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.

From the early days of the Internet to the present day, the World Wide Web has developed into one of the world's largest information resources. One of the first genres of web pages, which was also one of the first information resources, was the Personal Home Page (PHP). Over this same period of time, professional football in England has created the world's richest league and by extension an abundance of football related PHPs. This study investigates the role of the PHP as an information resource using the subject area of professional football in England. A holistic approach is taken so as to view the PHP from a broader context, as one information resource amongst many, including non-PHPs and even offline information resources (e.g. reference books). Within this study, football fans are interviewed along with web authors, surveys are carried out (by distributing both online and offline questionnaires) and research is also carried out online, examining football related PHPs and online web collaborations. Results suggest that whilst there are many informational benefits to be found on PHPs, such as plentiful unique information, they have low levels of use amongst football fans. The thesis concludes by proposing an avenue to the maximisation of the informational benefit of PHPs through a blueprint for a type of communal football website called the Club Community Composite Page (CCCP). Overall, several contributions are made to the field of information science, most notably attaining an improved understanding of PHPs as unique and accurate information providers online and devising new research methods for PHP research. In particular, the method of identification of PHPs developed here will be a useful tool for future researchers of PHPs. The contributions of this thesis are likely to be of value to researchers working in relevant sub-fields of information science, such as information seeking, web genres, grey literature and virtual communities.

<p> This study explores the information validation process of police investigators. The purpose of the research was to create a formal process model of the information validation process of a group of professional investigators. In this study I argue that the existence of such a model will help researchers in various disciplines by providing a baseline to which the validation process of other groups of information seekers can be tested and compared.</p><p> The study subjects consisted of 45 police investigators and data was collected using 4 distinct methods including semi-structured interviews, talk aloud sessions, a controlled experiment, and a Joint Application Design (JAD) session. The research culminated in a new process model of the information validation process of police investigators. The study also provides a new research framework for the future study of information validation processes of various groups of information seekers.</p><p> Several new discoveries emerging from the study include, but are not limited to, the findings that when validating new information, police investigator&rsquo;s consider disparities between the behavioral, physical, visual, evidentiary, and potentially audible forms of information surrounding the information source and the investigator&rsquo;s own personal knowledge base and experiential database. Other discoveries were that police investigators use their knowledge base and experiential database to create a virtual descriptive scenario or pre-disposition of what they expect to find before the validation process begins. They then use an abductive process through a questioning and information exchange process to test the details of their own scenario moving towards the best possible explanation of their observation.</p><p> In summary the study provides a new model of information validation illustrating the entities, processes, and decisions that comprise the process as well as the relationships, inter-dependencies, and constraints that govern it. Using professional investigators as study subjects provides merit to the model as a baseline or foundation to which we can now begin to study and compare the information validation process of other information seekers to the new model. </p>

This research is aimed towards the design and planning of an agricultural library and information network in China. Systems approach is applied to the construction of descriptive, mathematical and hybrid (logical) models in the design phase of the system development cycle. Four major conventional network functions are chosen as core functions to be designed in detail. A number of procedures and issues are identified for both overall network and individual function design. The embodiment of the design is based on the particular context to which it relates. The results of the design arc presented by either descriptive, or mathematical or hybrid (logical) models, decided by the categories of issues (quantitative or qualitative, or hybrid). The impacts of new technologies are explored and three alternative programmes, dependent on the technologies to be applied, arc defined. The cost-effectiveness-benefits of the services as overall criteria, and AHP (Analytical Hierarchy Process) as an processing tool, help determine 1) which program will be run, computerized or non-computerized (by cost-benefit analysis}; and 2) for a particular program, the resource allocations (mainly budgets) among co-operative activities and the resource allocations within the activity, i.e. two-level allocations. Zhejiang province, one of 29 provinces in the country, is taken as an example of regional (provincial) network model. Twenty-eight nodes Iron: five sectors and three levels, plus more potential nodes, will be configured hierarchically within the respective sectors and, in decentralised mode among sectors, in terms of network management. But, in terms of information flow and transaction, the configuration will be a mixed one. The purposes of data collection arc identified at four stages of network planning, i.e. investigation of situation, theory-testing, explanation of model and prediction. A number of investigations were made to fulfil the objectives of data collection. The descriptions of those investigations are given and the results arc discussed. The barriers to data collection confronted in Chinese circumstances are presented. Statistical analyses are carried out for certain types of data 1) to seek the conformity with the empirical assumptions, 2) to help set objective measures, 3) to estimate parameters and co-efficiency, and 4) to derive some mean, average and unit values. The research has focused on the organisational aspects of networking. However, the macro-consideration of technology is inevitable since it is a time of technological change. The latter stages of mathematical modelling, i.e. optimisation, prediction and validation are left until more empirical data become available. Nevertheless, it is possible for the author to make recommendations about the development of agricultural library and information networks in China.

