This thesis proposes an innovative model for citation analysis and applies it to 1186 citations derived from twenty papers from one interdisciplinary journal: Global Environmental Change. The main aim of this thesis is to build, not to quantify, a model which facilitates understanding of how citations act, and are acted upon, in citing texts. The model builds on, extends and modifies certain aspects of some existing models on citation form, stance and function. This thesis argues that stance and function are different but related concepts in the analysis of citation. They operate in different directions and, when combined, can reflect the role of citation in the citing text. In order to achieve a fine-grained understanding of the role of citation, citations are analysed within and beyond the level of the statements in which they occur. To achieve this, a new level is proposed for the analysis of citation function: the ‘citation block’. In this thesis, it is argued that citations operate in different directions within and beyond the proposition-level. The current thesis aligns and compares analyses at the clause- and block-levels for every citation. This alignment results in the identification of conventional and unconventional patterns of citing. The model is applied to four sub-corpora of texts from two time periods and representing the more ‘science-like’ and ‘social science-like’ papers in the journal. The text-based analysis demonstrates the complexity of citation practices in interdisciplinary discourse. Overall it is suggested that in this journal the ‘social science’ papers over time have become more similar to the ‘science’ papers. The results also show variation in citation practices between the individual selected papers in each sub-corpus. This variation is attributed to the interdisciplinary nature of GEC. The proposed model has the potential to be used to investigate variation in citation practices beyond interdisciplinary discourse, within and between disciplines or genres.

The methodology of intermediary XML schemas is introduced and its application to complex metadata environments is explored. Intermediary schemas are designed to mediate to other ‘referent’ schemas: instances conforming to these are not generally intended for dissemination but must usually be realized by XSLT transformations for delivery. In some cases, these schemas may also generate instances conforming to themselves. Three subsidiary methods of this methodology are introduced. The first is application-specific schemas that act as intermediaries to established schemas which are problematic by virtue of their over-complexity or flexibility. The second employs the METS packaging standard as a template for navigating instances of a complex schema by defining an abstract map of its instances. The third employs the METS structural map to define templates or conceptual models from which instances of metadata for complex applications may be realized by XSLT transformations. The first method is placed in the context of earlier approaches to semantic interoperability such as crosswalks, switching across, derivation and application profiles. The second is discussed in the context of such methods for mapping complex objects as OAI-ORE and the Fedora Content Model Architecture. The third is examined in relation to earlier approaches to templating within XML architectures. The relevance of these methods to contemporary research is discussed in three areas: digital ecosystems, archival description and Linked Open Data in digital asset management and preservation. Their relevance to future research is discussed in the form of suggested enhancements to each, a possible synthesis of the second and third to overcome possible problems of interoperability presented by the first, and their potential role in future developments in digital preservation. This methodology offers an original approach to resolving issues of interoperability and the management of complex metadata environments; it significantly extends earlier techniques and does so entirely within XML architectures.

<p> The purpose of this study is to propose a means of reconciling the competing ideas of library and information science's identity, thereby strengthening professional autonomy. I make the case that developing a system of virtue ethics for librarianship would be an effective way to promote that reconciliation. The first step in developing virtue ethics is uncovering librarianship's function. Standard approaches to virtue ethics rely on classical Greek ideas about the nature of being to determine function. Since classical ideas of being may no longer be persuasive, I introduce another approach to uncover librarianship's function that still meets all of the criteria needed to establish a foundation for a system of virtue ethics. This approach is hermeneutical phenomenology, the philosophical discipline of interpreting the meaning given to historical events. Hans-Georg Gadamer's hermeneutic circle technique and Paul Ricoeur's theory of narrative intelligence are used to engage in a dialogue with three crises in the history of American librarianship. These pivotal events are the fiction question, librarian nationalism during World War I, and the dispute between supporters of the "Library Bill of Rights" and social responsibility. From these crises, three recurring themes become apparent: the tendency to reconcile idealism and pragmatism, the intent to do good for individuals and society, and the role of professional insecurity in precipitating the conflicts. Through emplotment of these themes, an identity narrative for librarianship emerges. My finding is that librarianship's function is the promotion of stability-happiness. This is the dual-process of supporting dominant socio-cultural institutions as a means of protecting librarianship's ability to offer the knowledge, cultural records, and avenues for information literacy that can improve lives and facilitate individuals' pursuit of happiness. In the conclusion, the ethical implications of having stability-happiness as the profession's function are considered. It includes a discussion of how librarianship's narrative identity could be applied to develop an ethical character for the profession and how such a character, combined with knowledge of function, might address persistent problems of race and gender disparity in library and information science.</p>

<p> This dissertation proposes, exemplifies, and validates the usage of course-subject co-occurrence (CSCO) data to generate topic maps of an academic discipline. CSCO is defined as course-subjects taught in the same academic year by the same teacher. This work is premised on the assumption that in the aggregate and for reasons of efficiency, faculty members teach course-subjects that are topically similar to one another. To exemplify and validate CSCO, more than 112,000 CSCO events were extracted from the annual directories of the American Association of Law Schools covering nearly eighty years of law school teaching in the United States. The CSCO events are used to extract and visualize the structure and evolution of law for the years 1931-32, 1972-73, and 2010-11&mdash;roughly, forty year intervals. Different normalization, ordination (layout), and clustering algorithms are compared and the best algorithm of each type is used to generate the final map. Validation studies demonstrate that CSCO produces topic maps that are consistent with expert opinion and four other indicators of the topical similarity of law school course-subjects. Resulting maps of the educational domain of law are useful as a reference system for additional thematic overlay of information about law school education in the United States. This research is the first to use CSCO to produce visualizations of a domain. It is the first to use an expanded, multi-part gold-standard to evaluate the validity of domain maps and the intermediate steps in their creation. Last but not least, this research contributes a metric analysis and visualizations of the evolution of law school course-subjects over nearly eighty years.</p>

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Pittsburgh, 1997. / eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Pittsburgh, 1997. / eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record.

