The overall objective of this study is to analyze the document retrieval process and the main information retrieval (IR) concepts from the point of view of semiotics and design retrieval mechanisms based on the findings of the semiotic analysis of the retrieval situation. Semiotics is a discipline which studies 'sign systems' and how signs are exchanged in communication. The semiotic view of IR interaction presented in this dissertation views document retrieval as a kind of human communication process taking place in a social and cultural realm. The most important result of the semiotic model developed is the explication of the distinction between the knowledge production and transfer functions of document retrieval. The consequence of this finding is the conceptualization of the retrieval process as a dynamic and complex interplay between knowledge production and transfer tasks. It is hypothesised that, in the case of knowledge production, users of retrieval systems are interested in exploring new areas of the document collection which are not a priori known. Two knowledge based systems are developed based on the Okapi probabilistic retrieval system. The purpose of the retrieval systems designed is posited, in general terms, as to suggest the users new search areas of potential interest. This is achieved by treating the Inspec thesaurus as a semantic network, and applying a heuristic spreading activation technique to generate clusters of terms linked in the Inspec thesaurus. Each cluster or batch of terms is conceived as representing a part of the general search area defined by the initial user search terms. The main design objective here is to enable the user to identify new search areas from the term information contained in the batches. Two evaluation experiments were carried out with real users who had real information needs to test whether the batches were actually effective in defining search areas related to the original user queries and whether they were useful in pointing new areas which were potentially relevant to the users. A number of hypotheses related to the retrieval effectiveness of the knowledge based systems designed were also tested in the experiments. The main findings of the experiments indicate that: • the batches were useful in representing search domains relevant to the users' queries • in many cases the batches represented new ideas or new search domains to the users • the knowledge based systems had similar retrieval effectiveness in terms of precision as the Okapi system.

Evaluation studies can help libraries to find out their strengths and weaknesses and use this knowledge for re-orienting their collections, services and facilities to effectively meet the information needs of their users. The purpose of this study was to explore the information needs and seeking behaviour of agricultural scientists in Malaysia and how effectively their needs are satisfied by their libraries. The study investigated some major factors that were considered important in effectively meeting the information needs of these scientists. Five major agricultural institutions in Malaysia participated in the study. Data was collected through two questionnaires and follow-up interviews with selected respondents and library staff. The user survey questionnaire provided data on information needs and seeking behaviour of respondents, their assessment about the adequacy of library collections, services and facilities, and their overall perceptions about library effectiveness. The library survey questionnaire furnished data from the participating libraries on their manpower, budget, collections, physical resources, library services, and resource sharing activities. The population of the study comprised 1,328 individuals. Proportionate stratified random sampling technique was used to generate random samples. A total of 332 questionnaires were distributed and 234 useable questionnaires were received back with an overall response rate of 70.5 percent. The study found that research and review articles were the most preferred sources for getting up-to-date information. Interaction . with professional colleagues was also considered important for information exchange. Libraries were more extensively used during two important stages of research, i.e., proposal development and report writing. Although a majority of the respondents personally visited their library they, however, sent their junior researchers andlor para-professionals for getting photocopies of articles, checking out books or getting information from the sources already known to them. The use of IT-based information sources and facilities was very low, although a majority of the respondents possessed reasonably good computing skills. Among the Internet applications, e-mail was the most popular while other Internet-based sources and facilities were used infrequently. A positive relationship was found between perceptions about library effectiveness and assessment of participants of the adequacy of library collections, equipment and physical resources. Other factors having a positive impact on the perception about library effectiveness were: involvement in the selection of library materials; notification of current materials; adequate promotion; convenient library location; staff attitude; and participation in user education programmes. The level of resource sharing among Malaysian libraries was quite high as nearly 74 percent of the interlibrary loan and document delivery requests of the participating libraries were met locally. However, only a minimal resource sharing was found among the participating libraries and libraries in the ASEAN countries. Although the participating libraries agreed in principle to participate in a resource sharing scheme, they felt that it should be the prerogative of the participating library to decide its level of co-operation and with which library to share its resources. It means that these libraries were in favour of a "loose" library co-operation network. A big difference was found between the number of document delivery requests made by these libraries to international sources and the number of such requests received by them from overseas, confirming one-way flow of information. Most of the document delivery requests were made to the BLDSC. Malaysian agricultural scientists, as compared to scientists in developed countries, made considerably less number of interlibrary loan and document delivery requests. A positive relationship was found between the availability of funds in research projects for literature procurement and the number of document delivery requests made. The study concludes that agricultural libraries in Malaysia were to some extent meeting the information needs of their scientists, although a disparity among these libraries was quite evident. However, the financial crisis of 1997 has severely affected the performance of these libraries. Library collections, services and facilities considered reasonable at the time of this study may quickly become inadequate due to the lack of funds to sustain them. Therefore, agricultural libraries in Malaysia need to develop appropriate strategies for surviving in the rapidly changing environment. Major recommendations of the study are: development of a formal resource sharing scheme for agricultural libraries in Malaysia, putting holdings information of these libraries on the Internet to facilitate resource sharing, making subscriptions to full-text electronic journals, more library co-operation among ASEAN countries, and the conduct of intensive user education programmes.