The aim of this project is to establish a desirable information environment adjusting to need and behaviour of legal professional in Korea. For this purpose, present situation of information sources in printed form and computerised systems were examined. Printed sources were evaluated based on commonly used criteria title by title. Operation of the two systems, LIRES and SCS, was described based on written documents and on interview with the system designers. Professional's attitudes toward legal information, information sources, and computerisation were surveyed. Responses made a distinction between groups of practitioners and professors to compare the results. Differences in attitudes towards library, information sources, and information seeking habits between two groups were identified. Capabilities of the computerised systems were analysed and compared with the potential users' needs and behaviours as found by the survey. Also, functions of the two systems were analysed by practical use of them, which was carried out by application of five legal questions to each system. According to the analysis, it was identified that the problem of search method which was a main factor of users' dissatisfaction with the printed information sources, could not be completely cleared up by the systems. For development of the information sources, improvement of search method of printed sources was suggested. Also, advancement of the two systems in the direction of utilisation of computer capacity for searching and of expansion of input data adjusting to potential users' needs was recommended. In addition, in order to maximise the use of the two systems, integration of them, by connecting them to the Dacom-Net, and then to the distributed database system as an efficient interface was recommended. The configuration required of such an interface was demonstrated by the example of an experimental system, CONIT.

The project aimed to describe and critically evaluate information flows about medical research affecting UK quality newspapers. It focused particularly on the transfer of information from peer reviewed medical journals. In-depth interviews were conducted with media relations personnel at key organisations involved in medical research or more general health issues, and with specialist medical and health correspondents working for the national broadsheet press. The samples were purposively selected. Content analysis techniques were used to study news articles derived from information published in the British Medical Journal and the Lancet, which were compared with the original journal articles and any news releases associated with them. Many interacting factors shape media coverage of medical research and the personal motivations and preferences of a variety of individuals can play an important role. However, researchers, press officers and journalists are all constrained by their working relationships and contexts, so it is possible to identify certain common patterns of influence on the information flows. Press officers' activities are constrained by the characteristics and context of their organisations, particularly by the formal and cultural position of the press office within the organisation, and by relationships with other organisations in the field of interest which compete with their own for media access. Most importantly, they are constrained by their "go-between" role between their own organisation and media representatives who themselves operate under particular constraints. Press officers who liaise with researchers and journalists must seek acceptable compromises between scientific and news values. Specialist journalists are subject to the constraints of daily news reporting, and their stories must be strong in generally applicable news values if they are to be printed. The medical correspondents interviewed tried to avoid "over-sensationalisation" of stories because they had a sense of responsibility towards both their audience and their sources, but they had to be careful not to "kill" stories in their editors' eyes. Being unable to evaluate research evidence themselves, the journalists relied heavily on the authority of orthodox medical opinion in their story selection and development decisions. Their dependenceo n sourceso f authority encouragedt hem to write within a medical paradigm. Peer reviewed medical journals, articularly prestigious general journals, are regularly used as sources of news stories. Various factors encourage press officers and journalists to focus on a research project when it is about to be published. In particular, the peer review process is used by journalists as a quality safeguard, and journal policies against prior publication of material discourage researchers from discussing their work until it is safely in academically and professionally acceptable print. Several major medical research organisations invest heavily in media relations. Those which journalists regard as credible, and which can package information to suit their needs can successfully improve their media access. Future research should consider the roles of corporate culture and of competition between organisations involved with medical research in shaping information flows and media relations activity.

This thesis investigates aspects of the intellectual and social structure of the field of information policy through a detailed examination of the serials literature. The aims of the research are to explore how information policy scholarship is organised—in terms of its relation to other fields and disciplines; whether it constitutes a distinct specialty in its own right; and what kinds of institutional structures and arrangements exist to support research and scholarship. In Part One, a literature review identifies previous bibliometric and other studies which are relevant to studies of scholarly disciplines and knowledge communities. It discusses the interdisciplinary problem-oriented nature of information policy and considers some of the modes of enquiry which characterise investigations this area. Part Two consists of a series of experiments carried out on a test collection of 771 periodical articles drawn from the Social science Citation Index The empirical work comprised four linked studies: a bibliometric census study an analysis of document clustering; an author cocit.ation study; and a content analysis. Extensive use was made of multivariate statistical techniques, notably principal components analysis, hierarchical clustering, discriminant and correspondence analysis to identify statistically significant and meaningful patterns and structures within the test collection. The study concludes that information policy is a growing and reasonably distinctive field of study with strong links to library and information science, law, media studies, and the political sciences. It is suggested that the field is not unified and that research is still primarily organised along national and traditional disciplinary lines, with little evidence of significant collaborative activity across institutions or sectors. The research base is highly dispersed, with practitioners playing a major role in the production of knowledge. In institutional terms, the field is very thinly spread, with few signs of concentration.