This thesis investigates the extent of provision of LGBT-related fiction to children and young people in English public libraries, how it is procured and made available, staff attitudes, and factors affecting provision. The research drew on a pragmatic philosophy and used a mixed-methods approach, comprising a checklist study, questionnaires and interviews. The literature review highlighted a need for portrayals of LGBT people in children’s and Young Adult fiction: this can have benefits for young LGBT people and children of LGBT parents, as well as for increasing understanding among others. Despite this, there has been little attention to the area in UK library research or practice, and the small amount of extant research suggests provision is poor. The study found that provision of LGBT-related fiction to children and young people was generally limited in the participating authorities, particularly as regards younger children’s books and accessible formats. Staff attitudes were positive but not pro-active, with many admitting to never having thought about the area. Some concerns emerged, namely the provision of materials to younger children; materials with sexual content; the quality of materials; US-focused titles; promotion; and the possibility of complaint. The thesis presents a number of models of factors resulting in poor provision. A key factor is that many books are published outside the UK and consequently do not come through mainstream suppliers. This combines with a lack of awareness among librarians, who consequently do not seek out titles elsewhere. Budget and workload seem likely to have an increasing impact in the current economic situation. The model is situated within a broader environment of hetero/cisnormativity, stigma, and a neoliberal approach to library provision which may result in the neglect of areas perceived as ‘niche’. The thesis concludes by summarising the contributions of the study to research and practice, and presenting recommendations.

Personal Information Management (PIM) refers to the way people collect, organize and retrieve different forms of information including traditional printed and electronic content, such as books, papers, documents, email and bookmarks. Studies have shown that individuals struggle in their PIM practices to manage the diverse and voluminous information they accumulate. Within their research, scholars specifically, are not only information seekers, they are information keepers and managers as well. This research investigated the PIM practices of scholars in the Public Authority for Applied Education and Training (PAAET), a Higher Education institution in Kuwait. The study explored the factors that shape how scholars manage their personal information collections (PICs) within the research process. This was achieved by answering four research questions: How are scholars' research-related PICs created? What are the main characteristics of research related PICs? How are they used? What are the factors that shape them? The study employed a naturalistic qualitative design methodology. Three series of interviews were conducted with librarians and faculty members to identify a focus for the main study in an exploratory stage of the research. The main body of data investigated scholarly PIM practice of 17 scholars from Education and Health disciplines (College of Nursing and Health Science College) and focussing specifically on their research-related PICs. The data collected was interviews and photographs of scholars' collections, in addition to observation via tours of their working spaces within the interviews. The data was analysed using thematic analysis. The study found that scholars' research-related information collections (PICs) are huge, diverse, hybrid, and fragmented. Scholars' personal space of information contained a massive quantity of information related to their research that is stored in different places at different stages of the research. It chiefly consists of four types of information: sources of literature, research data, published research and administrative paperwork. It is fragmented in different locations physically and electronically. A model linking the size, diversity, hybridity and fragmentation of the collections to immediate and underlying factors was developed, explaining how the two layers of factors shaped the research-related PICs. The immediate factors affect the collections directly and were identified as: The need for research, Time pressure, Workspace, Technology opportunity, Support services and Self-positioning & Self-presentation. Those which affected the collections indirectly, the underlying factors, were: Age, Gender, Nationality, Seniority, Discipline, Foreign language, and Educational background. The study offers several contributions one of which is defining the specific nature of the research-related PICs of scholars and providing a model that explains the relationships between factors shaping their features. The research-related PIC is a special type of collection and thus needs special attention in handling such sizable, diverse, hybrid and fragmented material. By its findings, the study informed several stakeholders including scholars themselves, librarians, institutions, policy makers, PIM system vendors and software developers. Practical implications drawn out for each stakeholder can help scholars to be more efficient in creating, organizing and curating their research-related PICs, which will have positive effects in terms of time pressure and re-finding stored material.

