The information transfer in the context of hospitals in two countries, the UK and Brazil has been observed and analysed. This entailed identifying patterns of information use and need by medical professionals and ancillaries in both countries, and especially in determining deficiencies in satisfying such needs.

This study arose from my first professional work in 1973 while engaged in the National Youth Service Corps programme. I was then attached to the Rivers State Ministry of Education, Inspectorate Division, as a school librarian. Many foreign organisations and individuals had generously donated large consignments of books and other reading materials to schools and libraries in the area to offset the losses incurred during the Civil War between 1967 and 1970. These consignments were kept unused in a warehouse in Port Harcourt pending the time when the officials from the Ministry of Education would decide on how to distribute them to schools and libraries in the area. In September 1973, a decision was taken to share the books among the various schools and colleges that could 'evacuate' them from the warehouses without further delay. Being the only school librarian in the Ministry, I was given the responsibility to carry out the distribution. The arbitrary and hurried manner in which the distribution was effected was not the way in which the overseas donors would have expected or desired. Consequently, there arose in me a desire to take stock of past foreign aid to libraries in the country at large with a view of determining how they had been utilized.

The objects of this research are large, medium and small export/ import firms. This investigation represents an attempt to understand information-seeking behaviour in the IT export/import business in Britain and Saudi Arabia. Quantitative and qualitative research methods have been used in analysing the structure of the various IT export/import information provisions. The strengths and weaknesses of various forms of information provision are examined in terms of their effectiveness and efficiency. A structured analysis of various information sources (such as magazines and IT trade fairs) has also been made.

The issue of centralization vs decentralization in university library systems is studied in the context of Saudi Arabia. After a review of the relevant literature, background information is given on Saudi Arabia, with special focus on the higher education sector and its development, and on university library systems. The present situation of three selected university library systems is examined in comparison with library standards, together with the attitudes of users and professionals to .different aspects of the library systems and their quality. The methodology used was descriptive and analytical research, and data were gathered by distribution of three sets of survey questionnaires. An analysis and discussion of survey results is presented in chapters on library use, user satisfaction and user views. A summary of findings and an indication of both general and specific recommendations complete the thesis.

XML has become the standard way for representing and transforming data over the World Wide Web. The problem with XML documents is that they have a very high ratio of redundancy, which makes these documents demanding large storage capacity and high network band-width for transmission. Because of their extensive use, XML documents could be retrieved according to vague queries by naive users with poor background in writing XPath query. The aim of this thesis is to present the design of a system named “XML Compressing and Vague Querying (XCVQ)” which has the ability of compressing the XML document and retrieving the required information from the compressed version with less decompression required according to vague queries. XCVQ first compressed the XML document by separating its data into containers and then compress these containers using the GZip compressor. The compressed file could be retrieved if a vague query is submitted without the need to decompress the whole file. For the purpose of processing the vague queries, XCVQ decomposes the query according to the relevant documents and then a second decomposition stage is made according to the relevant containers. Only the required information is decompressed and submitted to the user. To the best of our knowledge, XCVQ is the first XML compressor that has the ability to process vague queries. The average compression ratio of the designed compressor is around 78% which may be considered competitive compared to other queriable XML compressors. Based on several experiments, the query processor part had the ability to answer different kinds of vague queries ranging from simple exact match queries to complex ones that require retrieving information from several compressed XML documents.

Ausschreibung "Sächsischer Bibliothekspreis 2011" 2011 wurde zum Europäischen Jahr der Freiwilligentätigkeiten zur Förderung der aktiven Bürgerschaft ausgerufen. Auch in Bibliotheken leisten engagierte Freiwillige bereits seit Jahren wertvolle Arbeit; einige kommunale Bibliotheken wären ohne ehrenamtliche Hilfe gar in ihrer Existenz bedroht.

