Das Information Resource Center (IRC) des amerikanischen Generalkonsulats in Leipzig spielt seit vielen Jahren eine aktive Rolle im bibliothekarischen Netzwerk der Bundesländer Sachsen, Sachsen-Anhalt und Thüringen. Zurzeit besteht ein aktives Arbeitsverhältnis mit rund 40 Bibliotheken, zu denen wissenschaftliche und öffentliche Bibliotheken sowie Schulbibliotheken gehören, aber auch die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek in Leipzig. Seit 2006 wurden im Rahmen des America@YourLibrary (A@YL) Programms der USBotschaft in Berlin 5 Bibliotheken, nämlich die Stadtbibliothek Leipzig, die Stadtbibliothek Chemnitz, die Bibliothek der Europa-Schule in Görlitz, die Stadtbibliothek in Magdeburg, und die Stadtund Landesbibliothek in Erfurt A@YL, Partnerbibliotheken des US-Generalkonsulats...

This study observed the interaction between historically disadvantaged undergraduate students and on-line information retrieval systems at the University of the Western Cape and the Cape Peninsula University of Technology.

<p>Today every organization is committed to some kind of environmental scanning in order to get necessary knowledge of the world around them. The acquisition, organization and storage of information in combination with a strategic use, is today an important factor for a successful organisation in any sector of our society.In this Master thesis I have studied how an organisation such as The Confederation of Swedish Enterprise (Svenskt Näringsliv) handles its information resources. I have also looked at the flow of information within the organization. The Confederation of Swedish Enterprise is Sweden’s largest business federation representing 50 member organizations and 55 000 member companies. The core business is to create better business conditions for companies as well as opinionbuilding, research and developing positions on expert issues.As a theoretical framework I have used Chun Choos theories and his model on The Information Management Cycle. In this casestudy I have conducted (four of seven steps of) an Information Audit and interviewed employees of The Confederation of Swedish Enterprise, both experts and personnel in charge of the information resources. My results show that there is multitude of information resources within the organization. The users make individual choices concerning which resources to use and how to use them. This reflects the environment in which the organization exists and operates in. In my study I also find that The Confederation of Swedish Enterprise has a strategic approach to information and the process of communication, which constitutes a favourable position for the organisation to work towards its goals.</p>

Today every organization is committed to some kind of environmental scanning in order to get necessary knowledge of the world around them. The acquisition, organization and storage of information in combination with a strategic use, is today an important factor for a successful organisation in any sector of our society.In this Master thesis I have studied how an organisation such as The Confederation of Swedish Enterprise (Svenskt Näringsliv) handles its information resources. I have also looked at the flow of information within the organization. The Confederation of Swedish Enterprise is Sweden’s largest business federation representing 50 member organizations and 55 000 member companies. The core business is to create better business conditions for companies as well as opinionbuilding, research and developing positions on expert issues.As a theoretical framework I have used Chun Choos theories and his model on The Information Management Cycle. In this casestudy I have conducted (four of seven steps of) an Information Audit and interviewed employees of The Confederation of Swedish Enterprise, both experts and personnel in charge of the information resources. My results show that there is multitude of information resources within the organization. The users make individual choices concerning which resources to use and how to use them. This reflects the environment in which the organization exists and operates in. In my study I also find that The Confederation of Swedish Enterprise has a strategic approach to information and the process of communication, which constitutes a favourable position for the organisation to work towards its goals.

Processing and optimizing ad-hoc and continual queries in an open environment with distributed, autonomous, and heterogeneous data servers (e.g., the Internet) pose several technical challenges. First, it is well known that optimized query execution plans constructed at compile time make some assumptions about the environment (e.g., network speed, data sources' availability). When such assumptions no longer hold at runtime, how can I guarantee the optimized execution of the query? Second, it is widely recognized that runtime adaptation is a complex and difficult task in terms of cost and benefit. How to develop an adaptation methodology that makes the runtime adaptation beneficial at an affordable cost? Last, but not the least, are there any viable performance metrics and performance evaluation techniques for measuring the cost and validating the benefits of runtime adaptation methods? To address the new challenges posed by Internet query and search systems, several areas of computer science (e.g., database and operating systems) are exploring the design of systems that are adaptive to their environment. However, despite the large number of adaptive systems proposed in the literature up to now, most of them present a solution for adapting the system to a specific change to the runtime environment. Typically, these solutions are not easily ``extendable' to allow the system to adapt to other runtime changes not predicted in their approach. In this dissertation, I study the problem of how to construct a framework where I can catalog the known solutions to query processing adaptation and how to develop an application that makes use of this framework. I call the solution to these two problems the Ginga approach. I provide in this dissertation three main contributions: The first contribution is the adoption of the Adaptation Space concept combined with feedback-based control mechanisms for coordinating and integrating different kinds of query adaptations to different runtime changes. The second contribution is the development of a systematic approach, called Ginga, to integrate the adaptation space with feedback control that allows me to combine the generation of predefined query plans (at compile-time) with reactive adaptive query processing (at runtime), including policies and mechanisms for determining when to adapt, what to adapt, and how to adapt. The third contribution is a detailed study on how to adapt to two important runtime changes, and their combination, encountered during the execution of distributed queries: memory constraints and end-to-end delays.

