Investigating the information-seeking behaviour of academic lawyers: From Ellis's model to design.

Information-seeking is important for lawyers, who have access to many dedicated electronic resources.However there is considerable scope for improving the design of these resources to better support information-seeking. One way of informing design is to use information-seeking models as theoretical lenses to analyse users’ behaviour with existing systems. However many models, including those informed by studying lawyers, analyse information-seeking at a high level of abstraction and are only likely to lead to broad-scoped design insights. We illustrate that one potentially useful (and lowerlevel) model is Ellis’s - by using it as a lens to analyse and make design suggestions based on the information-seeking behaviour of twenty-seven academic lawyers, who were asked to think aloud whilst using electronic legal resources to find information for their work. We identify similar information-seeking behaviours to those originally found by Ellis and his colleagues in scientific domains, along with several that were not identified in previous studies such as ‘updating’ (which we believe is particularly pertinent to legal information-seeking). We also present a refinement of Ellis’s model based on the identification of several levels that the behaviours were found to operate at and the identification of sets of mutually exclusive subtypes of behaviours

A Multi-Relational Network to Support the Scholarly Communication Process

The general pupose of the scholarly communication process is to support the creation and dissemination of ideas within the scientific community. At a finer granularity, there exists multiple stages which, when confronted by a member of the community, have different requirements and therefore different solutions. In order to take a researcher's idea from an initial inspiration to a community resource, the scholarly communication infrastructure may be required to 1) provide a scientist initial seed ideas; 2) form a team of well suited collaborators; 3) located the most appropriate venue to publish the formalized idea; 4) determine the most appropriate peers to review the manuscript; and 5) disseminate the end product to the most interested members of the community. Through the various delinieations of this process, the requirements of each stage are tied soley to the multi-functional resources of the community: its researchers, its journals, and its manuscritps. It is within the collection of these resources and their inherent relationships that the solutions to scholarly communication are to be found. This paper describes an associative network composed of multiple scholarly artifacts that can be used as a medium for supporting the scholarly communication process.Comment: keywords: digital libraries and scholarly communicatio

The Convergence of Digital-Libraries and the Peer-Review Process

Pre-print repositories have seen a significant increase in use over the past fifteen years across multiple research domains. Researchers are beginning to develop applications capable of using these repositories to assist the scientific community above and beyond the pure dissemination of information. The contribution set forth by this paper emphasizes a deconstructed publication model in which the peer-review process is mediated by an OAI-PMH peer-review service. This peer-review service uses a social-network algorithm to determine potential reviewers for a submitted manuscript and for weighting the relative influence of each participating reviewer's evaluations. This paper also suggests a set of peer-review specific metadata tags that can accompany a pre-print's existing metadata record. The combinations of these contributions provide a unique repository-centric peer-review model that fits within the widely deployed OAI-PMH framework.Comment: Journal of Information Science [in press

Accessing the content of nineteenth-century periodicals: the Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical project

Nineteenth-century periodicals significantly outnumber books from that era, and present historians with an immensely valuable set of sources, but their use is constrained by the difficulty of identifying relevant material. For many periodicals, contents pages and volume indexes have been the only guide, and the few subject indexes that exist usually provide only an indication of the subjects mentioned in the article titles. By contrast, the Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical project (SciPer) indexed the science content of general-interest periodicals by skim-reading the entire text. The project’s approach to indexing is described and the relative merits of indexing and digitization in aiding researchers to locate relevant material are discussed. The article concludes that, notwithstanding the more sophisticated search interfaces of more recent retrodigitization projects, human indexing still has an important role to play in providing access to the content of historic periodicals and in mapping their data structure

Effecting Social Change in the 'Smart City': The West End Connect Community Project

Brisbane has declared itself a 'smart city'. But more and more Brisbane is also becoming a digitally divided city. The Brisbane community is being separated into those who have access to and are comfortable using Information and Communication Technology (ICT) – the 'haves' – and groups who do not have access to and are not comfortable using ICT – the 'have-nots'. The social and economic implications of digitally divided communities cannot be ignored by government or society as whole. The inner city suburb of West End is an example of a socially, culturally and economically diverse community. The suburb has traditionally been home to Indigenous and migrant populations as well as being a refuge for many of Brisbane's homeless people. The demographics of this suburb, however, are being significantly altered by new property developments with wealthier residents choosing to move close to the city. West End is rapidly becoming a digitally divided community. This paper explores a case study in which the Queensland University of Technology and the State Library of Queensland worked in collaboration with a number of community groups in West End to help bridge the growing digital divide. The West End Connect Community Project began in November 2004 with the aim of providing the opportunity for West End community groups to develop the skills and knowledge vital for personal and vocational success in an ever-changing environment of digital information. The paper will discuss and evaluate the strategies used to deliver and develop a community education program that will lead to social change for West End. The paper will discuss the impact of the project on the West End community as a way of bridging the digital divide

The Effects of Electronic Access to Scientific Literature in the Consortium of Turkish University Libraries

Purpose: To provide some insight to the sharp increase in the scientific publications originating from Turkish academic and research institutions in the last few years. The underlying reasons, widespread access to literature through electronic databases being the most important, are also investigated. Design/methodology/approach: Although it is difficult to gauge national scientific productivity, number of publications in electronic databases which index thousands of scientific journals can give an idea. Web of Science is one of them, and it is provided to the Turkish academic community along with several other databases by the national library consortium. Based on the Web of Science data, a comparative analysis was performed to investigate publications originated from Turkey and other countries. Findings: The analysis revealed sharp increase in publications from Turkish institutions in the last few years. Considering the highest publishing 30 countries out of 190, the increase between 2001 and 2003 is 53.48 percent for Turkey, followed by 34.00 percent for China and 26.87 percent for South Korea. Research limitations: Although one of the largest, only one of several databases was analyzed. Additionally, there are also several other indicators of scientific productivity such as books published and citations received. Originality and value of the paper: The paper provides some insight to the importance of library consortia and efficient literature access it provides to the researchers

E-Science in the classroom - Towards viability

E-Science has the potential to transform school science by enabling learners, teachers and research scientists to engage together in authentic scientific enquiry, collaboration and learning. However, if we are to reap the benefits of this potential as part of everyday teaching and learning, we need to explicitly think about and support the work required to set up and run e-Science experiences within any particular educational context. In this paper, we present a framework for identifying and describing the resources, tools and services necessary to move e-Science into the classroom together with examples of these. This framework is derived from previous experiences conducting educational e-Science projects and systematic analysis of the categories of ‘hidden work’ needed to run these projects (Smith, Underwood, Fitzpatrick, & Luckin, forthcoming). The articulation of resources, tools and services based on these categories provides a starting point for more methodical design and deployment of future educational e- Science projects, reflection on which can also help further develop the framework. It also points to the technological infrastructure from which such tools and services could be built. As such it provides an agenda of work to develop both processes and technologies that would make it practical for teachers to deliver active, and collaborative e-Science learning experiences on a larger scale within and across schools. Routine school e- Science will only be possible if such support is specified, implemented and made available to teachers within their work contexts in an appropriate and usable form