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In the recent time, the digital music items on the internet have been evolving to an enormous information space where we try to find/locate the piece of information of our choice by means of search engine. The current trend of searching for music by means of music consumers' keywords/tags is unable to provide satisfactory search results; and search and retrieval of music may be potentially improved if music metadata is created from semantic information provided by association of end-users' tags with acoustic metadata which is easy to extract automatically from digital music items. Based on this observation, our research objective was to investigate how music producers may be able to annotate music against MPEG-7 description (with its acoustic metadata) to deliver meaningful search results. In addressing this question, we investigated the potential of multimedia ontologies to serve as backbone for annotating music items and prospective application scenarios of semantic technologies in the digital music industry. We achieved with our main contribution under this thesis is the first prototype of mpeg-7Music annotation ontology that establishes a mapping of end-users tags with MPEG-7 acoustic metadata as well as extends upper level multimedia ontologies with end-user tags. Additionally, we have developed a semi-automatic annotation tool to demonstrate the potential of the mpeg-7Music ontology to serve as light weight concept ontology for annotating digital music by music producers. The proposed ontology has been encoded in dominant semantic web ontology standard OWL1.0 and provides a standard interoperable representation of the generated semantic metadata. Our innovations in designing the semantic annotation tool were focussed on supporting the music annotation vocabulary (i.e. the mpeg-7Music) in an attempt to turn the music metadata information space to a knowledgebase.

Ontologies need to evolve to keep their domain representation adequate. However, the process of identifying new domain changes, and applying them to the ontology is tedious and time-consuming. Our hypothesis is that online ontologies can provide background knowledge to decrease user efforts during ontology evolution, by integrating new domain concepts through automated relation discovery and relevance assessment techniques, while resulting in ontologies of similar qualities to when the ontology engineers' knowledge is solely used. We propose, implement and evaluate solutions that exploit the conceptual connections and structure of online ontologies to first, automatically suggest new additions to the ontology in the form of concepts derived from domain data, and their corresponding connections to existing elements in the ontology; and second, to automatically evaluate the proposed changes in terms of relevance with respect to the ontology under evolution, by relying on a novel pattern-based technique for relevance assessment. We also present in this thesis various experiments to test the feasibility of each proposed approach separately, in addition to an overall evaluation that validates our hypothesis that user time during evolution is indeed decreased through the use of online ontologies, with comparable results to a fully manual ontology evolution.

Strategic alignment and strategic planning of information systems (IS) have been considered as significant topics in the IS field for the past twenty years. Abundant research has been conducted to understand how strategic alignment and strategic planning of IS support business operation and strategy in organisations and to develop frameworks to study strategic alignment. Nevertheless, there are still issues that need to be tackled, and one of them is environmental dynamism. Environmental dynamism or the changing environment can pose a serious threat to the success of IS planning and lead to alignment failure. Therefore whether and how organisations can sustain strategic alignment in a changing environment is a concern of many. This research aims to investigate the influence of changing environment, if any, on strategic alignment and strategic planning of IS, and how organisations can sustain strategic alignment of IS in a changing environment. The core research question of the research is: How can organisations adapt their strategic planning of IS and sustain strategic alignment in order to respond to the dynamic and competitive environment? A qualitative research strategy was employed for this research in order to achieve a better understanding of the impact of changing environments on organisations' IS planning and strategic alignment. An interpretive case study was carried out in a Chinese state owned company located in Shenzhen, Guangdong. 27 employees from various departments were interviewed and documents relevant to the study were collected. The data was analysed following the steps of thematic analysis and with the assistance of the research framework which was developed and presented in Chapter 3. The framework was built on the co-evolutionary theory and the dynamic capability perspective, which considers that strategic alignment is a continuous process. The framework also examines the process at different levels (strategic level, organisational/operational level, and individual level) in the context of changing environments. The findings of the research show that the internal environment of an organisation which is less turbulent may play a more influential role than a more changeable external environment does in sustainable strategic alignment. The findings also show that organisational resources can become potential barriers to making attempts to achieve strategic alignment. The framework describes the process of sustainable strategic alignment and the findings demonstrate how such a process can be affected by various factors, and how intended strategic alignment can easily be unrealised because of the combined effects of these factors. In addition, this study identifies and describes four challenges for sustainable strategic alignment (Attitude to IT/IS, Risk management, Lack of IS professionals and Lack of IS outsourcing options) and two dynamic capabilities for sustainable strategic alignment (IT flexibility and organisational agility) which can significantly affect sustainable strategic alignment. The results of this research contribute to the existing knowledge by extending the concept of strategic planning of IS and strategic alignment in dynamic environments; examining the relationship between strategic alignment and changing environments, as well as the significance of the sustainable strategic alignment; and investigating the process of sustainable strategic alignment in changing and competitive environments. In particular, this study proposes a process-based sustainable strategic alignment framework based on co-evolution and dynamic capabilities perspective. The study also identifies organisational resource as an internal environmental factor, affecting strategic alignment process, explores the effect of sustainable strategic alignment, identifies four potential challenges for sustainable strategic alignment, and extends sustainable strategic alignment concept in a state-own enterprise context. This study also has implications for practice and future research. IS executives/planners and top management can learn from this study how organisations can achieve sustainable strategic alignment by the process-based view and considering the challenges and dynamic capabilities identified in this research. The results of this research also provide a fertile ground for continuing research into sustainable strategic alignment. Future researchers may use the framework developed in this study to further investigate sustainable strategic alignment in dynamic environments. Also, the findings of this study need to be validated in different contexts to see how well the framework and the results can explain sustainable strategic alignment.