In Saudi Arabia the need is recognised significantly to move towards the concept of an Information Society, particularly for the benefit of the healthcare community. There have been some individual efforts, in this direction but they do not address the problem and related root issues. The problem is that the body and soul are not joined as one to formulate a single entity. The health professional is the body and the soul is the health information professional (health librarians). Health professionals spend a great deal of time in information searching, while the health information professional's role is underestimated. This research is conducted to explore the state of health sciences libraries, and to investigate the strengths and weaknesses of the Information Services and Information, Communication Technology (ICT) in health sciences libraries in the capital city of Saudi Arabia, Riyadh. To accomplish this, a mixed method is used (qualitative and quantitative approaches) to collect related data. A framework is designed particularly for this research and a visionary organisational model is designed initially and developed throughout the research. This proposed model is to introduce a potentially possible successful paradigm for changing the health sciences libraries environment to encounter future challenges. In addition, for this research will contribute to the better understanding of how to provide fast, efficient and easy-to-use service to increase user satisfaction. Changing the paradigm of health sciences libraries in Riyadh will facilitate better access, sharing and use of information resources from distant geographical locations, and increase participation opportunities. In addition, the proposed model considers the human and social needs of communication, and the exchange of feelings and reactions. Importantly, successful change will help healthcare environments to move towards the establishment of a flourishing health information society by popularising the use of electronic resources and demonstrating the benefits and advantages of continuous learning and development programmes. It is clear that access to fast. accurate and reliable health information and resources, may be, the difference between life and death.

A challenging problem in the user profiling domain is to create profiles of users of retrieval systems. This problem even exacerbates in the multimedia domain. Due to the Semantic Gap, the difference between low-level data representation of videos and the higher concepts users associate with videos, it is not trivial to understand the content of multimedia documents and to find other documents that the users might be interested in. A promising approach to ease this problem is to set multimedia documents into their semantic contexts. The semantic context can lead to a better understanding of the personal interests. Knowing the context of a video is useful for recommending users videos that match their information need. By exploiting these contexts, videos can also be linked to other, contextually related videos. From a user profiling point of view, these links can be of high value to recommend semantically related videos, hence creating a semantic-based user profile. This thesis introduces a semantic user profiling approach for news video retrieval, which exploits a generic ontology to put news stories into its context. Major challenges which inhibit the creation of such semantic user profiles are the identification of user's long-term interests and the adaptation of retrieval results based on these personal interests. Most personalisation services rely on users explicitly specifying preferences, a common approach in the text retrieval domain. By giving explicit feedback, users are forced to update their need, which can be problematic when their information need is vague. Furthermore, users tend not to provide enough feedback on which to base an adaptive retrieval algorithm. Deviating from the method of explicitly asking the user to rate the relevance of retrieval results, the use of implicit feedback techniques helps by learning user interests unobtrusively. The main advantage is that users are relieved from providing feedback. A disadvantage is that information gathered using implicit techniques is less accurate than information based on explicit feedback. In this thesis, we focus on three main research questions. First of all, we study whether implicit relevance feedback, which is provided while interacting with a video retrieval system, can be employed to bridge the Semantic Gap. We therefore first identify implicit indicators of relevance by analysing representative video retrieval interfaces. Studying whether these indicators can be exploited as implicit feedback within short retrieval sessions, we recommend video documents based on implicit actions performed by a community of users. Secondly, implicit relevance feedback is studied as potential source to build user profiles and hence to identify users' long-term interests in specific topics. This includes studying the identification of different aspects of interests and storing these interests in dynamic user profiles. Finally, we study how this feedback can be exploited to adapt retrieval results or to recommend related videos that match the users' interests. We analyse our research questions by performing both simulation-based and user-centred evaluation studies. The results suggest that implicit relevance feedback can be employed in the video domain and that semantic-based user profiles have the potential to improve video exploration.

Over many years much academic research has been carried out in the field of library and information science (US) into the information-seeking behaviour of individuals, and many models and theories of such behaviour have been put forward. Similarly, over an even longer period, there has been much research in the field of communication stud ies, particularly mass communications, and a large number of models of communication behaviour have been described. The research described in this thesis sets out to build on this work, learning from both fields, in order to develop a more comprehensive representation of information behaviour. Existing models were analysed to identify important elements of information behaviour and from these the new Information Seeking and Communication Model (ISCM) was formulated. This is the first time that a model of information behaviour has been constructed in this way from a range of different models from both LIS and communication studies. The ISCM is more comprehensive in scope than previous models. Those developed in library and information science are usually concerned with the information user and information seeking, while those from communication studies typically focus on the communicator and the effectiveness of the communication process. The ISCM takes into account both information users and information providers, their separate contexts, the activities of information seeking, information use and communication, and factors that affect them. The ISCM has been designed as a generic framework capable of application in different environments. Its validity has been tested in health care, where it has been shown to apply to the information behaviour of physicians as information users and to that of pharmaceutical companies and the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) as information providers. Its practical value has been demonstrated in evidence-based medicine (EBM), where it offers in sights into the reasons why clinical practice does not necessarily follow EBM guidelines. It has also been found to be of use in identifying areas in which users (physicians) and providers (pharmaceutical companies and NICE) can improve their information behaviour in order to achieve their goals. This thesis contributes to knowledge by building on previous research and models to develop a more comprehensive model which provides practical insights into information behaviour and which has the potential for wide application.

No description available.