Evaluation of a Resource Discovery Service: FindIt@Bham

In autumn 2012, the University of Birmingham launched FindIt@Bham, a Primo-based Resource Discovery Service, after a series of focus groups with students and staff to help determine its initial configuration and customisation. This paper presents the results from a large-scale online survey and focus groups that were conducted to poll users’ attitudes to the service over twelve months later, adding to a small body of research on user satisfaction with established resource discovery services. From the survey the overall level of appreciation was high with 71.13% rating FindIt@Bham to be ‘Good’ or ‘Very Good’. The level of appreciation was compared across undergraduates, postgraduates (taught and research) and academic staff which revealed that undergraduates are the group of users most happy with the service with academic staff being least satisfied. The reasons for this discrepancy are considered, along with users’ behaviour and a discussion of their perceptions of individual functional areas. The survey results led to focus group activities tailored to extract deeper information on system usage and satisfaction. From these combined activities, future customisations and developments to FindIt@Bham such as tuning of result relevancy, improved online help and additional functionality can be prioritised

Digital tools disrupting tertiary students’ notions of disciplinary knowledge: Cases in history and tourism

This paper reports on the findings from a two year research project that explored the potential of digital tools in support of teaching–learning across different disciplinary areas at a New Zealand university. Two courses (in History and Tourism) are case studied using data collected through interviews with lecturers, tutors and their students, and an online student survey. Findings from the research revealed that both lecturers and students were challenged in learning about the affordances and use of the lecturer selected digital tools as a mediational means. The tools were not initially transparent to them, nor were they able to be easily deployed to undertake their primary task—teaching for the lecturers, and, learning and demonstrating learning for the students completing assigned tasks. The process of learning and using the tools disrupted participants’ prior thinking and led to new understandings of both disciplines and of effective pedagogies for the two disciplines. The findings increase our understanding of the ways digital tools can develop, challenge and expand tertiary students learning and have implications for practice

DTRM: A new reputation mechanism to enhance data trustworthiness for high-performance cloud computing

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Elsevier via the DOI in this record.Cloud computing and the mobile Internet have been the two most influential information technology revolutions, which intersect in mobile cloud computing (MCC). The burgeoning MCC enables the large-scale collection and processing of big data, which demand trusted, authentic, and accurate data to ensure an important but often overlooked aspect of big data - data veracity. Troublesome internal attacks launched by internal malicious users is one key problem that reduces data veracity and remains difficult to handle. To enhance data veracity and thus improve the performance of big data computing in MCC, this paper proposes a Data Trustworthiness enhanced Reputation Mechanism (DTRM) which can be used to defend against internal attacks. In the DTRM, the sensitivity-level based data category, Metagraph theory based user group division, and reputation transferring methods are integrated into the reputation query and evaluation process. The extensive simulation results based on real datasets show that the DTRM outperforms existing classic reputation mechanisms under bad mouthing attacks and mobile attacks.This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (61602360, 61772008, 61472121), the Pilot Project of Fujian Province (formal industry key project) (2016Y0031), the Foundation of Science and Technology on Information Assurance Laboratory (KJ-14-109) and the Fujian Provincial Key Lab of Network Security and Cryptology Research Fund (15012)

UTP IRC, Mobile Facility System

The wireless world is experiencing a revolution; with the imminent introduction of thirdhalf generation (3.50). Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS (UTP) Information Resource Centre (IRC), Mobile Facility System is a Final Year Project (FYP) dedicated to the UTP students that provides opportunities to enhance skills and knowledge. The objective of Mobile Facility System for IRC is to integrate the technologies combine with the IRC services in order to enhance the efficiency of the IRC to serve its users, currently the targeted user are students. Mobile facility system is expects to be widely used in the future. In other words, this project is hoped to boost the way of communication in university life style. The aim for this project is to conduct a study of library middle application on phone. This project requires ongoing research on mobile library system by implementing a lot of observation, interviews, questionnaires, literature reviews and much more to ensure the theory able to serve the targeted users. In order to explore the use of mobile phone and handled IT devices as an additional communication channel, many factors need to be considered such as it constraint and limitations. This project will be valuable when it manage to expand the accessibility of IRC and optimize the anytime and anywhere learning for students

The paradoxes of the theory of imprévision in the new French law of contract: a judicial deterrent?

As part of the reform of the law of contracts,the theory of imprévision is now enshrined in Article 1195 CC of the French Civil Code. The novelty of this article lies essentially in the new judicial power of review. As this paper shows, Article 1195 CC raises three paradoxes:the first one in the nature of the article itself as a default rule that encourages a voluntary ex-ante contractual solution over a judicial solution through careful pre-emptive drafting;the second at the renegotiation phase as the affected party has the right to request renegotiation whereas the other contracting party the right to refuse to renegotiate; and the third in the new judicial powers that play as a deterrent and favour an ex-post contractual solution through renegotiation. Overall, this article demonstrates a clear bias for a private contractual and negotiated solution (over a judicial one). Small and medium sized businesses are likely to avail themselves of the new framework to redefine their contractual relationship. By contrast, larger commercial enterprises are further incentivised to enhance their self-reliance by boosting forward-looking contractual and expert determination provisions dealing with changed circumstances. The fear of a snowball effect with the provision generating a a more interventionist judicial attitude appears therefore exaggerated

Perceived Quality Indicators of Cancer-Related Podcasts Provided by Non-Profit Cancer Organisations

