Análise das abordagens Linguística Documentária e Análise de Domínio na Organização da Informação e Organização do Conhecimento. A análise consiste de um mapeamento da fundamentação teórica, objetivos e funções com base em discursos dos autores mais identificados com as vertentes mencionadas, bem como na literatura da Ciência da Informação, para compreender como cada abordagem concebe e desenvolve os seus principais conceitos, instrumentos e métodos. Após a descrição de cada abordagem foi feita uma análise comparativa com o objetivo de identificar semelhanças e diferenças e possível integração entre as abordagens no que se refere à elaboração e uso dos instrumentos e métodos de organização que visam à recuperação e à comunicação de informações. / Analysis of Documentary Linguistics and Domain Analysis approaches on Information Organization and Knowledge Organization. This analysis consists on a mapping of theoretical foundation, goals and functions based on most identified authors discourses with mentioned approaches, and also with Information Science Literature in order to understand the way each approach conceives and develops its main concepts, instruments and methods. After the description of each approach a comparative analysis was done to identify similarities, differences and integrations among approaches about elaboration and use of instruments and organization methods that aim communication information retrieval.

Orientador: José Augusto Chaves Guimarães / Banca: Lauro Frederico Barbosa da Silveira / Banca: Leilah Santiago Santiago Bufrem / Banca: Maria de Fátima Gonçalves Moreira Tálamo / Banca: Miguel Luiz Contani / Resumo: A Semiótica de C. S. Peirce (1839-1914), longe de ser uma ciência que explica a totalidade dos fenômenos abarcados pela organização da informação e do conhecimento, oferece conceitos fundamentais à Filosofia da linguagem e à Lógica, os quais podem lançar novas luzes à reflexão epistemológica da área. A principal questão teórica que norteia a pesquisa é saber quais as inter-relações teóricas e aplicadas entre organização da informação e do conhecimento e Filosofia e Semiótica peirceanas. Sustentou-se como hipótese que a Filosofia e a Semiótica peirceanas contribuem com explicações consistentes sobre os fenômenos decorrentes das atividades de organização da informação e do conhecimento. Para tanto, objetivou-se conhecer e avaliar as contribuições teóricas e aplicadas das Filosofia e Semiótica de Peirce para a área da organização da informação e do conhecimento. Trata-se de um estudo ao mesmo tempo bibliográfico e exploratório. Relata-se como resultados a presença dos níveis elementar e intermediário de interdisciplinaridade entre o pensamento de Peirce e a organização da informação e do conhecimento, principalmente, nos eixos Semiótica e Pragmatismo. / Abstract: The C. S. Peirce's (1839-1914) Semiotics, far from being a science that explains the totality of the phenomena covered by the information and knowledge organization, offers concepts that are fundamental for the language's Philosophy and for the Logic, each ones can launch news lights for epistemological reflection to the field. The main theoretical issue that guided the research is to know each are the theoretical and applied interrelations between information and knowledge organization and Peirce's Philosophy and Semiotics. The hypothesis supported is that Peirce's Philosophy and Semiotics contribute with consistent explications about the phenomena resulting from the activities of information and knowledge organization. Therefore the objective is to know and to value the theoretical and applied contributions of Peirce's Philosophy and Semiotics for the information and knowledge organization. It is at the same time a bibliography and exploratory study. It brings as results the presence of the elementary and intermediary levels of interdisciplinarity between the Peirce's thought and the information and knowledge organization, mainly, in the axle Semiotics and Pragmatism. / Doutor

