Information is a valuable commodity and its effective use is a vital part of everyday life. With the advancements of the internet and the increasing accessibility to it, the location of information is no longer the primary concern of information seekers. Digitisation techniques have made a wide variety of documents available on-line, and more and more publications are being published in electronic form simultaneously to their physical counterpart. The largest challenge currently facing information seekers is that of locating the correct information from the abundance available to them. Whenever a search query is made, the user is inundated with multiple options of documents to choose from. These documents are all deemed to have some relevance to the query produced by using an information retrieval algorithm. Thus far, automatic support has only been provided until the document retrieval level. The user is then left to search through the result set, mostly unaided, by the system he is using. In order to facilitate support for the users, a solid understanding of the information seeker's behaviours during this triage process is vital. Thus far, research into the behaviour of information seekers during the specific triage behaviour is limited. Even more limited however, is the evidence reporting the visual attention of the users. Since the triage process is highly visual, this important element needs to be thoroughly evidenced before accurately conceptualising the entire process. For this reason, this thesis aims to investigate the visual attention of information seekers during the document triage process. This will inform the modelling and conceptualisation of information seekers' behaviour during triage. In turn, this can be used to inform the design of supportive software. The thesis contains a review of related research and identifies the gaps that needs further investigation. From these, a series of user studies are then conducted on document triage. These in turn, facilitate the formulation and discussion of 2 document triage models and measurements to record the effectiveness of document triage. We study the visual attention of information seekers in four lab based studies, eliciting their exact gaze and focus details. We expand current research in the information seeking domain by reporting on findings from users' triage activities on small screen devices and when under time constraints. Furthermore, a high level diary study, gives us richer data on participants' triage activities over a larger period of time in their natural surroundings. All the studies are brought together to elicit requirements and measurements to understand system and user efficiency during each stage of the triage process.

I embarked on this research because I wanted to explore the basis of textual authority. Such an understanding is particularly important in a world where there is such an overload of information that it is a challenge for the public to identify which publications to choose when looking for specific information. I decided to look at the case of encyclopaedias because of the widespread belief that encyclopaedias are the ultimate authorities. I also made the choice based on the observation that, besides the research on Wikipedia, the scientific community seems to overlook encyclopaedias, despite of the role these latter play as key sources of information for the general public. Two theories are combined to serve as a framework for the thesis. On the one hand, there is the theory of cognitive authority as defined by Józef Maria Bocheński, Richard De George, and Patrick Wilson. On the other hand, there is the theory of quality as defined from the various frameworks recommended by librarians and information scientists on how to assess the quality of reference works. These two theoretical frameworks are used to deconstruct the concept of authority and to highlight aspects of authority which may be particularly worthy of investigation. In this thesis, studies were conducted on the following: (1) a literature review on the origin and evolution of encyclopaedia authority throughout the history of encyclopaedia, (2) a review of previous research pertaining to the quality and the authority of Wikipedia, (3) an analysis of the publishing and dissemination of science and technology encyclopaedias published in the 21st century throughout worldwide libraries, (4) a survey of perspective of encyclopaedia authors on the role of encyclopaedias in society and on the communication of scientific uncertainties and controversies, and (5) an analysis of book reviews towards a general assessment of encyclopaedia quality. The thesis illustrates how a concept such as authority which is typically taken for granted can actually be more complex and more problematic than it appears, thereby challenging widespread beliefs in society. In particular, the thesis pinpoints potential contradictions regarding the importance of the author and the publishers in ensuring encyclopaedia authority. On a theoretical level, the thesis revisits the concept of cognitive authority and initiates a discussion on the complex interaction between authority and quality. On a more pragmatic level, the thesis contributes towards the creation of guidelines for encyclopaedia development. As an exploratory study, the thesis also identifies a range of areas which should be of priority for future research.

This thesis is concerned with exploring patients’ experiences of using a diabetes eHealth system. The context of the study is the growth of interest in eHealth systems that focus on patient needs, alongside increasing home computer use and the rising incidence of chronic diseases, such as diabetes. I aim in this thesis to make a novel contribution to knowledge about how eHealth technology is experienced by patients with diabetes. The study takes the form of a qualitative enquiry into the use of a diabetes eHealth system by a group of patients and their healthcare practitioners at a primary care general practice in Northern England. Using symbolic interactionism as a methodological perspective and taking elements from grounded theory the study produces a theoretical framework based on a thematic analysis of participants’ descriptions of their experiences of using the eHealth system. A diabetes eHealth system was designed and built for the study, and 38 patients were recruited from a single GP practice using purposive sampling. Participants used the system for six months and were interviewed at the beginning, middle and end of the study period. Issues of surveillance, automation, endorsement and interaction influenced use and experiences of the system. Results from the study indicate that participants use and perceive the eHealth system as part of their diabetes management experience. My thesis is that the eHealth system is a boundary structure through which boundary objects, such as electronically formatted blood glucose readings, are created and shared across different social worlds. The eHealth system crosses the boundary between two spheres of an individual’s diabetes management experience, the personal sphere of self-management, and the external sphere of seeking and receiving support from medical experts and others with diabetes. The co-location of these two spheres exposes participants to scrutiny but also opens up new possibilities for collaboration and learning.

