Take Me Out: Space and Place in Library Interactions

Information interactions are strongly affected by the place where they occur. Specific locations are ofen associated with searches on particular topics, and individual users perform different tasks in habituated places. A classic example of habituated space is the commuter who regularly reads the news on the train. This paper investigates these associations through four user studies that examine different uses of place in information interaction. Through this, we reveal the ways in which the location of information interactions makes them effective or ineffective. This extends our interpretation of the role of place in information interaction beyond established foci such as location-based search

Getting creative in everyday life: Investigating arts and crafts hobbyists' information behavior

While there has been increasing interest in how creative professionals find information to drive creative outputs, previous information behavior research has largely ignored how arts and crafts hobbyists look for information sources in their everyday lives. To fill this literature gap, we conducted interviews and observations with arts and crafts hobbyists to find out how they conceive potential DIY projects. The findings highlight three themes: the dearth of human sources, the prevalence of domain-specific information, and the use of self-curated information. In addition to empirical results, this work also broadens the understanding of information behavior in an arts and crafts context by studying populations beyond professional artists

On Birthing Dancing Stars: The Need for Bounded Chaos in Information Interaction

While computers causing chaos is acommon social trope, nearly the entirety of the history of computing is dedicated to generating order. Typical interactive information retrieval tasks ask computers to support the traversal and exploration of large, complex information spaces. The implicit assumption is that they are to support users in simplifying the complexity (i.e. in creating order from chaos). But for some types of task, particularly those that involve the creative application or synthesis of knowledge or the creation of new knowledge, this assumption may be incorrect. It is increasingly evident that perfect order—and the systems we create with it—support highly-structured information tasks well, but provide poor support for less-structured tasks.We need digital information environments that help create a little more chaos from order to spark creative thinking and knowledge creation. This paper argues for the need for information systems that offerwhat we term ‘bounded chaos’, and offers research directions that may support the creation of such interface

You Can Check It Out But It Will Never Leave: Characterising Ebook Borrowing Patterns

What does it mean for a reader to borrow an ebook? Ebook technology means that borrowing can take different forms, for example printing and reading. We do not know, though, which of these options readers actually use. Ebook technology generates logs that allow us to understand ebook borrowing patterns over time, both by individual readers and in aggregate. Despite the ready availability of ebook logs, this area remains under-researched. In this paper we present an exploratory log analysis of ebook borrowing, comparing printing and reading, discovery patterns, single- and multiple-book sessions and identifying specific borrowing patterns

On the other side from you: How library design facilitates and hinders group work

This paper describes a longitudinal ethnographic analysis of space usage in an academic library. We focus on group work, identifying a range of group types and activities. We address how the library space and users’ technology choices impact the flow of information within groups, and finally identify some implications for both space and technology design

Construction of planar triangulations with minimum degree 5

AbstractIn this article, we describe a method of constructing all simple triangulations of the sphere with minimum degree 5; equivalently, 3-connected planar cubic graphs with girth 5. We also present the results of a computer program based on this algorithm, including counts of convex polytopes of minimum degree 5

The Generation of Fullerenes

We describe an efficient new algorithm for the generation of fullerenes. Our implementation of this algorithm is more than 3.5 times faster than the previously fastest generator for fullerenes -- fullgen -- and the first program since fullgen to be useful for more than 100 vertices. We also note a programming error in fullgen that caused problems for 136 or more vertices. We tabulate the numbers of fullerenes and IPR fullerenes up to 400 vertices. We also check up to 316 vertices a conjecture of Barnette that cubic planar graphs with maximum face size 6 are hamiltonian and verify that the smallest counterexample to the spiral conjecture has 380 vertices.Comment: 21 pages; added a not