The classification of notated Western art music is a perennial issue. This thesis analyses and models the knowledge organization of notated Western art music in order to elucidate a theoretical understanding of these classification issues and to offer new ways of viewing music classification in the future. This thesis also considers how music classification contributes to developments in general knowledge organization and compares the classification of Western art music across the library and information science (LIS) and music domains. The research is conducted using a number of analytical techniques, including examining music knowledge organization discourse, analysing examples of LIS classification schemes, unpicking discussions of classification in the music domain and analysing composer worklists in the music domain. After ascertaining how music classification fits into theories of faceted classification, three important facets of music are identified: medium, form and genre, and a quasi-facet of function. These three facets are explored in detail over five chapters: the binary vocal/instrumental categorisation; classifying numbers of instruments or voices, accompaniment, arrangements and “extreme” mediums; classifying musical instruments; classifying musical forms and genres; and the quasi-facet of function. Five resulting models of music classification are presented. Model 1 demonstrates the complexities of classifying musical medium, including the interlinked relationships between different parts of musical medium. Model 2 offers a solution to LIS classification’s largely binary view of vocal and instrumental categorisation by suggesting a novel new category: “vocinstrumental”. Model 3 illuminates the entrenched dependencies between facets of music, highlighting one of the structural issues with LIS classifications of music. Model 4 offers an original structure of music classification, proposing a simultaneous faceted and genre-based system. Model 5 compares classification in the music and LIS domains, offering a novel way of considering domain-based classification by codifying various types of relationships between the LIS and domain classifications. This thesis also contributes to the theory and practice of knowledge organization in general through the development of novel frameworks and methodologies to analyse classification schemes: the multiplane approach, reception-infused analysis, webs of Wirkungs (connections) between classification schemes and stress-testing.

The thesis reviewed the changes to the role of teacher librarians and the implications of this for primary teachers. The study sought to explore the teachers’ views about information literacy skills, who should teach them and the role of the teacher librarian. This study took a mix-methods approach, i.e. quantitative and qualitative research, in which self-report data were collected through a questionnaire to classroom teachers followed by individual face to face interview with six questionnaire respondents. The findings of the study were that teachers associate information literacy skills with information technology skills. Though they said they understand information literacy skills, their understanding of information literacy skills was discrete and not systematic compared with the definition of information literacy skills in the literature. They agreed that information literacy skills were important and they have the responsibility to teach student such skills. They agreed that they have further professional development needs in terms of information literacy skills. Teachers who started teaching before 1998 reported some changes in teaching and learning made by the presence of the teacher librarian. They agreed with the provision of the teacher librarian post though they were not aware of the legislated role of the teacher librarian. They thought that awareness of the role of the teacher librarian and information literacy skills and the ability to develop students’ information literacy skills would help them utilize the skills of the teacher librarian. The findings have highlighted the implications for teacher education to train teacher information literacy skills, raise teachers’ awareness of the role of the teacher librarian especially in Cooperative Planning and Teaching with teachers to equip student information literacy skills. For serving teachers, piloting the role of the teacher librarian, Cooperative Planning and Teaching and flexible library timetable are necessary to facilitate implementation of the legislated role of the teacher librarian.

