Are e-readers suitable tools for scholarly work?

This paper aims to offer insights into the usability, acceptance and limitations of e-readers with regard to the specific requirements of scholarly text work. To fit into the academic workflow non-linear reading, bookmarking, commenting, extracting text or the integration of non-textual elements must be supported. A group of social science students were questioned about their experiences with electronic publications for study purposes. This same group executed several text-related tasks with the digitized material presented to them in two different file formats on four different e-readers. Their performances were subsequently evaluated by means of frequency analyses in detail. Findings - e-Publications have made advances in the academic world; however e-readers do not yet fit seamlessly into the established chain of scholarly text-processing focusing on how readers use material during and after reading. Our tests revealed major deficiencies in these techniques. With a small number of participants (n=26) qualitative insights can be obtained, not representative results. Further testing with participants from various disciplines and of varying academic status is required to arrive at more broadly applicable results. Practical implications - Our test results help to optimize file conversion routines for scholarly texts. We evaluated our data on the basis of descriptive statistics and abstained from any statistical significance test. The usability test of e-readers in a scientific context aligns with both studies on the prevalence of e-books in the sciences and technical test reports of portable reading devices. Still, it takes a distinctive angle in focusing on the characteristics and procedures of textual work in the social sciences and measures the usability of e-readers and file-features against these standards.Comment: 22 pages, 6 figures, accepted for publication in Online Information Revie

Extending Knowledge Management to Mobile Workplaces

Knowledge and Knowledge Management (KM) are evolving into an increasingly eminent source of competitive advantage. However,for the time being, the potential of KM is usually limited to stationary workplaces. This excludes a multiplicity of mobile workers, many of them in charge of knowledge-intensive activities.This paper examines the capabilities and limitations of mobile technology usage in order to support KM. After a general overview of KM, the relevant mobile technology is introduced.Subsequently, the theory of mobile added values is employed to analyze the contributions of mobile technology for supporting KM in the different phases of the KM process. Especially the process of knowledge distribution is qualified to be supported through mobile technology.Knowledge Management; Mobile Commerce; Mobile Knowledge; Management; Mobile Business Processes; Mobile Added Values

CLIP/CETL Fellowship Report 2007/8 : Mentorship Scheme : extending work related learning

This project seeks to work with four parties; current second year students, alumni within the design industry, design professionals and PPD staff at LCC in a two stage process; setting up the requirements for a mentorship scheme and then investigating the outcomes. A handbook and website was produced

Extending the IS-Impact model into the higher education sector

The study addresses known limitations of what may be the most important dependent variable in Information Systems (IS) research; IS-Success or IS-Impact. The study is expected to force a deeper understanding of the broad notions of IS success and impact. The aims of the research are to: (1) enhance the robustness and minimize limitations of the IS-Impact model, and (2) introduce and operationalise a more rigorously validated IS Impact measurement model to Universities, as a reliable model for evaluating different Administrative Systems. In extending and further generalizing the IS-Impact model, the study will address contemporary validation issues

Protecting Interoperable Clinical Environment With Authentication

The Integrated Clinical Environment (ICE) is a standard dedicated to promote open coordination of heterogeneous medical devices in a plug-and-play manner. This carries the potential to radically improve medical care through coordinating, cooperating devices, but also to undermine the patient safety by giving rise to security vulnerabilities in the cyber world. In this paper, we propose an authentication framework as the first step to build an ICE security architecture. This framework is designed in a three-layered structure, allowing it to fit in the variety of authentication requirements from different ICE entities and of networking middleware from ICE instantiations. We implement the authentication framework on OpenICE, an open source ICE instantiation. Our experiments shows that the framework can help OpenICE mitigate the vulnerabilities caused by forged identity with negligible performance overload