This keynote address recounts the many important accomplishments and advancements in cataloguing theory and practice which have occurred between 1900 and 1999, and provides a backdrop for the papers and discussions which presented in the Conference on Bibliographic Control in the New Millennium. The address also serves as an upbeat reminder of all the progress that has been made and, we hope, will inspire conference participants to tackle the challenges of networked resources and the Web with enthusiasm and resolve.

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The Sami people are a national minority in Sweden, but are also considered as native citizens of Sweden, Norway, Finland and Russia. The world has however a very limited knowledge about the Sami’s and their cultural background. The aim of this proposal is to examine six different history schoolbooks which depict the Sami people in Sweden. In addition, one of the key elements of this proposal is to understand how the selected literature represents the Sami people. Lastly, the proposal also seeks to review if the literature in the schoolbooks represents the elementary curriculum goals (Lpo94). The selected method was to do a text analysis of the literature and to illustrate that is presented in the reviewed schoolbooks. The text analysis is completed with an analysis of the illustrations and pictures that are presented in the selected schoolbooks. The key findings were that the review in majority of schoolbooks has stereotypical descriptions of the Sami people. The Sami people are generally depicted with the hut and the reindeer management in majority of the reviewed schoolbooks. The research about the Sami people is inappreciable in majority of the reviewed literature. In addition, the Sami people are often presented in connection with “other” history, such as the silver ore in the mines or the territory dispute with settlers from the south of Sweden.   As a conclusion from the literature review, the Sami people are depicted as people with not much cultural history, static and none evolving.

The necessity of managing the tacit knowledge sharing is becoming more significant because of the upcoming demographic changes facing companies all over the industrialized part of the world. The so called baby boomers born in the middle part of the 20th century will soon reach the retirement age and this is anticipated to create an extensive loss of knowledge. In light of that, companies face a dilemma when over bridging the knowledge gap between their more experienced senior employees who have accumulated plenty of knowledge and the novel ones. It opens the discussion concerning how to “capture” that knowledge since it is the competitive advantage in the contemporary world. This is particularly sensible for knowledge-based firms which are the main focus of this study. Scholars have developed different approaches of the knowledge sharing phenomenon, but still there is a lack of understanding regarding how this abstract process should be supported in a daily basis. This work investigates the factors that aid or hinder the knowledge process within consulting firms as a prerequisite to reach a greater awareness of the particular setting that will foster the sharing. Supported by a theoretical background, this was accomplished by following a systems approach, favoring qualitative methods. The empirical data was collected using semistructured qualitative interviews within the headquarter offices of Pricewaterhouse Coopers in Stockholm, Sweden. The exploratory results suggest that by converging specific aspects, consulting firms can overcome the most common barriers when sharing knowledge transfer. Furthermore, it is pointed out the positive conditions a firm has to develop as well as Theoretical and Managerial implications.

The celebrated 'veil-of-ideas' argument is a skeptical argument that moves from a certain epistemological doctrine about perception to a general negative conclusion concerning our thoughts about external material objects. Indeed, the argument concludes not only that we do not know, but that neither could we know nor even reasonably believe, any of the thoughts that we may possibly entertain concerning external material objects. The epistemological doctrine about perception referred to in the argument has been in fashion since Descartes and states that the nature of perceptual knowledge in general is inferential. / In this thesis, we will attempt to defuse this argument by calling into question the epistemological doctrine upon which it relies. This method of defusing the argument appeals to some of the reasoning to be found in the writings of J. L. Austin and, more recently, John McDowell. The following is a rough outline of how we will proceed. First, we will briefly look at the skeptical argument in question. Second, we will examine the mainstay of the epistemological doctrine, the Argument from Illusion, and argue that without the appeal to a certain view about the nature of appearance, this argument is ineffective. Third, we will adduce reasons for rejecting this view of appearance and put forward an alternative. This alternative requires us to construe knowledge in fallibilist rather than infallibilist terms. Thus, finally, we will examine the fallibilist and infallibilist conceptions of knowledge.

