No description available.

<p> This dissertation examines the role of the mass news media as an influencer of opinions on immigration through an examination of information sources used by host, Highland community members. There is an extensive range of research exploring the experiences of immigrants and policy responses in the UK, but little is known about how host communities process and respond to increasing cultural diversity. Addressing the latter is essential to overcome the assimilation tendencies in discourses about the integration of immigrants. Critical discourse analysis was used to analyze newspapers and interviews in this mixed methods study conducted in the year prior to the Scottish Independence Referendum. Findings of this study revealed the negative and homogenizing portrayal of immigrants in the mass news media, the importance of first and second hand experiences as sources of information on immigration in Scottish Highland communities, and the influence of sociocultural factors on how people establish authority of information sources. Findings suggest the need for stronger institutional infrastructures to address increasing diversity in the UK. Of particular interest is the context of this research, during a time of crisis, which reveals that the act of decision-making is based on the often unconscious, ontological construction of information behaviors through the worldview of participants.</p><p>

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Washington State University, August 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 86-91).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1999. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 138-146).

<p> The development of information and communication technologies (ICTs) has expanded the ways that people communicate and share information with one another. In the context of disaster, this has disrupted and reshaped the nature of the communication of emergency information and public participation in the emergency response process itself. Members of the public have been much quicker at adapting and improvising solutions in this new communication ecology than emergency response organizations. This difference in adoption reflects key differences in the formal constraints and responsibilities faced by emergency responders in comparison to the ability in the public sphere to improvise and organize more fluidly. My research focuses on the design and ongoing development of sociotechnical solutions within a community of emergency responders interested in integrating social media into emergency response practices. I look at both the solutions emerging across this community and the sociotechnical arrangements that support ongoing communication and the evolution of new ideas in a continual process of invention. My research spans four years, starting with an initial case study and progressing over time into a collaborative role that leverages my skills and knowledge of crisis informatics in the joint exploration of data analysis strategies and communication strategies.</p>

<p> For several decades, the intensifying trend of researchers to believe that sharing research data is &ldquo;good&rdquo; has overshadowed the belief that sharing data is &ldquo;bad.&rdquo; However, sharing data is difficult even though an impressive effort has been made to solve data sharing issues within the research community, but relatively little is known about data sharing beyond the research community. This dissertation aims to address this gap by investigating <i><b>how data are shared effectively across research and public communities</b></i>.</p><p> The practices of sharing data with both researchers and non-professionals in two comparative case studies, Encyclopedia of Life and CyberSEES, were examined by triangulating multiple qualitative data sources (i.e., artifacts, documentation, participant observation, and interviews). The two cases represent the creation of biodiversity data, the beginning of the data sharing process in a home repository, and the end of the data sharing process in an aggregator repository. Three research questions are asked in each case:</p><p> &bull; Who are the data providers?</p><p> &bull; Who are the data sharing mediators?</p><p> &bull; What are the data sharing processes?</p><p> The findings reveal the data sharing contexts and processes across research and public communities. Data sharing contexts are reflected by the cross-level data providers and human mediators rooted in different groups, whereas data sharing processes are reflected by the dynamic and sustainable collaborative efforts made by different levels of human mediators with the support of technology mediators.</p><p> This dissertation provides theoretical and practical contributions. Its findings refine and develop a new data sharing framework of knowledge infrastructure for different-level data sharing across different communities. Both human and technology infrastructure are made visible in the framework. The findings also provide insight for data sharing practitioners (i.e., data providers, data mediators, data managers, and data contributors) and information system developers and designers to better conduct and support open and sustainable data sharing across research and public communities.</p>

No description available.

Recently the technological and organizational infrastructures of institutional repositories have been questioned. For example the British so-called Finch report  from last summer argued that further development, as well as higher standards of accessibility of repositories, are needed in order to make them better integrated and interoperable to ultimately bring greater use by both authors and readers. Not only the technical frameworks and presumably low usage levels are criticized but also the lack of “clear policies on such matters as the content they will accept, the uses to which it may be put, and the role that they will play in preservation”. The report concludes that: “In practice patterns of deposit are patchy”. As in the UK, today, all universities and university colleges in Sweden, except a couple of very small and specialized ones, do have an institutional repository. A majority (around 80%) are working together on a co-operative basis within the DiVA Publishing System with the Electronic Publishing Centre at Uppsala University Library acting as the technical and organizational hub. Because the system is jointly funded, and the members contribute according to their size, it has been possible even for smaller institutions with limited resources to run a repository with exactly the same functionalities as the biggest universities. In this presentation we want to demonstrate the ever-increasing importance of institutional repositories in Sweden. Starting more than a decade ago the DiVA Consortium has, for some time, been addressing the problems now raised by the Finch report in a number of areas.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Universität Essen, 1996. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1994. / eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record.