This thesis aims to investigate the reading of, and engagement with, minority ethnic English language fiction in public libraries, focusing on materials written by Black British and Asian authors. In order to achieve this, a literature review and three empirical studies were conducted, using a mixed methods approach. The literature review showed that previous research in the field of minority ethnic fiction had largely overlooked its readership, and furthermore that academic models of fiction reading had not considered this type of material. The first study was a survey of the reading habits and attitudes of library users, conducted via a quantitative questionnaire and subsequent qualitative interviews. This was cross-sectional at the individual respondent level, but a longitudinal element was also included at the library level, which enabled analysis by community type, local ethnicity and class. The second study was a qualitative exploration of perceptions of reader ‘types’ using personal construct theory and the associated repertory grid technique, in order to generate and explore a series of constructs relating to the characteristics of fiction readers. The third, quantitative study also drew from personal construct theory, adapting the repertory grid to investigate in greater depth a group of readers’ beliefs, attitudes and intentions to read certain fiction genres. A model of genre fiction reading is presented, based on the research findings. This identifies a new fiction reader profile and gives a causal ordering to the characteristics of the fiction reader which had previously not been achieved. The model is also demonstrably flexible to allow different types of factors to be included, and to further explore the interactions between these factors. Finally, the theoretical and professional contributions of the research are summarised, and recommendations are made for future research and the development within libraries and the book trade of minority ethnic fiction collections.

Knowledge and understanding of effective e-government to business services remains limited. At the same time there is little empirical knowledge or theoretical understanding of how infrastructure works in the government to business domain. Therefore the aim of this study is to investigate infrastructure in e-government and to specifically understand the impact of infrastructure on the relationship between government and business services. The e-Umrah government information system in Saudi Arabia was selected as the context for the investigation and involved identifying the factors that play a role in shaping the existing infrastructure, understanding the barriers which impede the development of government to business infrastructure; and exploring the challenges within the infrastructure that hinder businesses in their use of e-government services. The system was developed to connect all government and business sectors which involve in the Umrah activities in Saudi Arabia for the purpose of facilitating Umrah services for the international visitors who come from all over the globe anytime during the year to the holy cities of Makkah and Madinah to perform Umrah rituals. A mixed method approach was utilised to investigate and understand e-Umrah system. A qualitative case study and an interpretive approach were used to understand the infrastructure of the e-Umrah system. Semi-structured interviews, informed by Star and Ruhleder's (1996) eight dimensions for investigating infrastructure, were conducted with 43 Umrah companies. The data collected was then analysed based on Miles and Huberman (1994) three steps which consisted of data reduction, data display, and data reporting to establish and follow a systematic and thematic technique of data analysis. The data reduction step was based on Newman’s (2006) three coding steps to prepare the information for interpretation and comparison. Prior to the main qualitative study, a preliminary quantitative study was conducted to gain information about the e-Umrah system, how it operates, and to understand the levels of adoption, usefulness and ease of use of the e-Umrah system. The findings of the study demonstrate that the e-Umrah system’s infrastructure is affected by variables within each of the eight dimensions of Star and Ruhleder (1996): built on an installed base; embeddedness; embodiment of standards; transparency; become visible upon breakdown; links with conventions of practice; learned as part of membership and reach or scope. Additionally, these dimensions not only affect the infrastructure of the e-Umrah system but also have a relationship with each other. The main problem found in the e-Umrah system’s infrastructure include a lack of integration of some entities and services thereby preventing electronic transactions from taking place and hindering effective access to the use of electronic services available. The infrastructure framework proposed by Star and Ruhleder (1996) is based on the view that the eight dimensions have a direct and relatively fixed impact on infrastructure. This study contributed to enhancement of Star and Ruhleder’s (1996) framework through the discovery that not only did the eight dimensions have an impact on infrastructure, but that each of the dimensions also had an interrelationship with each of the other dimensions. In addition, the study revealed on an adaptive framework was found to provide an in depth and intensive understanding when investigating infrastructure; thus contributing to a holistic understanding both of the framework, and of its subsequent impact on infrastructure. Instead of focusing on one particular dimension of infrastructure, this study has adopted a more holistic approach to investigating effective e-government to business services. This holistic approach also argues that e-government should be examined from different perspectives including technological, social, political, managerial/organisational, and business aspects. Combining all these aspects in a holistic approach to the definition and scope of e-government enables the development of a broader and contextual understanding of e-government. Rather than focusing on just one aspect of e-government and therefore narrowing it down, because effective e-government concerns not only the utilisation of information technology, but also a combination of technology with all the other dimensions of infrastructure that have been identified and investigated in the study.