The University of Huddersfield Press, re-launched in 2010, is an open access publisher of peer reviewed journals, monographs and sound recordings. The research to inform this thesis was conducted between 2011 and 2015. The primary research question of this thesis and accompanying business plan is to demonstrate how the University of Huddersfield Press can establish a viable and innovative business model. Subsidiary research questions are to establish how the output of the Press will contribute to and enhance the University’s strategic objectives and to indicate how the Press, as an open access publisher, can contribute to the world of scholarly communication by increasing the literature on New University Presses. As such, a number of chapters have been published as journal articles. The thesis introduces the University of Huddersfield Press before setting out the motivation, background and focus of the study. The rise of New University Presses (NUPs), the open access movement, the role of the repository and the library as publisher are examined and placed in context to the Press. The four cases studies included in this thesis are not multiple case studies, rather they are embedded units of analysis in a single practice based case study, which allows the reader to follow a number of different reading paths. The case studies use observation, in depth investigations and a personal account of the author’s work in developing the Press, which will give new insight into open access publishing by NUPs. The first case study presents data and findings regarding the Press monograph publishing imitative. It draws on external literature and reflections of experience of the Press in order to derive lessons for best practice on future management of the Press. The second case study takes an in depth look at journal publishing within the Press. It looks at how the Huddersfield Open Access Publishing (HOAP) Project was used to launch a number of successful journals using the institutional repository and has helped to build the reputation of the Press in the University and wider community. Lessons learned are examined in order to recommend a more sustainable future for the Press. The third case study involves one of the journals to be published by the Press, Fields: journal of Huddersfield student research. It outlines the rationale for Fields in an institutional context, including the process of setting up an online, open access, multidisciplinary journal for student research. Year one of the project, which saw the journal go from proposal to fully fledged publication, is analysed and lessons learned are discussed. The final case study investigates Huddersfield Contemporary Records (HCR) and presents a case study of music publishing within the University. This case study stands independently and therefore begins with a review of the literature specifically on music industry issues pertinent to HCR. The case study includes a suggested business model and workflow for future releases. The thesis analyses the results and findings from the case studies in order to suggest a viable and innovative business model for the Press. This addresses questions of sustainability, arising from the case studies. The thesis develops Hahn’s programme and publication level business planning in library publishing before providing evidence of the reputational value of the Press to the University of Huddersfield. This is practically demonstrated in the Business Plan, which outlines the future for the Press for the next five years. The accompanying business plan will help to shape future thinking regarding this form of publishing.

This research project was motivated by the question of how a Slow perspective may relate to and impact upon theories of information behaviour and upon everyday information practices. Two related qualitative studies were undertaken to explore the relevance of Slow principles to the notion of the information society. The task-based, fixed end-points of existing theories of information behaviour and information literacy are shown to inadequately reflect the complexity of life in a social landscape characterised by the acceleration, and subsequent proliferation, of information channels. The project progressed through three distinct but related phases which are reported here. First, the conceptual foundations of a Slow perspective were hypothesised during reviews of the literature and existing conceptions of the information society. A Delphi study was then executed to facilitate discussion of the issues between experts in information behaviour. Thirdly, a focus group session was held to engage Slow experts in similar discussion of the issues from a practice perspective. Each phase was guided by a social constructivist methodology which encouraged participants and moderator to engage in conscious consideration of their perspective by connecting and discussing with others, echoing the Slow principles that the project sought to explore. A Slow perspective is shown to challenge received notions of information behaviour in three ways. The first two relate to fixed causal processes wherein the temporal progression of information behaviour and, relatedly, information literacy, is disrupted by a focus on tempo. The third challenge disrupts what ‘information’ is when society itself is perceived as information-based, shifting from an instrumental to an experiential view. Elements of a Slow approach were reported in practice as a means of attaining ‘informational balance’, which in turn can be seen to encourage everyday information literacy. Specifically Slow attitudes were reported in some withdrawal and avoidance behaviours, and were also rejected when the pressure of informational speed and scale proved too beneficial, or indeed, too addictive. The project concludes with an illustration of the implications of a Slow perspective of information behaviour, and recommendations for further research with this illustration in mind.

