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The objectives of this study are threefold: to describe and analyse what reading material was available in Canada; to explain the business methods by which it was made available; and, to delineate by specific criteria the Scottish contribution to such availability. The study is the first to use newspaper advertisements, circulating library catalogues and business records to examine book availability, at the individual title level, in selected colonial Canadian towns. The primary research material is analysed by means of a customized database, BOOKSCAN, which includes bibliographic, business and geographic information in a single database. BOOKSCAN is a union catalogue with one record for each title, and multiple repeatable fields which detail where, when, how (for sale or loan, at what price, etc.) and by whom the title was made available. Narrative and graphical analyses include: intellectual content, occupation of book provider, geographic route of acquisition, business practice and, country of origin of shipment. Scottish contributions in terms of authorship, publishers, wholesalers and book trade personnel are examined in detail, and some preliminary comparisons are drawn between the trade in the Canadian colonies and that in provincial Scotland. The principal findings question previous assumptions about the role of Scots in the early Canadian book trade. Scottish general merchants were frequently retailers of books in Canada, but Scottish publishers were not proactive in seeking Canadian markets, and Scottish printers tended not to emigrate to Canadian towns in this early period, as they did to American towns. The key business factor which determined whether Scottish publishers and booksellers exported to Canada was having a known contact in a Canadian town. Case studies of several Scots include: Alexander Morrison, bookbinder and stationer in Halifax; Richard, William, James and Alexander Kidston, general merchants in Halifax; and, John Neilson, printer in Quebec. The greatest quantities of books shipped from Scotland were not those works of the Scottish Enlightenment, which tended to be shipped from London, but were school books, Bibles and chapbooks, categories supplied by stationers. The role of wholesaling stationers in book exports, uncovered in this study, suggests that previous surveys of book exports from Scotland may greatly underestimate the total, as stationers' shipments were entered in the Customs Accounts generically as "stationery" rather than as "books". Wholesaling stationers in Scotland and Scottish general merchants in Canada are the two principal groups of Scots who contributed to early Canadian book availability. This study contributes new information to the book histories of both Scotland and Canada, and provides a methodological model for future comparative research.

Very little information is available about Swiss libraries and librarianship in English language text books and periodicals. While this study hopes to partly remedy this situation. it also intends to present a case study , or model, of library services in a federal, multi-lingual and democratic community which may serve as a basis for further investigations and comparative studies. The first two chapters of this thesis are devoted to a survey of the historical development of Switzerland and its libraries throughout their recorded history. and to an examination of the political. socio-economic and cultural developments which have taken place and have exerted a significant influence on Swiss library development. Seven chapters are devoted to an examination and discussion of recent developments in all types of library that offer at least a minimum of service to the public. Libraries that do not grant public access to their collections on any basis at all have not been included in this study, nor have archives and documentation centres. The investigation of modern Swiss library services focuses on the period mid-1960's to early 1980's. Special emphasis is placed on communal and cantonal library services and on their inter-relations. Chapter seven, which is three times as long as the average chapter and has been placed in the centre of this thesis, explores the problems, challenges and achievements of library provision at communal level in each of the twenty-six Swiss cantons. The Swiss Library Supply Agency, which played a major role in the development of communal libraries, is appraised in a separate chapter. The study concludes with two chapters devoted to an examination of the role of the major professional associations concerned with Swiss librarianship, and with a survey of library education at different levels. A final chapter is devoted to an appraisal of libraries and librarianship in Switzerland around 1980 and is followed by a bibliography of 922 entries.

Construction is a process, which involves diverse parties having different professional skills and interest. At present, the co-operation and information exchange between parties involved in any construction has not yet been attained. During a project life cycle, the amount of information generated and exchanged is enormous even for a small-size construction project. Current process of managing information flow in construction still lags behind other industries such as manufacturing. In the era of information age, information technology (IT) becomes a vital tool for managing information. It allows a user/manager to store and retrieve information easily, quickly, produce complete and accurate response, and be better informed of the relevant issues. However, the progress of IT in the construction industry relies on the ability of the project participants to exchange and share information among themselves. Inevitably, there is a need for common standards and approaches due to the lack of compatibility of the information exchange. The complexity and vast amount of information involved in any construction project and the lack of standards have made the process of producing an integrated environment very difficult. A framework for establishing an Integrated Construction Environment (ICE) has been proposed with the aim of co-ordinating the integration process between the various construction applications. SPACE (Simultaneous Prototyping in An integrated Construction Environment) has been developed which aims to integrate design and construction throughout the project's life cycle via a single database. The implementation of this framework has led to the development of a modularised central core whereby each application has its own data module. CAPE (Construction Application Protocol for data transfEr) is a design application, which has been developed as part of data module in SPACE. It represents a building elements data module and the object interpreter engine. It aims is to improve the flow of information between project's participants, particularly those related to the design stage. The development of CAPE data module has resulted in the implementation of a system, which capture most of the design elements in CAD (AutoCAD/AEC Tm), the study of their properties such as co-ordination and dimension and populates it into the object-oriented database systems to serve other application modules in the project model, i.e. SPACE. CAPE data module also provides several benefits. It provides essential support for the integration of design and construction, a generic set of building element classes, defines building elements with the necessary information at run-time, and a dynamic and an independent environment for all graphical packages such as CAD and YR.

