The potential of online library catalogues for supporting opportunistic acquisition of information pertaining scholarly literature

The article includes a description and analysis of empirical research, which by comparative means looked to determine the potential of various solutions for academic libraries in configuring the interfaces of online catalogues in support of opportunistic acquisition of information pertaining to scholarly literature. The research consisted of experiments using 22 different search instructions and an analysis of the results of other encountered sources. The research was carried out from May to July 2007 in 33 Polish libraries based on 8 different computer systems. The research allowed for the establishing of links between applied solutions in OPAC, the form of search instruction and the chances of discovering publications which are not able to satisfy the needs of an intentional and deliberate search, but can satisfy or even inspire other information needs of library users

Intellectual Property: The Practical and Legal Fundamentals

Patents, copyrights, trademarks and related interests are known as intellectual property (IP). It has not been long since patents especially were regarded in U.S. courts, and the Supreme Court in particular, as tools of monopolists, and their owners often fared poorly. However, people have come increasingly to view privately funded innovation as critical to national economic well-being and to agree that such innovation cannot occur unless companies that succeed in the marketplace can recoup their research, development and marketing costs. That is a major function of IP, and, particularly within the past dozen years, IP has been seen, both here and abroad, as playing a key role in developing technologies for the next century

Open Access to Legal Scholarship and Open Archives: Towards a Better Future? = L’Open Access per la dottrina giuridica e gli Open Archives: verso un futuro migliore?

The logic of Open Access (OA) is gradually spreading in the scientific community, mainly thanks to the help of important areas of public libraries. OA basically describes a phenomenon that sees many scientific communities publishing through the Internet their results (papers, articles, books, etc.) on archives accessible to anyone (and without payment of a price). OA seems to have the possibility to become a very powerful tool for the dissemination of scientific knowledge. As part of the general phenomenon called “Transfer of Knowledge” (broader category than the more famous “Technology Transfer”), which sees universities and research centers increasingly interested in showing in the market the quality of their scientific production through various activities aimed at exploiting the foreground of their researches (IPRs, licenses, spin-off, etc.), OA plays a pivotal role: it could make transfer of knowledge - previously conveyed (under payment) by private intermerdiaries - more transparent, fluid, and accessible to anyone. Despite the initial delay, the OA movement is quickly growing in importance for legal scholarship. Nonetheless, the institutional arrangements and the technological features of OA to legal scholarship are variegated and pose a vast array of problems. OA to legal scholarship changes the form of the legal publication - e.g., we face new kinds of publications such as blog posts or Wikipedia articles - and shifts the “quality selection” function of the publication system from traditional intermediaries (publishers, learning societies, editorial boards, etc.) to new ones (e.g., search engines, social software, Open Archives, etc.) and readers. In this perspective, a prominent issue is represented by the Open Archives. Open Archives, as well as other OA tools (OA journals), increase the reputation of authors and improve the future impact of their articles. A vast literature – although referring to other subjects - shows that papers deposited in OA repositories are cited more often than those which are not. Moreover, the OA repositories enable a new form of evaluation process. On one hand, it is possible to develop innovative bibliometric indicators. On the other hand, through them you can easily trace the entire life of a scientific product: for example, the OA repositories will allow the display of all the evolution stages of an article from the presentation at a conference to its final version. Given the enormous power of the Net and the rise of these OA repositories, we are still suffering - especially within the Italian context – the low number of uploads and the lack of innovative tools fit to navigate through the OA legal materials. The governance of legal Open Archives should pay attention to the following main features: interoperability, redundancy, multilingualism, evaluation criteria and tools, policies. This kind of issues can be solved only by using an interdisciplinary law and technology approach which clarifies the various, complex aspects of the relationship between Open Archives and legal scholarship. ITALIAN ABSTRACT Da qualche anno si sta gradualmente diffondendo all’interno della comunità scientifica, grazie anche all’impegno di operatori delle biblioteche pubbliche, la logica dell’“Open Access” (OA). Questa espressione descrive un fenomeno che vede molti ricercatori pubblicare attraverso Internet i risultati della propria ricerca (saggi, articoli, libri, etc.) su archivi accessibili a chiunque (e senza il pagamento di un prezzo). L’OA è sicuramente destinato a diventare uno strumento molto potente per la diffusione della conoscenza scientifica. Come parte del più generale fenomeno chiamato “trasferimento della conoscenza”, che vede le università e i centri di ricerca sempre più interessati a dimostrare la qualità della, propria, produzione scientifica attraverso varie attività volte alla valorizzazione delle loro ricerche, l’OA gioca un ruolo fondamentale: esso potrebbe rendere il trasferimento di conoscenze – prima veicolato, a pagamento, dagli intermediari privati - più trasparente, fluido ed accessibile a tutti. Nonostante il ritardo iniziale, il movimento OA sta rapidamente acquisendo importanza per la dottrina giuridica; ciò sebbene gli assetti istituzionali e le caratteristiche tecnologiche proprie di questo nuovo fenomeno siano variegati e pongano una vasta gamma di problemi. L’OA cambia, infatti, la forma stessa delle pubblicazioni scientifiche – affiorano, così, nuovi “generi letterari” quali post sui blog o articoli di Wikipedia – e determina uno spostamento della funzione di selezione della qualità del sistema di pubblicazione che dai tradizionali intermediari (editori, società scientifiche, comitati editoriali, etc.) viene sempre più svolta da nuovi soggetti (motori di ricerca, social software, Open Archives, etc.), quando non direttamente dai lettori stessi. Gli Open Archives, così come altri strumenti di OA (riviste ad accesso aperto), aumentano la fama degli autori ed incrementano l’impatto (citazionale) futuro dei loro articoli. Una vasta letteratura dimostra che i documenti depositati in archivi OA sono citati più spesso di quelli che, invece, non lo sono. Inoltre, tali archivi permettono di porre in essere una nuova forma di processo di valutazione: da un lato, è possibile sviluppare innovativi indicatori bibliometrici; dall’altro, consentono di tracciare facilmente l’intera vita di un prodotto scientifico (ad es., un repository OA consente la visualizzazione di tutte le fasi dell’evoluzione di un articolo: dalla presentazione in una conferenza alla sua versione finale). Nonostante l’enorme importanza che l’uso della Rete sta acquisendo e l’ascesa di questi archivi aperti, stiamo, però, ancora soffrendo – soprattutto all’interno del contesto italiano – il basso numero di depositi e la mancanza di strumenti idonei a navigare attraverso i materiali giuridici distributi secondo la logica dell’OA. La governance di questi innovativi Open Archives dovrebbe essere volta all’incorporazione dei seguenti principi: interoperabilità, ridondanza, multilinguismo, utilizzo di nuovi criteri e strumenti di valutazione, adozione di nuove policy. Questo tipo di problematiche possono trovare soluzione solo tramite l’utilizzo di un approccio interdisciplinare di “diritto e tecnologia” che chiarisca i vari e complessi aspetti del rapporto tra gli “archivi aperti” ed il mondo della dottrina giuridica