In this study, I examined how science curricula designed based on the Knowledge Community and Inquiry (KCI) model (Slotta, 2007) would foster the development of knowledge communities in secondary school science classrooms. KCI situates scaffolded inquiry activities within a collective context. In two design iterations, I collaborated with high school teachers to design and implement grade-nine science curriculum units with the topic of Climate Change. Then, I probed the extent to which characteristics of classroom-based knowledge communities manifested in students’ collaborative inquiry activities and the product of their work. In both iterations, students worked for approximately 8 weeks in a sequence of interconnected collaborative inquiry activities, creating digital inquiry artifacts. Two class sections engaged in iteration 1 and created wiki pages about the effect of climate change in Canada. They, then, used these wiki pages to examine the implications of climate change on certain industries. Five class sections engaged in iteration 2 where students identified important climate change-related issues and examined scientific aspects of those issues along with existing remediation plans. Knowledge co-constructed in this collaborative inquiry activity, contained in a Drupal platform, was used to propose improvement to existing remediation plans. Analyzing the process and the product of collaborative inquiry allowed me to examine the extent to which a knowledge community developed in each of the iterations. Findings from iteration 1 revealed that students needed tighter scaffolds during collaborative inquiry activities to stay focused on science connections. Additionally, epistemic scaffolds were added to the designed curriculum unit in iteration 2. Also, students were given regulative scaffolds to plan and monitor their collaborative inquiry. Findings from iteration 2 showed more science connections in co-constructed knowledge and higher amount of collaboration among students while constructing shared knowledge comparing to iteration 1. This study provided further evidence of the effectiveness of KCI model to foster characteristics of knowledge communities in secondary school science classrooms. In addition to elaborating pedagogical and technological scaffolds that facilitated KCI curriculum units, recommendations were made for future research to improve existing scaffolds and, thus, progressing towards knowledge communities that are responsive to curricular expectations of science classrooms.

In this study, I examined how science curricula designed based on the Knowledge Community and Inquiry (KCI) model (Slotta, 2007) would foster the development of knowledge communities in secondary school science classrooms. KCI situates scaffolded inquiry activities within a collective context. In two design iterations, I collaborated with high school teachers to design and implement grade-nine science curriculum units with the topic of Climate Change. Then, I probed the extent to which characteristics of classroom-based knowledge communities manifested in students’ collaborative inquiry activities and the product of their work. In both iterations, students worked for approximately 8 weeks in a sequence of interconnected collaborative inquiry activities, creating digital inquiry artifacts. Two class sections engaged in iteration 1 and created wiki pages about the effect of climate change in Canada. They, then, used these wiki pages to examine the implications of climate change on certain industries. Five class sections engaged in iteration 2 where students identified important climate change-related issues and examined scientific aspects of those issues along with existing remediation plans. Knowledge co-constructed in this collaborative inquiry activity, contained in a Drupal platform, was used to propose improvement to existing remediation plans. Analyzing the process and the product of collaborative inquiry allowed me to examine the extent to which a knowledge community developed in each of the iterations. Findings from iteration 1 revealed that students needed tighter scaffolds during collaborative inquiry activities to stay focused on science connections. Additionally, epistemic scaffolds were added to the designed curriculum unit in iteration 2. Also, students were given regulative scaffolds to plan and monitor their collaborative inquiry. Findings from iteration 2 showed more science connections in co-constructed knowledge and higher amount of collaboration among students while constructing shared knowledge comparing to iteration 1. This study provided further evidence of the effectiveness of KCI model to foster characteristics of knowledge communities in secondary school science classrooms. In addition to elaborating pedagogical and technological scaffolds that facilitated KCI curriculum units, recommendations were made for future research to improve existing scaffolds and, thus, progressing towards knowledge communities that are responsive to curricular expectations of science classrooms.

In today’s economy the importance of knowledge in organizations is well underscored. The management of an organization’s knowledge has become one of the most important strategic vehicles to an organization's sustainable competitive advantage. The design and success of knowledge management systems (KMS) is viewed as the next evolutionary step in the management of knowledge processes and activities. The debate over the efficacy of these systems draws attention to the differences in approach to KMS that may develop among organizations whose employees’ work involves primarily the execution of procedural routines and those who are involved in primarily creative, problem solving work. This study explored empirically the factors defining Knowledge-intensive Organizations (KIOs) and related these factors to the choices of KMS deployed in these organizations. The study was conducted in two phases and employed both quantitative and qualitative methodologies for data collection. Survey and document analysis techniques were used in the first phase of the study which examined KIO defining factors, how they relate to each other, and how they contribute to knowledge intensity in KIOs. In the second phase semi-structured, in-depth interviews and survey techniques were employed. Grounded theory method (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) was then utilized to uncover how knowledge-intensive defining factors interlace with the choice of KMS deployed in KIOs. The interviews were analyzed using QSR NVivo 9 qualitative data analysis software. Quantitative computations were carried out using the PASW Statistics 17.0 package. The study found that KIOs are described by unique knowledge-intense attributes and these attributes inform the design and choices of KMS implemented in KIOs. This research contributes to the literature on factors that describe knowledge intensity in organizations. It provides the research community with a new articulation of the underpinnings of KIOs and KMS, an important step in advancing subsequent theoreti¬cal developments. The study might also have practical value for sellers and systems designers who are looking at assessing user demand for new KMS design ideas and for decision makers within KIOs who would like to evaluate the offerings of sellers.

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