万维网(World Wide Web ，简称Web) 从上世纪九十年代出现以来在深度和广度上都得到了巨大的发展，大量的Web应用前所未有地改变了人们的生活。Web的发展形成了个庞大而有价值的信息资源，然而由于Web 内容异质性给自动信息抽取所造成的困难，这个信息源并没有被充分地利用。因此， Web信息抽取是Web信息应用过程中非常关键的一环。一般情况下，一个网页用来描述一个单独的对象或者一组相似的对象。例如，关于某款数码相机的网页描述了该相机的各方面特征，而一个院系的教授列表则描述了一组教授的基本信息。相应地， Web信息抽取可以分为两大类，即面向单个对象细节的信息抽取和面向组对象记录的信息抽取。本文集中讨论后者，即从单的网页中抽取组半结构化的数据记录。 / 本文提出了两个框架来解决半结构化数据记录的抽取问题。首先介绍一个基于数据记录切分树的框架RST 。该框架中提出了个新的搜索结构即数据记录切分树。基于所设计的搜索策略，数据记录切分树可以有效地从网页中抽取数据记录。在数据记录切分树中，对应于可能的数据记录的DOM子树组是在搜索过程中动态生成的，这使得RST框架比已有的方法更具灵活性。比如在MDR和DEPTA 中， DOM子树组是根据预定义的方式静态生成的，未能考虑当前数据记录区域的特征。另外， RST框架中提出了一个基于"HTML Token" 单元的相似度计算方法。i衷方法可以综合MDR中基于字符串编辑距离的方法之优点和DEPTA 中基于树结构编辑距离的方法之优点。 / 很多解决数据记录抽取问题的已有方法(包括RST框架)都需要预定义若干硬性的条件，并且他们通过遍历DOM树结构来在一个网页中穷举搜索可能存在的数据记录区域。这些方法不能很好地处理大量的含有复杂数据记录结构的网页。因此，本文提出了第二个解决框架Skoga。 Skoga框架由一个DOM结构知识驱动的模型和一个记录切分树模型组成。Skoga框架可以对DOM结构进行全局的分析，进而实现更加有效的、鲁棒的记录识别。DOM结构知识包含DOM 背景知识和DOM统计知识。前者描述DOM结构中的一些逻辑关系，这些关系对DOM 的逻辑结构进行限制。而后者描述一个DOM节点或者一组DOM节点的特点，由一组经过巧妙设计的特征(Feature) 来表示。特征的权重是由参数估计算法在一个开发数据集上学习得到的。基于面向结构化输出的支持向量机( Structuredoutput Support Vector Machine) 模型，本参数估计算法可以很好地处理DOM节点之间的依赖关系。另外，本文提出了一个基于分治策略的优化方法来搜索一个网页的最优化记录识别。 / 最后，本文提出了一个利用半结构化数据记录来进行维基百科类目(Wikipedia Category) 扩充的框架。該框架首先从某个维基百科类目中获取几个已有的实体(Entity) 作为种子，然后利用这些种子及其信息框(Infobox) 中的属性来从Web上发掘更多的同一类目的实体及其属性信息。该框架的一个特点是它利用半结构化的数据记录来进行新实体和属性的抽取，而这些半结构化的数据记录是通过自动的方法从Web上获取的。该框架提出了一个基于条件随机场(Conditional Random Fields) 的半监督学习模型来利用有限的标注样本进行目标信息抽取。这个半监督学习模型定义了一个记录相似关系图来指导学习过程，从而利用大量非标注样本来获得更好的信息抽取效果。 / The World Wide Web has been extensively developed since its first appearance two decades ago. Various applications on theWeb have unprecedentedly changed humans' life. Although the explosive growth and spread of the Web have resulted in a huge information repository, yet it is still under-utilized due to the difficulty in automated information extraction (IE) caused by the heterogeneity of Web content. Thus, Web IE is an essential task in the utilization of Web information. Typically, a Web page may describe either a single object or a group of similar objects. For example, the description page of a digital camera describes different aspects of the camera. On the contrary, the faculty list page of a department presents the information of a group of professors. Corresponding to the above two types, Web IE methods can be broadly categorized into two classes, namely, description details oriented extraction and object records oriented extraction. In this thesis, we focus on the later task, namely semi-structured data record extraction from a single Web page. / In this thesis, we develop two frameworks to tackle the task of data record extraction. We first present a record segmentation search tree framework in which a new search structure, named Record Segmentation Tree (RST), is designed and several efficient search pruning strategies on the RST structure are proposed to identify the records in a given Web page. The subtree groups corresponding to possible data records are dynamically generated in the RST structure during the search process. Therefore, this framework is more exible compared with existing methods such as MDR and DEPTA that have a static manner of generating subtree groups. Furthermore, instead of using string edit distance or tree edit distance, we propose a token-based edit distance which takes each DOM node as a basic unit in the cost calculation. / Many existing methods, including the RST framework, for data record extraction from Web pages contain pre-coded hard criteria and adopt an exhaustive search strategy for traversing the DOM tree. They fail to handle many challenging pages containing complicated data records and record regions. In this thesis, we also present another framework Skoga which can perform robust detection of different kinds of data records and record regions. Skoga, composed of a DOM structure knowledge driven detection model and a record segmentation search tree model, can conduct a global analysis on the DOM structure to achieve effective detection. The DOM structure knowledge