There being no cure for HIV, information continues to play an important role in the management of the pandemic. However, the ability to design successful HIV and AIDS information campaigns is highly dependent on knowledge of people’s information behaviour. Accordingly, there is a need for a clear understanding of the information behaviour of specific groups of people affected and infected by HIV. This phenomenological study investigates how serodiscordant couples experience HIV and AIDS information. In-depth interviews were conducted in the homes of twenty-one serodiscordant couples and three individuals who had separated from their partners. Participants for the study were selected purposively. Data analysis was done using Max Van Manen’s phenomenological approach to generate descriptions and interpretations of the couples’ experiences of HIV and AIDS information. The findings of this study identify three major aspects of experiencing HIV and AIDS information. First, the life-world is the overarching context of experiencing HIV and AIDS information. The study identified five existentials of the life-world of serodiscordant couples. The four of the five existentials were similar to those described by Max Van Manen. These are: lived body, lived space, lived others, and lived time. In addition, my study identified spirituality as a fifth existential. The second aspect of experiencing HIV and AIDS information concerns the nature of HIV and AIDS information. Serodiscordant couples experienced information sources before experiencing the information itself. In these sources serodiscordant couples categorised HIV and AIDS information as being available or unavailable, and accessible or inaccessible. Thirdly, HIV and AIDS information was experienced with various emotional and cognitive states of mind. The emotions were categorised as positive, negative, and ambiguous. Furthermore, this study proposes a conceptual framework for experiencing HIV and AIDS information. The conceptual framework suggests that HIV and AIDS information was experienced while anticipating it, interacting with it, acting on it, and reflecting on it. These findings reveal the complexity of experiencing HIV and AIDS information among serodiscordant couples. Recommendations are made for policy makers and practitioners on the importance of using knowledge of how serodiscordant couples experience HIV and AIDS information to design information services that suit their needs. In addition, this thesis highlights the need to have standard information materials for specific groups such as serodiscordant couples in order to effectively address their unique information needs.

Public libraries in Britain serve a wide range of people in today’s multicultural Britain, including those from Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) communities. In order to be able to do so in an effective and empathic manner, many library staff participate in training that comes under terms such as ‘Diversity Training’ or ‘Cultural Awareness Courses.’ At the same time, libraries have a unique role as a neutral meeting ground that can facilitate the bringing together of many diverse communities. This thesis seeks to establish whether such training does lead to empathic BME provision and whether the training allows for staff to fulfil the library's unique role. Further, it proposes recommendations and a training model that will facilitate this, allowing library staff to become culturally competent. The literature review highlighted the multiple criticisms levelled against Diversity Training - its focus on prejudice reduction as opposed to cultural understanding; its short and infrequent nature, for example - and also provided insights from other disciplines into how empathy and true cultural understanding could take place. A qualitative approach was adopted with observational data coupled multiple survey-based case studies with both library staff and library users. Individual data-sets were coded, and themes identified, both within each data-set and across the whole range of the data. This led to the development of a Culturally Competency Training Model that is multi-tiered, aims to be cost-effective, and provides both skills-based and knowledge-based training, with repeated inter-cultural contact at its theoretical base. It can be used as a part of an induction programme and as part of ongoing training for current public library staff. In closing, the thesis looks at recommendations aimed at public library staff and fellow researchers.

No description available.

