Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Cambridge, 1999. / Cover title. "January 2000." Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.Phil.) - University of Queensland, 2002. / Includes bibliography.

Thesis (M.Comm. (Human resources management))-University of Pretoria, 2004. / Summaries in English and Afrikaans. Includes bibliographical references. Available on the Internet via the World Wide Web.

Thesis (M.Sc.)--York University, 2004. Graduate Programme in Computer Science and Engineering. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 76-79). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url%5Fver=Z39.88-2004&res%5Fdat=xri:pqdiss &rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:MR11842

Unrestricted accessible scholarly resources are increasingly considered essential to knowledge creation and socio-economic development. In order to facilitate this, university libraries at National Research Universities (NRUs) in Thailand have established institutional repositories (IRs). The development of the Open Access publishing movement also provides opportunities and challenges to NRUs’ IRs and scholarly community. Like others, the IR projects in Thailand have experienced low awareness and content contribution from stakeholders. Accordingly, this study aims to optimize the established IR projects in NRUs in Thailand by exploring the stakeholders’ research publishing behaviour, and the perception, participation, and utilisation of IRs. This study advances the understanding of IRs in NRUs in Thailand from the perspectives of multiple stakeholder groups. This inductive qualitative study employs Constructivist Grounded Theory as a research methodology. Theoretical sampling, convenient sampling, and purposive sampling were used to recruit key participants in Thai scholarly communication at three NRUs. An in-depth semi-structured interview method was used to collect data and Charmaz’s Grounded Theory Method of Open coding and Focused coding was used to analyse it. The analysis resulted in the generation of the 4Cs (/foresee/) Model for the Development of University-based IRs. It composes of “Communication” “Collaboration”, “Copyright understanding”, “Control” and “Local academic culture”. This innovative model provides an explanatory framework identifying the factors for the availability and accessibility of full-text digital research publications in Thai university-based IRs. Moreover, the 3Rs – Rethinking, Redefining, and Re-collaborating- are recommended as key activities to be considered when confronting the difficulties in the development of IRs. In addition, this study also proposes the “2PSC model for operational excellence – Policies, Procedure, Services, and Competencies” as a practical and effective mechanism for managing IRs. Further, the study offers theoretical, methodological, and empirical contributions to the understanding of IRs in NRUs in Thailand from the perspectives of multiple stakeholder groups.

The Web has changed the face of scientific communication; and the Semantic Web promises new ways of adding value to research material by making it more accessible to automatic discovery, linking, and analysis. Institutional repositories contain a wealth of information which could benefit from the application of this technology. In this thesis I describe the problems inherent in the informality of traditional repository metadata, and propose a data model based on the Semantic Web which will support more efficient use of this data, with the aim of streamlining scientific communication and promoting efficient use of institutional research output.

e-Science technologies and tools have been applied to the facilitating of the accumulation, validation, analysis, computation, correlation and dissemination of chemical information and its transformation into accepted chemical knowledge. In this work a number of approaches have been investigated to address the diffeerent issues with recording and preserving the scientific record, mainly the laboratory notebook. The electronic laboratory notebook (ELN) has the potential to replace the paper notebook with a marked-up digital record that can be searched and shared. However it is a challenge to achieve these benefits without losing the usability and flexibility of traditional paper notebooks. Therefore using a blog-based platform will be investigated to try and address the issues associated with the development of a flexible system for recording scientific research.