Introduction to the second international symposium of platial information science

People ‘live’ and constitute places every day through recurrent practices and experience. Our everyday lives, however, are complex, and so are places. In contrast to abstract space, the way people experience places includes a range of aspects like physical setting, meaning, and emotional attachment. This inherent complexity requires researchers to investigate the concept of place from a variety of viewpoints. The formal representation of place – a major goal in GIScience related to place – is no exception and can only be successfully addressed if we consider geographical, psychological, anthropological, sociological, cognitive, and other perspectives. This year’s symposium brings together place-based researchers from different disciplines to discuss the current state of platial research. Therefore, this volume contains contributions from a range of fields including geography, psychology, cognitive science, linguistics, and cartography

An Exploratory Study of Information Systems Researcher Impact

Citation counts of refereed articles are a potentially valuable measure of the impact of a researcher\u27s work, in the information systems discipline as in many others. Citation counts can be generated from a number of data collections, including Thomson’s ISI database and Google Scholar. This paper reports on an exploratory study of the apparent impact of IS researchers, as disclosed by citation counts of their works in those two collections. Citation analysis using currently available databases is found to be fraught with many serious problems, particularly if the ISI collection is used. Unless these problems are appreciated and addressed, IS researchers will be under-valued by those with authority over research funding and employment, to the serious detriment of the IS discipline

Making a Difference Through Sustained In-Service Teacher Training

This study is based on collaboration between a school and a university on professional development training of 4th and 5th grade elementary school teachers in a southeastern state in the USA. The study was three-pronged and focused on teacher knowledge, pedagogy, and student achievement. We examined how the building of teacher capacity affected the performance of underachieving students in math and literacy. Underachieving students were targeted with specific strategies, projects, problems solving stories, self-reflection, and higher-level thinking questions. Student performance was measured for literacy achievement, with quantitative and qualitative measures used for data collection purposes. Students showed progress over previous years in reading scores. Teachers’ growth in knowledge related to the content area was evidenced by the consistently high mean scores. Teachers’ self-ratings on the frequency of using the targeted strategies were indirect evidence of their implementation in the classroom. The results were positive and showed significant progress over previous years concerning student achievement