consists of background knowledge as well as statistical knowledge capturing different characteristics of data records and record regions as exhibited in the DOM structure. Specifically, the background knowledge encodes some logical relations governing certain structural constraints in the DOM structure. The statistical knowledge is represented by some carefully designed features that capture different characteristics of a single node or a node group in the DOM. The feature weights are determined using a development data set via a parameter estimation algorithm based on structured output Support Vector Machine model which can tackle the inter-dependency among the labels on the nodes of the DOM structure. An optimization method based on divide and conquer principle is developed making use of the DOM structure knowledge to quantitatively infer the best record and region recognition. / Finally, we present a framework that can make use of the detected data records to automatically populate existing Wikipedia categories. This framework takes a few existing entities that are automatically collected from a particular Wikipedia category as seed input and explores their attribute infoboxes to obtain clues for the discovery of more entities for this category and the attribute content of the newly discovered entities. One characteristic of this framework is to conduct discovery and extraction from desirable semi-structured data record sets which are automatically collected from the Web. A semi-supervised learning model with Conditional Random Fields is developed to deal with the issues of extraction learning and limited number of labeled examples derived from the seed entities. We make use of a proximate record graph to guide the semi-supervised leaning process. The graph captures alignment similarity among data records. Then the semisupervised learning process can leverage the benefit of the unlabeled data in the record set by controlling the label regularization under the guidance of the proximate record graph. / Detailed summary in vernacular field only. / Detailed summary in vernacular field only. / Detailed summary in vernacular field only. / Detailed summary in vernacular field only. / Bing, Lidong. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2012. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 114-123). / Abstract also in Chinese. / Chapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter 1.1 --- Web Era and Web IE --- p.1 / Chapter 1.2 --- Semi-structured Record and Region Detection --- p.3 / Chapter 1.2.1 --- Problem Setting --- p.3 / Chapter 1.2.2 --- Observations and Challenges --- p.5 / Chapter 1.2.3 --- Our Proposed First Framework - Record Segmentation Tree --- p.9 / Chapter 1.2.4 --- Our Proposed Second Framework - DOM Structure Knowledge Oriented Global Analysis --- p.10 / Chapter 1.3 --- Entity Expansion and Attribute Acquisition with Semi-structured Data Records --- p.13 / Chapter 1.3.1 --- Problem Setting --- p.13 / Chapter 1.3.2 --- Our Proposed Framework - Semi-supervised CRF Regularized by Proximate Graph --- p.15 / Chapter 1.4 --- Outline of the Thesis --- p.17 / Chapter 2 --- Literature Survey --- p.19 / Chapter 2.1 --- Semi-structured Record Extraction --- p.19 / Chapter 2.2 --- Entity Expansion and Attribute Acquisition --- p.23 / Chapter 3 --- Record Segmentation Tree (RST) Framework --- p.27 / Chapter 3.1 --- Overview --- p.27 / Chapter 3.2 --- Record Segmentation Tree --- p.29 / Chapter 3.2.1 --- Basic Record Segmentation Tree --- p.29 / Chapter 3.2.2 --- Slimmed Segmentation Tree --- p.30 / Chapter 3.2.3 --- Utilize RST in Record Extraction --- p.31 / Chapter 3.3 --- Search Pruning Strategies --- p.33 / Chapter 3.3.1 --- Threshold-Based Top k Search --- p.33 / Chapter 3.3.2 --- Complexity Analysis --- p.35 / Chapter 3.3.3 --- Composite Node Pruning --- p.37 / Chapter 3.3.4 --- More Challenging Record Region Discussion --- p.37 / Chapter 3.4 --- Similarity Measure --- p.41 / Chapter 3.4.1 --- Encoding Subtree with Tokens --- p.42 / Chapter 3.4.2 --- Tandem Repeat Detection and Distance-based Measure --- p.42 / Chapter 4 --- DOM Structure Knowledge Oriented Global Analysis (Skoga) Framework --- p.45 / Chapter 4.1 --- Overview --- p.45 / Chapter 4.2 --- Design of DOM Structure Knowledge --- p.49 / Chapter 4.2.1 --- Background Knowledge --- p.49 / Chapter 4.2.2 --- Statistical Knowledge --- p.51 / Chapter 4.3 --- Finding Optimal Label Assignment --- p.54 / Chapter 4.3.1 --- Inference for Bottom Subtrees --- p.55 / Chapter 4.3.2 --- Recursive Inference for Higher Subtree --- p.57 / Chapter 4.3.3 --- Backtracking for the Optimal Label Assignment --- p.59 / Chapter 4.3.4 --- Second Optimal Label Assignment --- p.60 / Chapter 4.4 --- Statistical Knowledge Acquisition --- p.62 / Chapter 4.4.1 --- Finding Feature Weights via Structured Output SVM Learning --- p.62 / Chapter 4.4.2 --- Region-oriented Loss --- p.63 / Chapter 4.4.3 --- Cost Function Optimization --- p.65 / Chapter 4.5 --- Record Segmentation and Reassembling --- p.66 / Chapter 5 --- Experimental Results of Data Record Extraction --- p.68 / Chapter 5.1 --- Evaluation Data Set --- p.68 / Chapter 5.2 --- Experimental Setup --- p.70 / Chapter 5.3 --- Experimental Results on TBDW --- p.73 / Chapter 5.4 --- Experimental Results on Hybrid Data Set with Nested Region --- p.76 / Chapter 5.5 --- Experimental Results on Hybrid Data Set with Intertwined Region --- p.78 / Chapter 5.6 --- Empirical Case Studies --- p.79 / Chapter 5.6.1 --- Case Study One --- p.80 / Chapter 5.6.2 --- Case Study Two --- p.83 / Chapter 6 --- Semi-supervised CRF Regularized by Proximate Graph --- p.85 / Chapter 6.1 --- Overview --- p.85 / Chapter 6.2 --- Semi-structured Data Record Set Collection --- p.88 / Chapter 6.3 --- Semi-supervised Learning Model for Extraction --- p.89 / Chapter 6.3.1 --- Proximate Record Graph Construction --- p.91 / Chapter 6.3.2 --- Semi-Markov CRF and Features --- p.94 / Chapter 6.3.3 --- Posterior Regularization --- p.95 / Chapter 6.3.4 --- Inference with Regularized Posterior --- p.97 / Chapter 6.3.5 --- Semi-supervised Training --- p.97 / Chapter 6.3.6 --- Result Ranking --- p.98 / Chapter 6.4 --- Derived Training Example Generation --- p.99 / Chapter 6.5 --- Experiments --- p.100 / Chapter 6.5.1 --- Experiment Setting --- p.100 / Chapter 6.5.2 --- Entity Expansion --- p.103 / Chapter 6.5.3 --- Attribute Extraction --- p.107 / Chapter 7 --- Conclusions and Future Work --- p.110 / Chapter 7.1 --- Conclusions --- p.110 / Chapter 7.2 --- Future Work --- p.112 / Bibliography --- p.113

Made available in DSpace on 2014-06-11T19:31:01Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2009-03-02Bitstream added on 2014-06-13T19:19:54Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 espiritosanto_sm_dr_mar.pdf: 639676 bytes, checksum: 303974d8b535e48f196ca218db6c9bda (MD5) / A presente tese estuda os conteúdos do desenvolvimento das coleções e da documentação sobre a representação museológica do Oeste paulista (Oeste Paulista, 1948-1958) no Brasil. O trabalho também inclui a análise da personagem agenciadora no exemplo específico e o caso sobre o processo de criação do museu de história natural e oficial e sobre a economia do café. O contexto econômico e da cultura material, nesse estudo do Museu Histórico e de Ordem geral, talvez guarde os aspectos do corpo material e os processos do colecionismo, da documentação de objetos e dos documentos. / The present thesis studies the contents of the development of the collections and the documentation on the museológica representation of the São Paulo West (São Paulo West, 1948-1958) in Brazil. The work also includes the analysis of the agent personality in the special example and the case on the creation process of the natural and official history museum and the coffee economy. Perhaps the economic and the material culture context, in this History Museum and general Order study, holds the aspects of the material body and the colecionismo processes, objects documentation and documents.