Non-profit cancer organisations aim to reduce the illness caused by cancer by providing emotional support and practical information using different online resources. Cancer podcasts are one type of resource provided by those organisations to support cancer-affected people by transmitting information via audio in the form of interviews, conversations, and panel discussions. However, little is known about the quality features of these podcasts from the perspective of users. This is important to provide insights into designing podcasts that can meet the needs of cancer-affected people. Integrating the IQ assessment framework, source credibility theory, and two-factor theory of website design, this study collected data via semi-structured interviews with 14 participants to develop a framework to assess the quality of cancer-related podcasts. Results showed that all features underlying the credibility, content, and design constructs were fundamental, except for the visual appearance of the website which constituted a motivating factor for using podcasts

Surveying Indigenous Cancer Support Needs Survey Design and Development

Cancer survival rates are currently lower amongst Indigenous Peoples in Canada than non-Indigenous Peoples in Canada (1). Health professionals speculate that late cancer diagnosis and limited access to screening and support services are some of the main factors contributing to lower survival rate among Indigenous cancer patients (2). Fortunately, social supports have been found to improve cancer survival rates (3,4). Yet, there is little known about whether cancer support services meet the needs of Indigenous peoples. The purpose of this research was to create two survey tools that could evaluate the cancer support needs of Indigenous patients in Saskatchewan from both patient and health care provider perspectives. Surveys were created using existing cancer support surveys as reference, though none previously existed specific to Indigenous cancer patients. In addition, current literature surrounding Indigenous cancer supports was used to create the surveys along with informant input. Both surveys were created by matching survey content to themes to those found in an environmental scan and those in interviews from a study also evaluating cancer support needs for Indigenous patients. Surveys were validated using respondent validation and informant feedback. The result of this research was two survey tools; one to evaluate patient perspectives and another to evaluate health care provider or facilitator views on cancer support needs for Indigenous patients. The results of this study will benefit Indigenous cancer patients, their families, and their communities. The two surveys created in this study could help to inform health professionals and policy makers on the needs of Indigenous cancer supports in future research

Detecting, Modeling, and Predicting User Temporal Intention

The content of social media has grown exponentially in the recent years and its role has evolved from narrating life events to actually shaping them. Unfortunately, content posted and shared in social networks is vulnerable and prone to loss or change, rendering the context associated with it (a tweet, post, status, or others) meaningless. There is an inherent value in maintaining the consistency of such social records as in some cases they take over the task of being the first draft of history as collections of these social posts narrate the pulse of the street during historic events, protest, riots, elections, war, disasters, and others as shown in this work. The user sharing the resource has an implicit temporal intent: either the state of the resource at the time of sharing, or the current state of the resource at the time of the reader \clicking . In this research, we propose a model to detect and predict the user\u27s temporal intention of the author upon sharing content in the social network and of the reader upon resolving this content. To build this model, we first examine the three aspects of the problem: the resource, time, and the user. For the resource we start by analyzing the content on the live web and its persistence. We noticed that a portion of the resources shared in social media disappear, and with further analysis we unraveled a relationship between this disappearance and time. We lose around 11% of the resources after one year of sharing and a steady 7% every following year. With this, we turn to the public archives and our analysis reveals that not all posted resources are archived and even they were an average 8% per year disappears from the archives and in some cases the archived content is heavily damaged. These observations prove that in regards to archives resources are not well-enough populated to consistently and reliably reconstruct the missing resource as it existed at the time of sharing. To analyze the concept of time we devised several experiments to estimate the creation date of the shared resources. We developed Carbon Date, a tool which successfully estimated the correct creation dates for 76% of the test sets. Since the resources\u27 creation we wanted to measure if and how they change with time. We conducted a longitudinal study on a data set of very recently-published tweet-resource pairs and recording observations hourly. We found that after just one hour, ~4% of the resources have changed by ≥30% while after a day the change rate slowed to be ~12% of the resources changed by ≥40%. In regards to the third and final component of the problem we conducted user behavioral analysis experiments and built a data set of 1,124 instances manually assigned by test subjects. Temporal intention proved to be a difficult concept for average users to understand. We developed our Temporal Intention Relevancy Model (TIRM) to transform the highly subjective temporal intention problem into the more easily understood idea of relevancy between a tweet and the resource it links to, and change of the resource through time. On our collected data set TIRM produced a significant 90.27% success rate. Furthermore, we extended TIRM and used it to build a time-based model to predict temporal intention change or steadiness at the time of posting with 77% accuracy. We built a service API around this model to provide predictions and a few prototypes. Future tools could implement TIRM to assist users in pushing copies of shared resources into public web archives to ensure the integrity of the historical record. Additional tools could be used to assist the mining of the existing social media corpus by derefrencing the intended version of the shared resource based on the intention strength and the time between the tweeting and mining

Information provision and retrieval in the farming industry in Western Australia

Agricultural information dissemination to farmers has been studied extensively. However, farmers preferred methods of delivery has not been investigated thoroughly within a Western Australia (WA) context. Availability of different information delivery channels have led to the overwhelming and overlapping of information available to farmers. As a consequence, the type of information required by WA farmers should be considered as knowing information needs could allow farmers to access relevant, concise and timely agricultural information. To answer the research questions, a survey was designed, using Likert-scale, close ended and open ended questions techniques, enabling qualitative and quantitative data analysis. The study‘s findings are relevant to agricultural information providers, government and public agencies, and other researchers who work in the agricultural and farming industries in Western Australia, and Australia