The work described in this thesis investigates the application of enterprise document management techniques to better support documents discovery and reuse across a learning organisation. It examines the nature of documents and organisations, and the roles that documentation plays within modern enterprises. This thesis recognises the increasing need to reuse documents at a number of levels of abstraction, so leveraging an enterprise's valuable document resources. Enabled by Internet developments and document mark-up languages, particularly the extensible mark-up language (XML) and its associated standards, this thesis describes the development of ideas that have led to the design and initial implementation of the Model-driven Reuse Architecture MRA The concept underlying the design of the MRA have developed from an initial feasibility study undertaken with the United Kingdom Ministry of Defence (MoD) to provide management techniques for military support documentation. A range of current approaches to document management and enterprise-wide information model based approach to document management permits access to and reuse of document fragments for new purposes. An extensible mechanism permits the inclusion of other document approaches to facilitate document discovery, potentially lead into reuse. This thesis describes the approach taken undersigning a new document architecture that provides a work-focussed approach to document management encouraging social collaboration rather than automation, and supporting a range of users within the same environment. This thesis presents the overall Model-driven Reuse Architecture and preliminary implementation that has been developed to support the specific needs of teaching and learning in higher education. The resulting web-base implementation, MRA-HE, is evaluated in terms of how it performs against a set of realistic scenarios within the domain of higher education. Upon evaluating the MRA-HE implementation, the final chapter of this thesis generalises some of the MRA approaches to the diverse demands of other types of organisation.

Virtual communities where people with common interests and goals communicate, share resources, and construct knowledge, are currently one of the fastest growing web environments. A common misconception is to believe that a virtual community will be effective when people and technology are present. Appropriate support for the effective functioning of online communities is paramount. In this line, personalisation and adaptation can play a crucial role, as illustrated by recent user modelling approaches that support social web-groups. However, personalisation research has mainly focused on adapting to the needs of individual members, as opposed to supporting communities to function as a whole. In this research, we argue that effective support tailored to virtual communities requires considering the wholeness of the community and facilitating the processes that influence the success of knowledge sharing and collaboration. We are focusing on closely knit communities that operate in the boundaries of organisations or in the educational sector. Following research in organisational psychology, we have identified several processes important for effective team functioning which can be applied to virtual communities and can be examined or facilitated by analysing community log data. Based on the above processes we defined a computational framework that consists of two major parts. The first deals with the extraction of a community model that represents the whole community and the second deals with the application of the model in order to identify what adaptive support is needed and when. The validation of this framework has been done using real virtual community data and the advantages of the adaptive support have been examined based on the changes happened after the interventions in the community combined with user feedback. With this thesis we contribute to the user modelling and adaptive systems research communities with: (a) a novel framework for holistic adaptive support in virtual communities, (b) a mechanism for extracting and maintaining a semantic community model based on the processes identified, and (c) deployment of the community model to identify problems and provide holistic support to a virtual community. We also contribute to the CSCW community with a novel approach in providing semantically enriched community awareness and to the area of social networks with a semantically enriched approach for modeling change patterns in a closely-knit VC.

This study investigates the travellers' choice of information sources and their subsequent mode choice decisions. The goal of this study is to develop a comprehensive choice model that can capture the information acquisition process by predicting the choice of information sources together with its effects on modal choices of the travellers. A decision making framework for travel information acquisition is developed and the abstract terms, necessary to be tested in the models, are identified. A Stated Preference experiment is developed based on the complicated decision making process and an interactive CATI questionnaire is designed to cope with it. Utility functions are formulated by expanding travellers' choice set to include different combinations of the viable sources of information and with the inclusion of policy sensitive variables. The research employs a wide range of modelling methodologies and examines a range of traditional and newly developed calibration and estimation procedures including Mixed Logit models with individual specific parameters and the newly developed Random Regret Minimisation framework. The study also analyses the effects of travel planning websites on travel decisions and establishes a link between content, design, advertisements, and presentation of information on overall modal shift. The results indicate that travellers give credence to government owned sources and give more importance to their own previous experiences followed by multimodal websites, train websites, friends and coach websites respectively. A website with less search time, specific infonnation on users' own criteria, and real time information is regarded as most attractive by the travellers. The study also found that the market share of the modes increases when information sources show decreased travel time and cost values and the maximum results are achieved when different information sources give the same information to the travellers. These results show that information sources could be used to influence the mode choice of the travellers.