Análise das abordagens Linguística Documentária e Análise de Domínio na Organização da Informação e Organização do Conhecimento. A análise consiste de um mapeamento da fundamentação teórica, objetivos e funções com base em discursos dos autores mais identificados com as vertentes mencionadas, bem como na literatura da Ciência da Informação, para compreender como cada abordagem concebe e desenvolve os seus principais conceitos, instrumentos e métodos. Após a descrição de cada abordagem foi feita uma análise comparativa com o objetivo de identificar semelhanças e diferenças e possível integração entre as abordagens no que se refere à elaboração e uso dos instrumentos e métodos de organização que visam à recuperação e à comunicação de informações. / Analysis of Documentary Linguistics and Domain Analysis approaches on Information Organization and Knowledge Organization. This analysis consists on a mapping of theoretical foundation, goals and functions based on most identified authors discourses with mentioned approaches, and also with Information Science Literature in order to understand the way each approach conceives and develops its main concepts, instruments and methods. After the description of each approach a comparative analysis was done to identify similarities, differences and integrations among approaches about elaboration and use of instruments and organization methods that aim communication information retrieval.

As coleções precedem o gabinete de curiosidades e o museu e remete a motivações diferentes que revelam aspectos da matriz cultural de cada época. De modo análogo, as formas de organização dos objetos, livros e obras de arte seguem as referências de seu tempo sendo sensíveis às mudanças. Neste trabalho, procuramos mostrar como se dá esta relação em determinados momentos, escolhidos por suas características de ruptura e transformação. Enquanto nas \'bibliotecas\' (ou bibliografias) e nos Gabinetes de Curiosidades do Renascimento a ordem se ligava à analogia e à semelhança por parentesco (divinatio), com Descartes a semelhança passa a ser feita pela comparação, obtida pela medida. Tais mudanças se refletem tanto nas formas de arranjo e classificação dos objetos, como na própria vida dos museus, que passam a organizar suas coleções a partir de critérios artificiais e abstratos. Com o Modernismo europeu, na passagem do séc. XIX para o séc. XX, a introdução de novas tecnologias acaba por provocar novas mudanças que são sentidas até os nossos dias com a comunicação digital. Grande parte dos problemas desse museu pode ser creditado ao fato de que estabeleceu a coleção como foco de sua atuação e com isto suas atividades operacionais passaram a predominar sobre seus propósitos ou papel social. O museu do século XXI, no entanto, deverá alterar esse procedimento de modo a contemplar as relações entre as pessoas e o museu, bem como com a coleção e a obra. Só assim o museu passará a ser um espaço de experiência ou um espaço-relacional. / Collections precedes the Cabinet of Curiosities and the museum and refers to different motivations that disclose aspects of the cultural matrix of each time. In an analogous way, the forms of organization of objects, books and works of art follow the references of their time being sensible to changes. In this paper, we intend to show the way this relation happens at specific moments in history, chosen for their characteristics of rupture and transformation. While in the ?libraries? (or bibliographies) and in the Cabinets of Curiosities from the Renaissance the order was bound up with the analogy and the similarity by kinship (divinatio), with Descartes the similarity starts to be characterized by comparison of measurable attributes. Such changes are reflected in the forms of arrangement and classification of objects, as in the proper life of the museums, which start to organize their collections from artificial and abstract criteria. With the European Modernism, from century XIX to XX, the introduction of new technologies ends up provoking new changes that are felt until nowadays with the digital communication. Most of the problems of this museum can be credited to the fact that it established the collection as the focus of its performance and with this its operational activities that started to predominate on its intentions or social paper. The XXI century museum, however, will have to modify this procedure in order to contemplate the relations between the people and the museum, as well as with the collection and the workmanship. Thus the museum will start to be a space of experience or a relational space one.