This thesis addresses a gap in both popular and scholarly literature about the nature and practice of third-party editing, as a specific stage in the publishing process. The role’s invisibility reflects its inherently ambiguous and varied nature, a feature shared with other forms of mediation. This makes it difficult to study as a specific practice in its own right. The subject is therefore approached here from a deliberately varied range of perspectives to create a more clearly defined and fully rounded picture. A working definition and a set of foundational principles, described as a poetics of editing, are put into dialogue with other interpretive frameworks. Descriptions of editing practice are traced through time, following the act – not the actor – into new locations in the present, demonstrating the centrality of editing to contemporary debates about digital communication. The comparative exercise is carried into a set of semi-structured interviews, which provide fresh empirical evidence about what editing practitioners do and how they articulate their concerns. The results convey the potential of the editing perspective to provide a dynamic, creative understanding of failure and change, based on an acute awareness of both possibility and constraint. The research suggests further evaluation of the role based on comparative empirical discovery and analysis.

Understanding research productivity in higher education is an important issue because of the impact it has on both individual advancement and departmental planning and policymaking. To date most of the previous studies have recorded a gender imbalance in productivity especially in science and engineering fields. This study has chosen Library and Information Science (LIS), which is known to be a female dominant discipline, to investigate research productivity and compare its differences between men and women in the UK. This study also investigates the impact of institutional factors on the productivity of academics. With a quantitative approach, this study employs bibliometrics’ methods and techniques for data collection and develops two datasets of people and publications for the analysis. Productivity is measured by collecting the data related to the number of publications, number of citations and h-index of academics. In addition, this study also analyses the subject of the publications and the sub-disciplines that men and women are publishing in. Finally LIS men and women are compared against institutional factors such as affiliations, academic professional level and academic status. The results of the statistical analysis suggest that there are not statistically significant differences between LIS men and women academics’ productivity in the UK. The number of citations of the male academics at reader level is statistically significant compared to women. This has been explained by comparing men’s and women’s length of career in this discipline. This study also found that there is a tendency for men to collaborate more with other men than women while women collaborate with both men and women equally.

There are numerous studies in the literature of the impact on library staff and users in the West with regards to electronic journal usage; however there exists little literature related to this topic with regards to Saudi Arabia. This research is therefore timely and contributes to the literature. The aims of this research were to study the current collection situation within Saudi Arabian hospital libraries thus determining the existence of electronic journals; examine usage of print and electronic journals by hospital staff; determine if there were differences in usage, in terms of gender, age group, job title, department, and academic qualifications; determine the format preferences of hospital staff, in terms of core and non-core journals; determine if there were any differences in format preferences with regards to gender, age group, job title, department and academic qualifications; review how electronic journals were being accessed, where they were being accessed, and what other formats were being utilised.

The aim of this research is to identify novel functions and design principles for performance measurement which assist the user in better managing knowledge reuse and invention in New Product Development (NPD) environments. Within this research performance management is defined as the methods, processes, structures and behavioural patterns an organisation uses to improve the performance of its knowledge asset invention and reuse activities. Performance management may be used during the strategic and operative planning, implementation and communication stages of knowledge asset invention and reuse. Performance measurement is defined as the process that gathers and records the effectiveness and efficiency of the implementation and planning stages. There is a rich body of performance measurement, knowledge management and NPD literature. However there is a lack of understanding of how performance can be managed and measured in the NPD context explicitly focusing on knowledge reuse and invention. Performance measurement of knowledge is emerging as a possible mechanism to support improvement in highly complex NPD environments. Based on an extensive literature review, a definition of performance management and measurement has been elaborated as well as a taxonomy of purposes for performance measurement which is the base-line for this research. The purposes have been used to derive a set of requirements for performance measurement from a knowledge reuse and invention perspective. The requirements in turn have led to the detailed formulation of those functions needed to support effective performance measurement targeted to the specific context of knowledge reuse and invention. Performance measurement theory resulting in novel performance measurement functions has been developed, implemented and tested in four businesses (ranging from 45 to 7000 employees). The research is of a problem-oriented nature starting from a real-world problem, relying mainly on phenomenological and qualitative data analysis principles due to the "messy" nature of the problem. The analysis is based on direct interaction with more than 30 users of the functions (being the Performance Measurement Infrastructure, the framework, the catalogue, the software, and the build and implementation method). The major contributions to knowledge of this research can be summarised as follows: U Provision of comprehensive design principles for a performance measurement framework targeted to knowledge reuse and invention in NPD. U Delivery of a well-structured reuse and invention measurement catalogue embedding a set of specific reuse and invention focused measures. U Using the knowledge asset structuring concept from Knowledge Management and integrating with performance measurement principles. This is embodied in a novel Performance Measurement Infrastructure which applies measures directly to knowledge asset reuse and invention in NPD. U Design principles for an enabling information technology solution for the above modules. U A build and implementation methodology which embodies knowledge on how to build and implement reuse and invention oriented performance measurement functions.