This thesis examines the historical array of 'social' and 'technical' factors that have shaped the development and evolution of Korean national Coded Character Set (CCS) standards. CCS standards refer to a layer of compatibility standards which specify rules for digital representation of textual data at the most basic level of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). The effective and efficient operation of information processing, storage, and exchange is thus dependent on the employment of technically sound, economically viable, and culturally adequate CCS standards at national, regional and international levels. Historicaily, the CCS standards had emerged around the cultural presumptions and practices of the US and Western Europe due to the economic and tcchnical dominance of the region from the formative stage of ICTs development. As the need for global information infrastructure and multilingual information processing has been growing, however, the international CCS standards regime has evolved (from 1SO 646, to ISO 2022, and JSO/IEC 10646-1) to incorporate various national scripts around the world, and the issues have arisen over the adequate representation of these scripts within the international standards regime. For example, the incorporation of East Asian scripts, such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, presents a formidable challenge with their exceptionally large repertoire. In particular, the design and implementation of Korean national CCS standards, normally a exclusive domain of experts and bureaucrats, had caused a series of heated public controversies during the 1980s and 1990s. Despite the intensity of disputes and the breadth of participation in the controversies on Korean national CCS standards, the standardisation process had not been subject to a detailed socio-economic analysis, the lack of which allowed deterministic and simplistic speculations to appear, implying technological rationality, economic imperatives or corporate strategics alone have guided the CCS standards along a linear development path with increasingly larger and more powerful standards replacing previous ones. Drawing on the social shaping of technology perspective, the case study examines the evolution of Korean national CCS standards, focusing both on the process in which a standards emerges as a result of network building activities and alliance formation of various actors, and on the changes in immediate and broader contexts around the standardisation which directly and indirectly affect the interests alliances and evolution of standards. Contrary to the deterministic and simplistic perspectives, the case study suggests a structured but also dynamic social shaping process of the Korean national CCS standards. Four major themes forwarded in the case study are as below: First, the case identified a received view on the Korean controversy which can be characterised as 'technological fix on cultural problem' in a sense that technical challenge experienced in Korean character encoding was a product of distinctive local culture and the problem was fixed by the steady advances in the information technology. Without denying the importance of the state of technological capabilities, however, the case shows that social choices had been made both in international and national standards and had critical roles in shaping various controversy and whole national standards sdting process. Second, the case study identifies two contrasting modes of standardisation, 'technicisation' and 'politicisation,' and examines how the fluctuation between them has affected the development of Korean national standards setting process. In the discourse of technicised standardisation, technological knowledge is accepted as neutral, asocial 'hard fact.' Accordingly, the social choices are obscured and the standardisation process is to be dominated by the negotiation among disinterested experts over the relative technical merits of standards. Under the politicised mode of standardisation,' the political nature of CCS standards design - conflicting values and incongruent ascription of technological properties as a result - is brought forward. The standardisation is characterised by the formation of and competition among interests alliances. The outcome of standardislltion seems to be dependent on which mode is dominant as well as who prevails in each mode. Third, the case study raises a question about the relationship between the standards and interests embedded in them. The ascription of certain technological properties to standards and the interests alliances built around them proved unstable and dynamic. Both of them seem to be influenced by network building activities of llctors and their backdrop, a specific configuration of economic, social, cultural, political and technological factors, enabling and constraining the activities of actors involved in the standardisation process. As the makeup of the configuration changes for various reasons, - for example, globalised software market, social movements, surge of nationalism, political democratisation, advances in related technological field - the meanings attached by the actors to the standard also shifts, and the interests alliances based on them are unmade and replaced by new ones, producing a series of character set standards. Fourth, the study also draws attention to the complexity involved in the nlltional standardisation process and the challenge faced by the social research into those intricate social shaping process. The standardisation process involved many actors at different levels and across various geographical locales. Also there had been recurrent but unpredictable changes in the relationship among the actors and between the actors and artefacts. A recent trend in the social shaping approach - a call for a decentralised concept of actor and the transforming terrain of innovation - was found hrlpful to meet the challenge. In particular, the concept of 'development arena' was found useful to meet the challenge and to understand the case in balance between the actions of different 'modes of performance' and the contexts of varying 'configurations' of heterogeneous clements.

This thesis is concerned with the role of new information and communication technologies (lCTs) in community development. Bhalla and James (1988) have stated, 'The rapidly advancing scientific and technological frontier will inevitably have monumental consequences for the Third World ... Equally predictable, however, is that modem technologies will be deployed in developing countries ... ' With this in mind, questions central to the current research are asked: Is Africa being left behind in the new information revolution? Will the new ICTs aid deVelopment in African countries, and in particular, are local communities going to be empowered or marginalized? Is there room for optimism? To address these questions and investigate the potential of ICTs to aid community development, the author outlines the importance of community development, particularly the role played by small enterprises and women in development (Chapter Two). Further, the chapter looks at the information needs of these economic sectors and the intermediary bodies that have been formed to assist them. Chapter Three seeks to show the importance of technology within the development process, and in particular, the importance of local capacities and local technologies. These are deemed necessary for technology blending which adapts new technologies to local circumstances. In Chapter Four, the author reviews the growth ofICTs and related institutions identifying constraints that have been encountered and how they are being addressed. Significant is the discovery that African telecommunications generate higher profits than those in other parts of the world; this should allow efficiency gains which should permit major expansion in ICTs within current investment levels. Reports on field research carried out in Kenya and South Africa are given in Chapter Five. In both countries, small enterprises and women's development were identified as key players in community development. To this end, intermediary organizations involved in these two areas were identified for study: the Women's Bureau and the Kenya Industrial Estates in Kenya; and the Women's National Coalition, the Small Businesses Advisory Bureau, BRIDGES and Mamelodi in South Africa. Whilst all the organizations were providing benefits to target communities, the South African organizations showed greater capacity for delivering assistance. All demonstrated high management skills and exploited the new opportunities provided through a sound infrastructure and a political will, to extend assistance to local communities in various ways. The final Chapter draws reasoned conclusions pointing out three necessary success factors: infrastructure, management skills and political will. With these three critical factors in mind, the author makes recommendations to government, commerce and industry, agencies serving local communities, international agencies and to researchers. To this end, the thesis makes a contribution of value to all potential stakeholders. It also provides guidance to future researchers into African development.

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