Users of the Web usually use search engines to find answers to a variety of questions. Although search engines can rapidly process a large number of Web documents, in many cases, the answers returned by search engines are not relevant to the user’s information need, although they do contain the same keywords as the query. This is because the Web contains information sources created by numerous authors independently, and the authors’ vocabularies vary greatly. Furthermore, most words in natural languages have inherent ambiguity. This vocabulary mismatch between user queries and Web sources is often addressed through query expansion. Moreover, user questions are often short. The results of a search can be improved when the length of the question is long. Various query expansion methods that add useful question-related terms before processing the question have been proposed and proven to increase the performance of the result. Some of these query expansion methods add contextual information related to the user and the question. On the other hand, human communications are quite successful and seem to be very easy. This is mainly due to the understanding of language and the world knowledge that humans have. Human communication is more successful when there is an implicit understanding of everyday situations of others who take part in the communication. Here the implicit situational information, or the “context” that humans share, enables them to have a more meaningful interaction amongst themselves. Similar to human–human communications, improving computers’ access to context can increase the richness of human–computer communications, giving more useful computational services to users. Based on the above factors, this research proposes a method to make use of context in order to understand and process user requests. Here, the term “context” means the meanings associated with key query terms and preferences that have to be decided in order to process the query. As in a natural environment, results produced to different users for the same question could vary in an automated system. If the automated system knows users’ preferences related to the question, then it could make use of these preferences to process user queries, producing more relevant and useful results to the user. Hence, a new approach for a personalised query expansion is proposed in this research, where user queries are expanded with user preferences and hence the expanded queries that will be used for processing vary for different users. An architecture that is required for such a Web application to carryout a personalised query expansion with contextual information is also proposed in the thesis. The preferences that could be used for the query expansion are therefore user-specific. Users have different set of preferences depending on the tasks they want to perform. Similar tasks that have same types of preferences can be grouped into task based domains. Hence, user preferences will be the same in a domain, and will vary across domains. Furthermore, there can be different types of subtasks that could be performed within a domain. The set of preferences that could be used for each sub task could vary, and it will be a sub set of the set of preferences of the domain. Hence, an approach for a personalised query expansion which adds user, domain and task-specific preferences to user queries is proposed in this research. The main stages of this expansion are identified and discussed in this thesis. Each of these stages requires different contextual information which is represented in the context model. Out of the main stages identified in the query expansion process, the first three stages, the domain identification, task identification, and missing parameter identification, are explored in the thesis. As the preferences used for the expansion depend on the query domain, it is necessary to identify the domain of the query at first instance. Hence, a domain identification algorithm which makes use of eight different features is proposed in the thesis to identify domains of given queries. This domain identification also reduces the ambiguity of query terms. When the query domain is identified, context/associating meanings of query terms are known. This limits the scope of the possible misinterpretations of query terms. A domain ontology, domain dictionary, and user profile are used by the domain identification algorithm. The domain ontology consists of objects and their categories, attributes of objects and their categories, relationships among objects, and instances and their categories in the domain. The domain dictionary consists of objects and attributes. This is created automatically from the domain ontology. The user profile has the long term preferences of the user that are domain-specific and general. When the domain of the query is known, in order to decide the preferences of the user, the task specified in the query has to be identified. This task identification process is found to be similar in domains with similar activities. Hence, domains are grouped at this stage. These domain groups and the rules that could be used to find out the tasks in the domain groups are identified and discussed in the thesis. For each sub tasks in the domain groups, the types of preferences that could be used to expand user queries are identified and are used to expand user queries. An experiment is designed to evaluate the performance of the proposed approach. The first three stages of the query expansion, the domain identification, task identification, and missing parameter identification, are implemented and evaluated. Samples of five domains are implemented, and queries are collected in these domains from various users. In order to create new domains, a wizard is provided by the system. This system also allows editing the existing domains, domain groups, and types of preferences in sub tasks of the domain groups. Instances of the attributes are manually identified and added to the system using the interface provided by the system. In each of the stages of the query expansion, the results of the queries are manually identified, and are compared with the results produced by the system. The results have confirmed that the proposed method has a positive impact in query expansion. The experiments, results and evaluation of the proposed query expansion approach are also presented in the thesis. The proposed approach for the query expansion could be used by search engines, organisations with a limited set of task domains, and any application that can be improved by making use of personalised query expansion. / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Thesis (M.S.)--Mississippi State University. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. / Title from title screen. Includes bibliographical references.

