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This thesis studies relevance criteria for medical images' applied by health care professionals. The study also looks at the image information needs and image resources used by health care professionals, together with the image seeking behaviour of health care professionals from different disciplines. The work is a qualitative study that uses the Straussian version of grounded theory. The population of the study included health care professionals from different health and biomedical departments who worked in Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. In total twenty-nine health care professionals participated in this study and fifteen relevance criteria were identified from the data collected using semi-structured interviews and think-aloud protocols. The work forms part of the medical image retrieval track of ImageCLEF (ImageCLEFMed), and investigated the use of relevance criteria applied to search statements. Analysis indicates that some of the criteria identified by participants could be included in new topics used for future versions of the track. The findings of the study showed that health care professionals paid more attention to the visual attributes of medical images when selecting images and that they applied topical relevancy as the most frequent and most important criterion. The study found that health care professionals looked for medical images mainly for educational and research purposes and judged the relevancy of medical images based on their pictorial information needs and the image resources they used. We identified the difficulties that health care professionals faced when searching medical images in different image resources. Other findings also highlighted the need for, and the value of, looking at narrower subject communities within health and biomedical sciences for better understanding of relevance judgment and image seeking behaviour of the health care professionals.

Intellectual assets are strategic resources that underlie a library's sustainable growth. Many library experts are striving to design indicators for measuring the intangible sides of library organizations. However, very little effort has been made to develop indicators with specific reference to intellectual assets. The purpose of this study is to apply intellectual capital concepts to academic library settings by exploring types of intellectual assets from a new perspective for library managers, explaining the motivation behind an interest in intangible assessment, and developing indicators to evaluate measurable surrogates for library intellectual assets. The researcher selected the case study methodology to investigate the actual development of indicators at three university libraries in Thailand. Using multiple methods of data collection, document reviews and semi-structured interviews yielded the case descriptions, key success factors associated with intellectual assets, and initial intangible indicators. Small-scale surveys were sequentially undertaken to test user acceptance of the suggested indicators. The case findings from within-case analysis were compared to examine similar patterns across the three case libraries that led to the formation of theoretical propositions and the modification of the conceptual framework for developing intangible indicators. The key findings from this study are as follows: (1) library collections and services can be treated as an additional category of library intangibles because they are derived from a combination of human, structural and relationship assets; (2) two main motives for interest in intangible assessment are tracking progress on knowledge management projects and supplementing library evaluation reports with information on intangibles; and (3) most indicator users at the operations management level place more emphasis on the indicators developed for assessing human assets, as well as on collection and service assets. This research makes a major contribution to knowledge on library performance evaluation by providing the theoretically-informed, empirically-supported propositions that intellectual capital reporting principles are relevant and applicable to internal assessment practices in Thai academic libraries. These propositions may be transferable to other information service units where their contextual conditions are similar to the case study libraries.

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This thesis charts a course through an emerging landscape of online user participation in archives, focusing upon user involvement at the point of practice known to professional archivists as archival description. Recent years have seen significant growth in participatory initiatives in the archive sector, and the application of Web 2.0 technologies — augmenting traditions of user engagement and volunteering — has been widely heralded as a new opportunity to ‘democratise’ archival practice. The study considers a spectrum of online initiatives which have sought to benefit from the skills or knowledge of diverse user groups: from mass participation ‘crowdsourcing’ transcription projects, via tagging and commenting functionalities added to traditional archive catalogues, to community engagement programmes which have attempted to build up multiple layers of narrative interpretation. The research was designed around three principal stakeholder groups, professionals, participants, and users, seeking to address three main research questions: • Does online user participation constitute an evolution or a revolution in archival practice and professionalism? • What contexts and circumstances motivate and sustain participation? • Who benefits from user participation in archival description? Two new analytical frameworks are presented as navigation aids for this exploration of participatory archives, taken from the perspective of professional archivists and of participants respectively. The discussion on users is necessarily more speculative, but concludes that realisation of the claims made for the transformative impact of online user participation is dependent upon a redefinition of archival use which is inclusive of both participation and the communication of meaning, in addition to the routine processes of information seeking. Future research directions are identified therefore which lie at the points of intersection between engagement (participation and use combined) and professional theory and practice.

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This thesis consists of an examination of the ways in which information technology is used by people living in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, focussing on the range of uses in two locations within the region, the island of Islay, and the village of Ullapool in the northwest Highlands. The methods used to gather information were primarily ethnographic, based on extended stays in these two locations, backed up by interviews with individuals elsewhere whose professional experiences bring them into contact with information technology users throughout the region. These methods were chosen with the aim of exploring the ways in which information technology figures within the context of existing business activities, and the interviews conducted with businesses and individuals on Islay and in Ullapool provide in-depth accounts of the ways in which people have developed their ideas, skills and practices related to information technology. Their views are set alongside those expressed in published work on the contribution of information technology to rural development, an exercise which highlights a number of radical contrasts between the ways in which academic researchers and policy-makers have thought about information technology, and the manner in which people using information technology in the Highlands and Islands have approached the subject. In particular, rural development policy at various levels of government has given a high priority to publicising the supposed benefits of information technology for rural businesses, a strategy which has resulted in the publication of a considerable amount of information aimed at those living in rural areas. Those living on Islay and in Ullapool, on the other hand, generally cited 'word of mouth' as their principal source of ideas about information technology, and took a critical stance to the way information technology was presented in government publications and the media, often terming it 'hype'.

This research aimed to determine what web page attributes facilitate optimal website design for use by learning-disabled people – a topic hitherto rarely addressed. Qualitative research developed methods appropriate for this cohort, determined attributes that impact on usability and explored ways of eliciting preferences. Attributes related to menu position, text size and images, which were then examined quantitatively by comparing web pages of different layouts. Task-times were analysed, determining which attributes have the greatest impact on performance. The main predictor of task-time was menu position, followed by text size. Images did not affect performance. The study also found that learning-disabled people have only ‘serial access’ to information when searching individual pages – it being imbibed sequentially until the required content is reached. Words on the left of horizontal menus were found quicker than those in the middle or right. Information access took longer from vertical menus, possibly because of the juxtaposition of distracting body text. Images were ignored until reached ‘serially’– and thus did not help signpost content. Small-text was consumed quicker than large, as the latter took up more lines and required more eye movements to negotiate. A three category rating scale and simple interviews elicited web design preferences. The ‘neutral’ category proved troublesome and so a refined four category scale without this mid-point was adopted which yielded a greater variety of results. In verbally eliciting preferences, ‘acquiescence bias’ was minimised by avoiding polar interrogatives - partly achieved by comparing different designs. Preferred designs were for large-text and images – the reverse of those facilitating fastest retrieval times, a discrepancy due to preferences being judged on aesthetic considerations. Design recommendations are offered which reconcile preference and performance findings. These include using a horizontal menu, juxtaposing images and text, and reducing text from sentences to phrases – facilitating preferred large-text without increasing task-times.