces with Concept Maps visualising personal and shared conceptual structures of community members. The technical realization integrates Kohonen’s self-organizing maps with extraction of word categories from texts, collaborative indexing and personalised classification based on user-induced templates. This is accompanied by intuitive visualisation and interaction with complex information spaces based on multi-view navigation of document landscapes and concept networks. The developed method is prototypically implemented in form of an application framework, a concrete system and a visual information interface for multi-perspective access to community information spaces, the Knowledge Explorer. The application framework implements services for generating and using personal and community knowledge maps to support explicit and implicit knowledge exchange between members of different communities. The Knowledge Explorer allows simultaneous visualisation of different personal and community knowledge structures and enables their use for structuring, exploring and navigating community information spaces from different points of view. The empirical evaluation in a comparative laboratory study confirms the adequacy of the developed solutions with respect to specific requirements of the cross-community problem and demonstrates much better quality of knowledge access compared to a standard information seeking reference system. The developed evaluation framework and operative measures for quality of knowledge access in cross-community contexts also provide a theoretically grounded and practically feasible method for further developing and evaluating new solutions addressing this important but little investigated problem

Digitization of the work environment for sustainable production

Global pandemics, devastating wars and natural disasters with increasing frequency and impact are disrupting previously carefully balanced manufacturing networks. All industrial companies are required to examine their operations and adjust accordingly. The increasing cost of resources require enterprises to re-design their value creation processes to be more sustainable, to optimize the supplier network to become more resilient and to accelerate digitizing of operations to enhance operational effectiveness. This year's WGAB research seminar is themed around Digitization of the work environment for sustainable production and seeks to contribute solutions to the current challenges. The scientific discourse aims to advance the sustainable and data-based organization of value creation processes. Exemplary efforts for the sustainable production of 3D printed footwear and the circular supply chain of energy production will be discussed. With advances in sensory data collection in cyber-physical production systems (CPPS), there are new opportunities for sensing the status of manufacturing systems, which enable advanced data analytics to contribute to a sustainable production. Intelligent processes enable sustainable value creation and bi-directional knowledge exchange between humans and machines. With people at the centre of the CPPS, production systems shall be both adaptive and personalized for every worker. People need to be involved in the technological and organizational changes. Simulating the migration from a linear economy to a circular economy supports the trend of regionalized production networks. Digital assistance systems are tested to back up resilient manufacturing. We would like to thank all authors for their efforts in preparing the contributions, which are valuable inputs to the discourse to solve the current challenges