This study investigated the us e of cataloguing tools and resour ces in the University of Malawi (UNIMA) Libraries and the Malawi National Library Service (MNLS) in providing access to information. Cataloguing tools and resources are mainly used by cataloguers to process library materials fo r easy location and access to the collection. The cataloguer’s goal is to meet user needs and make available materials and services for the purpose of supporting the learning, te aching and research needs of the UNIMA Libraries and the MNLS. Cataloguing practice in most of the acad emic and public libraries in developing countries has lagged behind due to financial constraints. Poor budget allocations and economic problems have forced many libraries to operate inefficiently without preparing cataloguers for the work with effective training. The UNIMA Libraries and the MNLS have also been affected by this economic problem. In order to find out how catal oguing tools and resources are being used by cataloguers in UNIMA Libraries and the MNLS in providing access to information, a study sample consisting of fifty cataloguers and directors (Librarians) of libraries was chosen. The cataloguers and directors of libra ries were surveyed by means of a self administered questionnaire a nd an interview schedule to investigate availability and use of cataloguing tools and re sources and the effectiveness of the services to provide for the information needs of the users. Other information requested from the respondents related to the probl ems encountered with the tool s and training offered to the cataloguers. A to tal of thirty-fiv e cataloguers and directors of libraries responded yielding a 70 % response rate. The results were analysed using SPSS. The results were shown in the form of tables and figures. The study revealed that the majority of cataloguers in the UNIMA Libraries and the MNLS used the cataloguing t ools and resources but relati vely infrequently. Results also revealed that the cata loguers encountered various pr oblems with the tools which most of them attributed to a lack of training to adequately prepare them for cataloguing requirements. In addition, the majority of libraries had cataloguing iv backlogs which were attribut ed to various factors such as a lack of professionally trained staff in cataloguing and a lack of cataloguing tools and resources. Recommendations and sugges tions to improve the catal oguing practice in general were made by both the researcher and re spondents with regard to the findings and the literature reviewed. / Thesis (M.I.S.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2009.

Mergers of higher education institutions in South Africa have had a significant impact on the higher education sector. Unfortunately, libraries are not often regarded as a key component in a merger between two institutions. Rather as a result of the merger, libraries have to find how they fit into the broader picture. Very little research has been published in terms of the effects these mergers have had on library catalogues. In this study, the merging of the library catalogues of the Edminson Library at the Edgewood College of Education in Pinetown and the E.G. Malherbe Library of the University of Natal on the Durban campus was researched to determine how these library catalogues were merged and how successful this process was. To meet the objectives of this study, semi-structured interviews were conducted with the major role-players who were involved in, or affected by this process. Considering that this was the first time that a study of this nature pertaining to the merger of library catalogues was conducted in South Africa, a literature review was conducted to investigate similar studies involving library catalogue mergers. Important themes from the literature were identified. Unpublished material such as minutes of meetings and annual reports formed an integral part of the information gathering process. An analysis of the information collected at the interviews was done through content analysis. The evidence from all these sources finally resulted in conclusions and the lessons learnt throughout the process of the merger. / Thesis (M.I.S.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2009.