This research was aimed towards the planning, design and evaluation of an experimental prototype for the systematic organisation, access and retrieval of community information and local studies, henceforth defined jointly as community-related information, for public libraries in Brazil. Community-related information services were identified as areas of modern public librarianship still to be developed in that country. To raise relevant theoretical issues that could be discussed in practice, applied prototyping was chosen as the core methodology for this project. The model proposed was built upon a software especially designed by Unesco for library applications available in Brazil called CDS/ISIS - Computerised Documentation System/Integrated Set of Information Systems. The resulting Automated Library and Community-Related Information System (ALTS) was designed based on a theoretical framework which suggested 1) information repackaging of community-related information concerns represented as A-Z listings with corresponding definitions aimed at encouraging public librarians to create their own community-related information systems; 2) a reference function implicit in the self-defining element of information repackaging and by referring the user to wider library resources to complement a community-related information query, thus encouraging the use of wider library resources, and 3) a referral function to direct users to resources external to the library capable of helping him/her with a community-related information concern and to encourage the inhouse creation of local resources files. This conceptual and practical framework was aimed at encouraging indigenous resources-building and a degree of autonomy for Brazilian public libraries to define and create their own community-related information systems based on their perceptions of community needs. ALTS prototype was made of six menu-driven modules or databases (CITYOR, AZHEAL, AZJOBS, AZLAW, LOCAL and LIBRY), related to one another in content and structure, accessed by a top menu via one-key options. Prototype specifications, database maps, data entry, master file maintenance, information retrieval services and user interfaces were described and illustrated with examples. System evaluation was carried out in Brazil in two selected public libraries which agreed to participate in the evaluation exercise. Evaluation consisted of individual interviews on perception of concepts, self-administered questionnaires on system use and implementation and data collection of real users' queries in Brazil to check whether ALTS could respond to present community-related information needs. Finally, the prototype was reviewed and discussed in the light of trends and developments for community-related information supply worldwide, validity of applied prototyping as the core methodology for this project and the setup of a national infrastructure for community-related information supply based on this research findings. Conclusions and recommendations were also drawn to encourage the development of community-related information activities in Brazil and further implementation of CDS/ISIS.

Searching behaviour in a university library is studied using a holistic approach encompassing the use of bibliographic tools and browsing at the shelves. The project was designed as a 'before and after' study to evaluate the impact of an online catalogue on subject searching behaviour. A combined methodology was devised using a talk-aloud technique, observation, and screen logging facility to elicit both verbal and non-verbal data from users in their searching activity at the manual bibliographic tools, including a microfiche catalogue and printed PRECIS index and at the online catalogue, as well as at the shelves. The data was recorded on a highly structured dual questionnaire and observation form with some real time expert interpretation. The limitations of the methodological approach of previous catalogue use studies are highlighted suggesting that subject searching as a basic primary need had been previously underestimated. The online catalogue does not seem to have increased the extent of subject searching nor the use of the bibliographic tool. An extensive qualitative analysis correlating expressed topics, search formulation strategies and documents retrieved at the shelves reveals the adaptive nature of the subject searching process, whereby the user adapts to the structure of the tools available. The PRECIS index supports a contextual approach for broad search formulations and more interactive reformulations whereas the OPAC encouraged a matching approach and narrow formulations with fewer but user generated reformulations. The success rate of the online catalogue was slightly better than that for the PRECIS index but fewer items were retrieved at the shelves. Nonusers of the bibliographic tools seemed to be just as successful. The information retrieval task in both searching environments is tailored by the system to a single one dimensional sequential process. It is suggested that a major obstacle to subject searching effectiveness may lie in the lack of interaction between the different subject access elements: the indexing language, the classification and the titles. The study concludes that to improve retrieval effectiveness online catalogues should cater for both matching and contextual approaches to searching. Recent research indicates that a more interactive process could be promoted by providing query expansion through a combination of searching aids for matching, for search formulation assistance and for structured contextual retrieval.

