This is a preprint published in Journal of Documentation 62 (4): 462-481. Purpose: This paper examines William Stetson Merrill, the compiler of A Code for Classifiers and a Newberry Library employee (1889-1930) in an attempt to glean lessons for modern information studies from an early librarianâ s career. Methodology/Approach: Merrillâ s career at the Newberry Library and three editions of the Code are examined using historical, bibliographic, and conceptual methods. Primary and secondary sources in archives and libraries are reviewed to provide insight into Merrillâ s life at the Newberry and his attempts to develop or modify tools to solve the knowledge organization problems he faced. The concept of bricolage, developed by Levi-Strauss to explain modalities of thinking, is applied to Merrillâ s career. Excerpts from his works and reminisces are used to explain Merrill as a bricoleur and highlight the characteristics of bricolage. Research Implications and Limitations: Findings show that Merrill worked collaboratively to collocate and integrate a variety of ideas from a diverse group of librarians such as Cutter, Pettee, Poole, Kelley, Rudolph, and Fellows. Bliss and Ranganathan were aware of the Code but the extent to which they were influenced by it remains to be explored. Although this is an anachronistic evaluation, Merrill serves as an example of the archetypal information scientist who improvises and integrates methods from bibliography, cataloging, classification, and indexing to solve problems of information retrieval and design usable information products and services for human consumption. Originality/Value of Paper: Bricolage offers great potential to information practitioners and researchers today as we continue to try and find user-centered solutions to the problems of digital information organization and services. Paper Type: Research paper

Teaching older adults to use computers requires taking into account the effects of the aging process. Techniques which work for a younger generation will not necessarily be successful with older novices, but modifications which improve the outcome for older students also work well with younger learners. This article explains how computer trainers at the Palm Beach County Library System's North County Regional Library created a mousing class and modified existing classes to create a series of four classes designed specifically for older adults who have never used a computer before. The article also summarizes the difficulties older adults face in learning to use computers, and ways to improve the learning outcome.

This is a submission to the "Interrogating the social realities of information and communications systems pre-conference workshop, ASIST AM 2006.

Older adults present a special challenge to libraries offering computer training. Many of those seeking training have little, if any, prior experience with the concepts and skills necessary to use computers, yet their ability to learn those concepts and skills is hampered by the aging process. This article summarizes the factors in aging which most affect learning computer skills, and how those factors can be mitigated.

==Background== In most academic disciplines journals play an important role in disseminating findings of research among the disciplinary community members. Understanding a discipline's body of journals is therefore of grave importance when looking for previous research, compiling an overview of previous research and and in order to make a decision regarding the best place for publishing research results. Furthermore, based on Bradford's Law of scattering, one can assume that in order to be able to compile a satisfying overview of previous research a wide range of journals has to be scanned, but also that there are some 'core' journals which are of more importance to specific disciplines than others. ==Aim== This thesis aims to compile a comprehensive master list of journals which publish articles of relevance to Library and Information Science (LIS). A method to rank journals by their importance is introduced and some key characteristics of the disciplines body of journals are discussed. Databases indexing the disciplines journals are also compared. ==Method== The master list of LIS journals was created by combining the journal listings of secondary sources indexing the field's literature. These sources were six databases focusing on LIS literature: INFODATA, Current Contents, Library and Information Science Abstracts, Library Information Science Technology Abstracts, Information Science and Technology Abstracts, and Library Literature and Information Science, the LIS subsection in three databases with a general focus: Social Science Citation Index, Academic Search Premier, and Expanded Academic ASAP, and the listing of LIS journals from the Elektronische Zeitschriften Bibliothek. Problems related to editorial policies and technical shortcomings are discussed, before comparing: predominant publication languages, places of publication, open access, peer review, and the ISI Journal Impact Factors (JIF). Journals were also ranked by the number of occurrences in multiple databases in order to identify 'core' publications. The number of journals overlapping between databases are estimated and a matrix giving the overlap is visualized using multi dimensional scaling. Lastly, the degree of journals overlapping with other disciplines is measured. ==Results== A comprehensive master list of 1,205 journals publishing articles of relevance to LIS was compiled. The 968 active journals are mostly published in English, with one third of the journals coming from the US and another third from the UK and Germany. Nearly 16% of all journals are open access, 11% have a ISIJIF, and 42% are peer reviewed. Fifteen core journal could be identified and a list of the top fourteen journals published in Germany is introduced. Databases have between five to 318 journals in common and the journal collection shows an substantial overlap with a wide range of subjects, with the biggest journal overlap with Computing Studies, and Business and Economics. ==Conclusion== The aim of compiling a comprehensive list of LIS journal was achieved. The list will contribute to our understanding of scholarly communication within the LIS discipline and provide academics and practitioners with a better understanding of journals within the discipline. The ranking approach proved to be sufficient, showing good similarity with other studies over the last 40 years. The master list of LIS journals has also potential use to further research.

This study of 28 countries involves comparative content analysis of the English versions of codes of ethics proposed by professional associations. It yielded an empirically grounded typology of principles arranged in twenty categories. The most frequently identified principles were professional development, integrity, confidentiality or privacy, and free and equal access to information. While confidentiality and privacy, and equal access to information, appear in all existing typologies of library and information science ethics, other principles, such as copyright and intellectual property, democracy, and responsibility toward society, which appear in almost all other typologies, were evident in fewer than half of the codes. This empirical study provides a global perspective on library association code of ethics.