In this research the virtual product user community is defined as a producer sponsored customer aggregation existing on the Internet to share usage experience and to collaboratively find technical solutions to problems with specific brand products. Such groups have a variety of benefits to members and organisations, one being that they are a knowledge resource for product users to look for solutions to specific problems with products and identify how to use them effectively. They are also a platform for the producer to communicate with its customers, to collect market intelligence, and to incorporate users’ innovative insights and problem solving skills. However, how knowledge is constructed and shared in such groups has been rarely studied. Previous literature that focuses on cognitive development and critical thinking stages in a formal online learning context may offer some relevant insights and methodologies but requires translation to the new context, and is not likely to provide a comprehensive understanding of this area. Accordingly, this thesis aims to explore knowledge construction in virtual product user communities. The philosophical basis of the research design was constructivism and interpretivism. A qualitative research methodology was adopted. Dozens of discussion threads of theoretical interest were chosen from a typical virtual product user community on the Dell User Support Forum (and from the Dell Idea Storm Community) and were analyzed through a qualitative content analysis method. In addition, semi-structured interviews with 20 community members of the Dell User Support Forum were conducted via e-mail. A deductive thematic analysis method was used for analysing the interview transcripts. More threads were chosen from a range of other virtual product user communities for content analysis in order to explore the influences of attributes such as language, national culture and technology platform on knowledge construction. A new content analysis tool, which is based on a combination of prior codes and new categories identified from the data, was created, in order to analyze the knowledge construction embedded in the discussion of technical problems. The research identified five types of key knowledge construction episodes that make up the knowledge building process and which are characterised by low-level cognitive engagement. A knowledge construction model which represents knowledge building in reality was developed. Furthermore, problem description episodes, non-constructive episodes, and moderation episodes were identified and their relations clarified. The problem description episodes were found to facilitate knowledge construction by providing knowledge about the problem and knowledge about its context. Following from this the peer advisor could diagnose the cause of technical problems and propose tailored solutions ideas based on the users’ experiential knowledge. The moderation episode can offset the negative influence of non-constructive episodes, maintaining social order and promoting knowledge contribution. The findings illustrate that knowledge construction needs collective contribution through various types of participation by community members at different knowledge levels. The influences of contextual attributes of a virtual product user community, including communication technology, sponsorship, national language and culture, moderation, and discussion topics, on knowledge construction, were all explored in this research. Models of different types of knowledge transfer across the boundaries between the virtual product user community and the organization, highlighting the role of moderators, were constructed. Besides the above findings, this research identified and defined this specific type of online community on the Internet, i.e. the virtual product user community. In addition, it provided a content analysis tool which is tailored to the purpose of examining low-level critical knowledge construction, which complements existing analytical frameworks, derived from formal learning contexts. The study mainly contributes to the general area of information and knowledge management, specifically knowledge construction in the virtual product user community and other low-level cognitive engagement contexts. It provides a theoretical basis for practices in managing online communities, and offers useful suggestions for educators in designing and managing formal online learning communities.

This study employs the phenomenographic concept of the structure of awareness to examine the experience of information literacy. It argues that the context in which information literacy is experienced affects the aspects of this phenomenon that are conceptualised and practised. The sample consisted of 27 students studying part-time for the MA in Information Services Management in London, and working as librarians or information managers. An iterative process of development led to the creation of an outcome space consisting of four categories of description on the students' experience of information literacy: Functional Literacy, Provision, Lifelong Learning, and Education. The categories are ordered hierarchically both by the purpose and context of the information goal and by the information relationship that underpins this goal. First, 'Functional Literacy' involves a binary relationship between individual and information which underpins everyday information goals. Secondly, in 'Provision' the information relationship expands from binary to ternary involving a threeway interaction between user, information professional, and information to address a range of information goals. Thirdly, 'Lifelong Learning' involves a binary relationship between the students and open-ended, complex information goals. Fourthly, 'Education' involves a ternary relationship whereby the educator fosters the development of independent learners by exposing them to open-ended, complex information goals. The multiple-context approach generates a more comprehensive outcome space for the students' experience of information than previous phenomenographic studies because it establishes the context-specific aspects of the phenomenon that are the focus in each category of description and enables the examination of the dynamics of the changes that occur within each category (classified as 'transformation') or across categories (classified as 'transfer'). It is argued that this multiple-context outcome space is better suited to inform future investigations exploring the experiences of information literacy education from the perspective of learners and of librarians who are charged with its delivery