This study has been undertaken to determine what pseudo-proprietary information and patenting activity statistics could be derived from an online patents database. To achieve this, a thorough investigation uas made of patenting in the field of an important group of beta-lactam antibiotics, the. Cephalosporins. Patents data was retrieved from the World Patents Index online files of Derwent Publications Limited, and the bibliographic details of each patent application retrieved analysed according to numbers of patents per patentee, priority and publication dates, types of patents, etc. A review of technological advances in this subject was conducted, demonstrating the value of patents literature for such purposes. The relationship between sales volumes and patenting activity for Cephalosporins patentees has been investigated and found to show a. significant correlation between these parameters. As an extension, the USA patenting and sales activity for the leading USA Industrial Corporations (the 1981 Fortune 500) was studied; overall a high correlation was exhibited, but there were notable differences. between different industries. A number of bibliometric studies have been undertaken with a variety of patents data. for a number of techhologies. These studies include the application of Bradford-Zipf plots, other productivity studies and Vector Analysis to patents. Whilst previous studies on journal literature have investigated the applicability of frequency distributions as measures of author productivity, this study has for the first time applied Lotka's Law, Price's Pareto-type Distribution, Simon-Yule Distribution, Shockley's Lognormal Distribution, Borel-Tanner Distribution, Williams Geometric Series, Fisher's Logarithmic Series and the Negative Binomial Distribution to patents data. Theoretical distributions were ascertained using a series of microcomputer programs written in BASIC programming' language. The results indicate that of the distributions investigated, the Negative Binomial most closely fits the observed data when goodness-offit is measured by the Kolmogorov-Smirnov Test.

This thesis aims to study and analyse the complex spatio-social relations among social entities who interact together in a spatially structured social group. This aim is approached in three steps: 1. Collecting and classifying spatio-social data, 2. Disambiguating place names that people use to refer to their homes and 3. Analysis of data of this kind (numerical and visual). The source of spatio-social data used in this work is Flickr. Flickr is a yahoo photo sharing site. Users have a social network of friends and a collection of photos on their profiles. According to available statistics1 the Flickr database contains more than three billion photos, out of which a hundred million are geo-tagged. In retrieving data from Flickr database two different samples have been explored. Initially a random collection of photos that have been uploaded in Flickr during the examined periods has been collected on a daily basis. This is followed by much narrower and more precise criteria for the second data sampling that resulted in Flickr sample GB data. The thesis concludes that location dominates a significant pattern in online behavior of social entities who interact together via internet. The core contributions of this thesis are in the areas of: 1. Extracting indicative sample from very large data sets, 2. Disambiguation of place names that people use in their natural language to refer to their home locations and 3. Proposing potential new insights into behaviors of social entities with spatio-social relations. Overall, the popularity of social networking sites and availability of data that can be obtained from the web (whether people provide voluntarily or can be retrieve as a consequence of online interactions) are likely to continue the increasing trend in future. In addition, the realm of spatio-social data analysis and its visualization also continue to expand, as do the types of maps that are achievable, the visualization packages that the maps can be built with, the number of map users and improved gazetteers with more comprehensive coverage of vague terms. Therefore, the developed methods, algorithm and applications in this study can be beneficial to researchers in social and e-social sciences, those who are interested in developing and maintaining social networking sites, geographers who work on disambiguation of fuzzy vernacular geographic terms, visualization and spatial data analysts in general and those who are looking for development and accommodation of better business strategies (i.e. localization and personalization). 1 (http://www.Flickr.com, retrieved 20/07/09)

This research briefly outlines the problems of traditional information retrieval systems and discusses the different approaches to inferring context in document retrieval. By context we mean word disambiguation which is achieved by exploring the generalisation-specialisation hierarchies within a given ontology. Specifically, we examine the use of ontology based query expansion for defining query context. Query expansion can be done in many ways and in this work we consider the use of relevance feedback and pseudo-relevance feedback for query expansion. We examine relevance feedback and pseudo-relevance to ascertain the existence of performance differences between relevance feedback and pseudo-relevance feedback. The information retrieval system used is based on the probabilistic retrieval model and the query expansion method is extended using information from a news domain ontology. The aim of this project is to assess the impact of the use of the ontology on the query expansion results. Our results show that ontology based query expansion has resulted in a higher number of relevant documents being retrieved compared to the standard relevance feedback process. Overall, ontology based query expansion improves recall but does not produce any significant improvements for the precision results. Pseudo-relevance feedback has achieved better results than relevance feedback. We also found that reducing or increasing the relevance feedback parameters (number of terms or number of documents) does not correlate with the results. When comparing the effect of varying the number of terms parameter with the number of documents parameter, the former benefits the pseudo-relevance feedback results but the latter has an additional effect on the relevance feedback results. There are many factors which influence the success of ontology based query expansion. The thesis discusses these factors and gives some guidelines on using ontologies for the purpose of query expansion.