E-books have seen a significant proliferation over recent years. In the UK, about a third of the population today owns an e-reader with about half either owning an e-reader or tablet. Nevertheless, only about 4% of readers have moved to reading e-books only. These numbers suggest that, while e-books have caught on among a large number of users, they seem to complement rather than replace books. In light of the significance of books to past and contemporary cultures and societies it is little surprising that the emergence of e-reading technologies has sparked a plethora of writing on the topic, particularly in journalism and the humanities. With a common focus on the relative merits of books and e-books, and ultimately, their respective futures (some writers go as far as either mourning or celebrating the death of the book), the debate largely suffers from a technological determinist stance, neglecting the role of social practice as a driving force in technology adoption and use. Regardless, the sheer volume of the discourse suggests that something important is at stake in the move from analogue to digital reading technologies and that books continue to be valued as physical artefacts in the digital age, if not with more fervour than ever. What is surprising then is the lack of empirical research aiming to understand how books and e-books are used and valued in everyday life. Existing work in the area is almost exclusively concerned with practices of reading, with a particular emphasis on reading in academic and professional environments, thereby not only disregarding the social and material nature of reading, but also the rich life of the book beyond its role as a reading technology. The aim of this thesis then is to provide an understanding of the practices and values surrounding books and e-books in everyday life. Based on this understanding, it further aims to explore alternatives to the current e-reading ecosystem through designs that are sensitive to some of the broader values people associate with books and e-books. To do so, it takes a situated approach to studying books and e-books as they are used over the course of their lifecycle inside and outside the home. Through a combination of a series of in-depth interviews, guided ‘home tours’, and participant diaries ‘context-rich’ data on people’s uses of, and orientations towards, books and e-books are gathered. Subsequently, design responses are iteratively developed before being returned to readers for analysis. The contribution of this thesis is fourfold: (1) an account of the socially and materially situated practices associated with books and e-books inside and outside the home, (2) an explication of the distinct, yet complementary, values reflected in and driving book and e-books use, (3) an explication of the ways in which developing a sense of self and connecting with others are actualized through the use of books and e-books, and (3) the development and in situ analysis of a design exemplar in support of these goals.

Today, the web is constantly growing, expanding global information space and more and more data is being processed and sourced online. The amount of electronically accessible and available online information is overwhelming. Increasingly, recommendation systems, which engage in some form of automated personalisation, are hugely prevalent on the web and have been extensively studied in the research literature. Several issues still remain unsolved including high sparsity situation and cold starts (how to recommend content to users who have had little or no prior interaction with the system). Recent work has demonstrated a potential solution in the form of cross-domain user modeling. This thesis will explore the design, implementation and testing of a cross-domain approach using social media data to model rich and effective user preferences and provide empirical evidence of the effectiveness of the approach based on direct real-world user feedback, deconstructing a cross-system news recommendation service where user models are generated via social media data. This will be accomplished by identifying the availability of a source domain from which to draw resources for recommendations and the availability of user profiles that capture a wide range of user interests from different domains. This thesis also demonstrates the viability of generating user models from social media data and evidences that the automated cross-domain approach can be superior to explicit filtering using self-declared preferences and can be further augmented when placing the user with the ability to maintain control over such models. The reasons for these results are qualitatively examined in order to understand why such effects occur, indicating that different models are capturing widely different areas within a user's preference space.

New information and communications technologies, such as mobile phones and social media, have presented the humanitarian community with a dilemma: how should humanitarian organisations integrate information from crisis-affected communities into their decision-making processes whilst guarding against inaccurate information from untrustworthy sources? Advocates of crisis mapping claim that, under certain circumstances, crowdsourcing can increase the accuracy of crisis information. However, whilst previous research has studied the geography of crisis information, the motivations of people who create crisis map mashups, and the motivations of people who crowdsource crisis information, the geography of, and the uncertainty associated with, crowdsourced crisis information has been ignored. As such, the current research is motivated by the desire to explore the geographic uncertainty associated with, and to contribute a better understanding of, crowdsourced crisis information. The current research contributes to the fields of GISc (Geographic Information Science) and crisis informatics; crisis mapping; and geovisualisation specifically and information visualisation more generally. These contributions can be summarised as an approach to, and an understanding of, the geographic uncertainty associated with crowdsourced crisis information; three geovisualisation software prototypes that can be used to identify meaningful patterns in crisis information; and the design, analysis, and evaluation model, which situates the activities associated with designing a software artefact-and using it to undertake analysis-within an evaluative framework. The approach to the geographic uncertainty associated with crowdsourced crisis information synthesised techniques from GISc, geovisualisation, and natural language processing. By following this approach, it was found that location descriptions from the Haiti crisis map did not 'fit' an existing conceptual model, and, consequently, that there is a need for new or enhanced georeferencing methods that attempt to estimate the uncertainty associated with free-text location descriptions from sources of crowdsourced crisis information.