In 2011, over 1.5 million new book titles were published in the United States, a 400% increase in just five years compared to 2006. In the same time period, the market share for eBooks increased dramatically and now comprises 20% or more of sales from many of the biggest publishing companies. This hyper-abundance of titles in an increasingly heterogeneous market place has made it difficult for consumers to connect to books they might want to read. This is the discovery problem. It is compounded by the continuing decline of traditional gatekeepers and sources of discovery such as mass media reviews and advertising, as well as the decline of traditional bookstores where people often find books through browse. Authors and publishers therefore have turned to social media to spread the word about their titles. Social gatekeeping, an extension of traditional gatekeeping theory, is proposed as the framework for understanding how author participation in social networks initiates a flow of the diffusion of information over the web and other computer mediated communication channels, and through individuals and social networks to potential readers. Serendipitous browse and discovery is a key strategy for readers to find titles of interest, and the serendipitous tie is proposed as a social mechanism through which individuals discover new titles and bring it back to their social networks to share. To explore these concepts, a random sample of new eBook titles published during the first week of April, 2012 was generated and analyzed in three phases. The first phase of research classified books and authors according to facets such as traditional or self-published, use of social media and other factors. The second phase used multiple regression to establish an association between the use of social media by authors and a title's sales and presence on the Web. The third phase reviewed selected titles for new approaches to social media use and evidence of the serendipitous tie. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that author web presence predicts discoverability and sales.

Intellectual property affects an increasingly large range of social life. Despite the breadth of goods and activities affected by intellectual property schemas, policy-makers, legislators, jurists and even many social theorists have a narrow understanding of the basis for instituting intellectual property rights and understanding their limits: most see intellectual property rights only as a means to create more intellectual goods in society. My dissertation argues that our intellectual property schemas and policies need to be more sensitive to the diversity of values involved in the social meanings of different intellectual goods and activities. Contrary to those who claim that "information wants to be free," I defend a property-based approach to the protection and regulation of intellectual goods. I argue that intellectual property schemas need to do a better job responding to the diversity of value that characterizes intellectual activities and goods. Finally, I argue that context is an important tool for marking out which values are to be promoted in different circumstances and communities.

Thesis (M.Tech.: Library and Information Studies)-Durban Institute of Technology, 2004. viii, 71 leaves / The aim of the study was to investigate management and maintenance procedures that were used by other sites and how these could be used as a basis for formulating management and maintenance procedures for the SALO subject directory.

The thesis focussed on the need to understand the nature of design processes in innovative, multi-domain, organisational information systems design. A cross-disciplinary, interpretive investigation of organisational IS design was based upon multiple literatures: information system development and methodologies, human-computer interaction, situated action, social psychology, psychology of programming, computer-supported co-operative work, computer science, design 'rationale' and organisational behaviour. Three studies were performed: 1. A case study of a user-centred design project, employing grounded theory analysis. 2. A postal survey of IS development approaches in large UK companies. 3. A longitudinal field study, involving participant observation over a period of 18 months in a cross-domain design team, employing ethnography, discourse analysis and hermeneutics. The main contributions of this research were to provide rich insights into the interior nature of IS design activity, situated in the context of the organisation (a perspective which is largely missing from the literature); to provide conceptual models to explain the management of meaning in design, and design framing activity; to produce a social action model of organisational information system development which may form the basis for communicating the situated nature of design in teaching; and to suggest elements of a process model of design activity in multi-domain, organisational information system development. The implications of the research findings for IS managers and developers are also considered a significant contribution to practice. Detailed findings from these studies relate to: I. Disparities between the technology-centred view of organisational IS development found in the literature and the business and organisation-based approaches reported in the survey. 2. The role of pre-existing 'investment in form' in shaping the meaning of design processes and outcomes for other team members and its implications for the management of expertise and for achieving double-loop leaming. 3. The detailed processes by which design is framed at individual and group levels of analysis. These findings indicated a mismatch between "top down" models of organisational IS design and observed design "abstraction" processes, which were grounded in concrete analogies and local exemplars; this finding has significant implications for organisational design approaches, such as Business Process Redesign. 4. The distributed nature of group design, which has implications for achieving a 'common vision' of the design and for the division of labour in design groups. Intersubjectivity with respect to process objectives may be more critical to design success than intersubjectivity with respect to the products of design. - 5. The political nature of design activity: it was concluded that an effective design process must manage conflict between the exploration of organisational possibilities and influential, external stakeholders' expectations of efficiency benefits. 6. Design suffers from legitimacy problems related to the investigation of a "grey area" between explicit system design goals and boundary and emergent definitions of design goals and target system boundaries; this issue needs to be managed both internally to the design-team and externally, in respect of stakeholders and influential decision-makers. It is argued that the situated nature of design requires the teaching of design skills to be achieved through simulated design contexts, rather than the communication of abstract models. It is also suggested that the findings of this thesis have implications for knowledge management and organisational innovation. If organisational problem-investigation processes are seen as involving distributed knowledge, then the focus of organisational learning and innovation shifts from sharing organisational knowledge to accessing distributed organisational knowledge which is emergent and incomplete.