Technical change and industrial democracy

[Δε διατίθεται περίληψη / no abstract available][Δε διατίθεται περίληψη / no abstract available

Knowledge, work and subject in informational capitalism

"With the development of informational capitalism and the network society, globalization and informatization play an increasingly crucial role for understanding technology and society. Informatization describes a qualitative leap in technology development which opens up new dimensions of productivity by information modelling on the one hand, but which demands new forms of knowledge of information workers on the other hand. Work is becoming more flexible, but also more precarious and more polarized socially. These tendencies create a contradictory situation for the subject: formalization and new scopes of autonomy exist side by side. This constellation allows for new approaches to the social shaping of technologies. But they presuppose a fundamental change in attitude by both, system developers and social scientists." (author's abstract

Advancing digital libraries in Germany and creating distributed scientific resources - the telos working group at Darmstadt University of Technology

"This text gives an overview of the work of the author and his working group telos over the past 20 years and sketches the main focus of this work, i.e., creating technologies for distributed scientific resources and their intelligent retrieval." (author's abstract

Scientific work and the usage of digital scientific information - some notes on structures, discrepancies, tendencies, and strategies

"The article discusses changes in scientific work (academic and applied) associated with new potentials, but also coercions of information technologies. Background for this interest is the experience gained in several digital library projects that inclinations and willingness to use these technical possibilities is much less common than the developers of these systems, and we all, tended to think in recent years. This seems to be true even in those scientific disciplines which were and are at the forefront of the development, e.g. physics, mathematics, etc. The background for this observation is discussed looking at general economic and social changes, viewing the environments of work in the scientific sphere, the contents and their quantity and quality of supply in scientific IT systems, the user side in their communities of practice, and the technological and organizational basis of scientific information. Some strategic issues to improve the situation are discussed in the final part of the paper." (author's abstract

Digital library activities in Germany: the German Digital Library Program GLOBAL INFO

"Several digital library projects have emerged in Germany in recent years. The German Digital Library Programme GLOBAL INFO, which is funded by the federal ministry for education and research from 1998 to 2003, is about to become the most important of them. It has the aim to ad-vance for the single scientist 'optimal access to the world-wide electronic and multimedial information on full texts, literature references, factual databases and software' at every workdesk. The programme requests the close cooperation between all the parties taking part in the processes of provision of information and documents. A first wave of projects has recently started. Their areas of concern are tools and standards in the production of documents (along the publication chain), description and retrieval of documents and dealing with their heterogeneity (i.e. metadata and retrieval, distributed systems), and provision and payment systems for published documents in distributed systems. Some more projects in other fields (dynamic documents, large distributed systems, administration systems for users and integration of electronic business models and payment systems) have been or will be handed in and evaluated in the course of 1999." (author's abstract

Upgrading academic scholarship: challenges and chances of the digital age

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to discuss what the beginning of the Internet Age means for the functions and structures of scholarly information and communication by looking at and evaluating today's usability and usage of the digital information infrastructure for and by academic scholarship. Design/ methodology/ approach: The paper gives an overview of the current state of development of digital information in the scholarly cultures and stresses the importance of data as the crucial – and considerably extended – basis of scholarly work. The central role of the publishing world for the academic rewards system is analyzed to consider continuities and discontinuities in scholarly publication. Findings: The paper advances the thesis first coined by Christine Borgman that today we have an information infrastructure of, but not for, scholarly information. Some ideas and proposals of what should be done to move towards an information infrastructure for scholarly work conclude the paper. Originality/ value: The paper tries to bridge the gap between information professionals as producers and scholars as users of information and communication technologies and shows that a joint debate on these issues is necessary

Upgrading Academic Scholarship : Challenges and Chances of the Digital Age

Purpose: The paper is a discussion of what the beginning of the Internet Age means for the functions and structures of scholarly information and communication by looking at and evaluating today's usability and usage of the digital information infrastructure for and by academic scholarship. Design/methodology/approach: The paper gives an overview of the current state of development of digital information in the scholarly cultures and stresses the importance of data as the crucial - and considerably extended - basis of scholarly work. The central role of the publishing world for the academic rewards system is analyzed to consider continuities and discontinuities in scholarly publication. Findings: The paper advances the thesis first coined by Christine Borgman that today we have an information infrastructure of, but not one for scholarly information. Some ideas and proposals of what should be done to move towards an information infrastructure for scholarly work conclude the paper. Originality/value: The paper tries to bridge the gap between information professionals as producers and scholars as users of information and communication technologies and shows that a joint debate on these issues is necessary

Harassment Act Implementation in Higher Education Institutions

"Effective implementation of harassment Act might be inevitable to acquiring gender equality in higher education institutions and diminishing the influence of patriarchal and conservative mind set. This study intended to explore implementation of the harassment Act (2010) in universities. Although Government of Pakistan has enforced harassment Act and Higher Education Commission (HEC) made it mandatory to implement, none of the university in the sample has implemented it. Various incidence of harassment has been reported by study participants and in certain cases, victims are asked to resign the jobs as they refuse or fail to comply with the drives of male colleagues and heads. Lack of state and organizational control leads women to be silent and tolerant of harassment and ultimately, it encourages perpetrator to continue the derogatory behaviour." (author's abstract