MASTS is an extensible, feature rich, software architecture based on tabu search (TS), a metaheuristic that relies on memory structures to intelligently organize and navigate the search space. MASTS introduces a new methodology of rule based objectives (RBOs), in which the search objective is replaced with a binary comparison operator more capable of expressing a variety of preferences. In addition, MASTS supports a new metastrategy, dynamic neighborhood selection (DNS), which “learns” about the search landscape to implement an adaptive intensification-diversification strategy. DNS can improve search performance by directing the search to promising regions and reducing the number of required evaluations. To demonstrate the flexibility and range of capabilities, MASTS is applied to two complex decision problems in conservation planning and groundwater management. As an extension of MASTS, ConsNet addresses the spatial conservation area network design problem (SCANP) in conservation biology. Given a set of possible geographic reserve sites, the goal is to select which sites to place under conservation to preserve unique elements of biodiversity. Structurally, this problem resembles the NP-hard set cover problem, but also considers additional spatial criteria including compactness, connectivity, and replication. Modeling the conservation network as a graph, ConsNet uses novel techniques to quickly compute these spatial criteria, exceeding the capabilities of classical optimization methods and prior planning software. In the arena of groundwater planning, MASTS demonstrates extraordinary flexibility as both an advanced search engine and a decision aid. In House Bill 1763, the Texas state legislature mandates that individual Groundwater Conservation Districts (GCDs) must work together to set specific management goals for the future condition of regional groundwater resources. This complex multi-agent multi-criteria decision problem involves finding the best way to meet these goals considering a host of decision variables such as pumping locations, groundwater extraction rates, and drought management policies. In two separate projects, MASTS has shaped planning decisions in the Barton Springs/Edwards Aquifer Conservation District and Groundwater Management Area 9 (GMA9). The software has been an invaluable decision support tool for planners, stakeholders, and scientists alike, allowing users to explore the problem from a multicriteria perspective. / text

published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Education / Master / Master of Science in Information Technology in Education

The second international m-Libraries conference schedule & guidebook features the conference program; pre-conference workshops; and, local/UBC tours, events and attractions. A listing of the various conference committees and sponsors including the names of the organizing committee chair members, the graphic artist, the conference staff, and the consultant are shown on pages 27 and 28.

Attached is the list of 15 session abstracts and proposals from the second international m-Libraries Conference, held and sponsored on 23 & 24 June 2009, by the University of British Columbia in conjunction with Athabasca University, The Open University and Thompson Rivers University.

The purpose of this mixed methods study was to investigate the Web search strategies used to retrieve information from the Web by postgraduate students at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg campus in order to address the weaknesses of undergraduate students with regard to their Web searching strategies. The study attempted to determine the Web search tactics used by postgraduate students, the Web search strategies (i.e. combinations of tactics) they used, how they determined whether their searches were successful and the search tool they preferred. In addition, the study attempted to contribute toward building a set of best practices when searching the Web. The sample population consisted of 331 postgraduate students, yielding a response rate of 95%. The study involved a two-phased approach adopting a survey in Phase 1 and interviews in the Phase 2. Proportionate stratified random sampling was used and the population was divided into five mutually exclusive groups (i.e., postgraduate diploma, postgraduate certificate, Honours, Master’s and PhD). A pre-test was conducted with ten postgraduate students from the Pietermaritzburg campus. The study revealed that the majority of postgraduate students have been searching the Web for six years or longer and that most postgraduate students searched the Web for information from five to less than ten hours a week. Most respondents gained their knowledge on Web searching through experience and only a quarter of the respondents have been given formal training on Web searching. The Web searching strategies explored contribute to the best practices with regard to Web search strategies, as interviewees were selected based on the highest number of search tactics used and they have several years of searching experience. The study was also able to identify the most preferred Web search tool. It is envisaged that undergraduate students can potentially follow these search strategies to improve their information retrieval. This finding could also be beneficial to librarians in developing training modules that assist undergraduate students to use these Web search tools more efficiently. The final outcome of the study was an adaptation Bates’ (1979) model of Information Search Tactics to suit information searching on the Web. / Thesis (M.Com.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2012.