This thesis is concerned with measuring and predicting the performance and effectiveness of a data fusion process. Its central proposition is that information entropy may be used to quantify concisely the effectiveness of the process. The personal and original contribution to that subject which is contained in this thesis is summarised as follows: The mixture of performance behaviours that occur in a data fusion system are described and modelled as the states of an ergodic Markov process. An new analytic approach to combining the entropy of discrete and continuous information is defined. A new simple and accurate model of data association performance is proposed. A new model is proposed for the propagation of information entropy in an minimum mean square combination of track estimates. A new model is proposed for the propagation of the information entropy of object classification belief as new observations are incorporated in a recursive Bayesian classifier. A new model to quantify the information entropy of the penalty of ignorance is proposed. New formulations of the steady state solution of the matrix Riccati equation to model tracker performance are proposed.

This thesis and its accompanying project are concerned with the use of digital technology in the representation of material culture. The thesis aims to find ways of using such technology that are appropriate to our present needs and to its potential. The computer is a technology which we understand, interact with and relate to through metaphor. I propose that many of the metaphors through which we understand it invoke the idea of an enclosed space. The use of such a trope might seem suitable when using computers for representing museum collections, or material culture in general, since it invokes the enclosed space of the museum. I examine how this idea of enclosure is manifested in computer developments such as virtual reality and artificial intelligence. I also look at how these developments are congruent with perspectival modes of visual representation privileged in the modern era. I argue that such metaphors and forms of representation, whether manifested in visual arts, the museum, or computer applications are problematic, bound up as they are with modern western ideas of mastery and transcendence, which are presently being subjected to critiques from various quarters. Throughout the modern era there have been forms of representation which have contested the dominant visual mode of modernity. These include the art of the Baroque in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and, in this century, the work of the Surrealists. In contrast to the rational, orthogonal space of modernity, both these deal with complex and fragmented representations of spaces and time. Such developments have been discussed as forms of representation appropriate to contemporary concerns about knowledge They also have a corollary in computing developments, such as multimedia and hypermedia, Yet, I argue, those working in multimedia have in the main failed to exploit the potential of such developments to enable new ways of representing knowledge. I propose looking to both the Baroque and Surrealism to find possible models and strategies for use in multimedia in the representation of material culture. In relation to this I describe practical work done in conjunction with this thesis which uses these models as the basis of a piece of multimedia software for the representation of material culture.

A study of research and the library school in the United States of America to 1965. The thesis traces developments in a range of selected areas in order to provide synthesising conclusions descriptive of developments in four periods established to facilitate ease of analysis. The subordinate areas focused on in the study include: (1) The idea and implications of research in relation to the library school; (2) Library education programmes and research at undergraduate and post graduate levels; (3) The development of research knowledge, skills and aptitudes through the library school curriculum; (4) Students and research in the library school; (5) Faculty and research in the library school; (6) The research institute or centre attached to, or within the library school; (7) The research product of the library school - research projects, theses, dissertations, and faculty research, and publication and dissemination; (8) The funding and support of library school research; and other narrower topic areas which have relevance only in particular periods. The periods established to assist analysis are: 1887–1927, 1927–1939, 1940–1951 and 1951–1965. In addition, because of its unique significance, a fifth section on the Graduate Library School at the University of Chicago 1928 to the 1940s is separately included. Finally, from an overview of developments throughout the period, key issues and factors which have proved critical to the development of research and the library school in the United States have been isolated for broader consideration.

In an age where information has become a crucial commodity, accessing appropriate information quickly is essential to economic success. Developing ways of improving information retrieval is therefore of central concern to human factors and technologists alike. One aspect of information access relates to the ability of individual office workers to manage and retrieve their own information effectively, and this is what the present research addresses. Previous work in the area has been dominated by designing computer interfaces for the average user. This research investigates how people's needs might differ according to circumstance and examines a wider range of design possibilities. Specifically it sets out to relate retrieval problems (specific information retrieval rather than e.g. browsing or reminding) to job and individual (personality) differences within the general context of personal information management in offices using traditional technologies of paper, filing cabinets and desks. This is achieved by both extensive fieldwork and the use of simulated filing-retrieval systems in a controlled context.

The thesis examines the nature and effectiveness of the communications system by which information about science reaches those not professionally involved with the subject. The range and diversity of individual engagements with science, has been explored, as have the links between such engagements and people's other non-professional activities and objectives.

Personal computers provide users with abilities to create, organize, store and access large amounts of information. Most of this information is in the form of documents in files organized in the hierarchical folder structures provided by the operating system. Operating system-provided access to these data is mainly through structure-guided navigation, and more recently through keyword search. This thesis describes the author's research into the accessibility and utilization of personal documents stored and organized using the hierarchical file system provided by common operating systems. An investigation was carried out on how users currently store and access their documents in these structures. Access and utility problems triggered a need to reconsider the navigation methods currently provided. Further investigation into navigation of personal document hierarchies using semantic metadata derived from the documents was carried out. A more intuitive exploratory interface that exposes the metadata for browsing-style navigation was implemented. The underlying organization is based on a model for navigation whereby documents are represented using index terms and associations between them exposed to create a linked, similarity-based navigation structure. Exposure of metadata-derived index terms in an interface was hypothesized to reduce the user's cognitive load and enable efficient and effective retrieval while also providing cues for discovery and recognition of associations between documents. Evaluation results of the implementation supports this hypothesis for retrieval of deeply located documents, as well as better overall effectiveness in associating and discovery of documents. The importance of semantic document metadata is also highlighted in demonstrations involving transfer of documents from the desktop to other organized document stores such as a repository.