This thesis is concerned with the academic study of information policy and aims to improve theoretical and methodological approaches for the analysis of complex information policy environments. In conducting a casestudy on the formulation of the European directive on the legal protection of databases. up to its adoption in March 1996. the research aims to explore the ways in which copyright and information issues were framed. and solutions shaped by the process of formulating policy responses to them at the European level. At the substantive level the research examines the legal issues arising in the protection of databases in Europe and describes and explains the role of human. organisational and contextual factors in shaping the content of the directive as finally adopted. At the methodological level the research examines the utility of a re-interpreted process model of policy-making for providing a coherent framework within which to conduct analysis of this complex information policy issue. At the theoretical level the research aims to use the casestudy findings to generate insights for the academic study of complex (European) information policy environments. The literature review begins by examining the development of information policy and considers the main problems that have inhibited the development of a coherent approach to information policy studies from within the information science tradition. It examines the reinterpreted process model of policy-making and presents it as a heuristic device with which to conduct the casestudy. The literature review also examines in detail the development of copyright policy at the European level and identifies the expansion of protection that has taken place. In particular. the impact of digital information and communication technologies on copyright regimes is considered. The literature review also outlines the emergence of the European Union(EU). and considers how the EU has shaped the characteristics of. and interactions between policy actors operating in the European policy-making environment. The casestudy analysis is conducted in two parts consisting of a detailed analysis of documentary evidence and forty in-depth semi-structured interviews with policy actors directly involved in the formulation of the directive. In deploying the re-interpreted process model the analysis is divided into two overlapping phases linked by the publication of the Commission's formal directive proposal in 1992. To ensure that the casestudy findings can be used in a more generalisable manner the analysis addresses the links between the formulation of the database directive and the wider context of European copyright and information policy-making in the digital age. Following the documentary and interview analysis the research findings are discussed and interpreted. The thesis concludes that at a substantive level the formulation of European copyright policy is problematic and tends towards a strengthening of protection in favour of right shoulders. In the digital environment the implications of this for other areas of information policy are also shown to be of concern. At the methodological level the re-interpreted process model is highlighted as useful in sensitising analysis to sources of complexity in the formulation process and for providing a coherent framework within which to study them. At the theoretical level the thesis enhances understanding of (European) information policy processes and provides some useful insights for academic information policy studies.

The study describes action research undertaken within the Knowledge Management programme of the British Council, a not-for-profit multinational organisation. An interpretive methodology is adopted because of its appropriateness to the study of real-life complex situations. There is a contested literature on Knowledge Management which this study explores and contributes too. The action research draws on a social constructivist stance to develop and introduce Knowledge Management systems for significant groups within the organisation. A rich set of issues emerge from the literature, and the action research, which contribute to the discourse on Knowledge Management systems and their use in practice. The study suggests that a methodological framework is beneficial in supporting the development and introduction of such systems. However the research identified that Knowledge Management problems cannot be identified and so reconceptualises Knowledge Management in terms of improvement. A framework is developed (AFFEKT: Appreciative Framework for Evolving Knowledge Technologies) to such improvement. This framework is used in the final action research cycle. The conclusions are drawn from a reflection on the application of this framework and reflection on broader issues raised by the action research. The study concludes that knowledge management systems should introduced through an ongoing iterative process of reflection and action. Knowledge Management systems should encourage new work practices, however this requires a realisation that the development of a Knowledge Management systems is a reflective process by which the system is integrated into existing practice and enables users to critique this practice. The study contributes to the discourse concerning the application of technology within Knowledge Management (Galliers 1999; Alavi and Leidner 2001; Butler 2002; Wickramasinghe 2002). It contributes to the field of Information Systems by describing a coherent narrative on the introduction of knowledge management systems within a unique organisational context, and by developing a framework to aid intervention.

<p> Libraries often engage in services that require collaboration across stakeholder boundaries to be successful. Institutional repositories (IRs) are a good example of such a service. IRs are an infrastructure to preserve intellectual assets within a university or college, and to provide an open access showcase for that institution&rsquo;s research, teaching, and creative excellence. They involve multiple stakeholders (librarians, IT experts, administrators, faculty, and students) and are typically operated by academic libraries. They have existed since the early 2000s. </p><p> Collaborative leadership has been studied in areas such as health care and business, but it has received little attention in studies of library leadership and management. Collaborative leadership has been shown to be an effective leadership style for an increasingly networked world; it is an interactive process in which people set aside self-interests, share power, work across boundaries, and discuss issues openly and supportively. Collaborative leadership moves organizations beyond mere cooperation towards a state of interdependence; it empowers all members of a team to help each other to achieve broader goals, find personal satisfaction in their work, and sustain productive relationships over time. A better understanding of collaborative leadership can inform both IR development and future complex multi-stakeholder campus services. </p><p> Two methodologies &ndash; content analysis of IR web pages and surveys of library directors and IR developers &ndash; were employed to determine if IRs revealed evidence of collaborative leadership. The study populations were those members of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and the Oberlin Group of liberal arts colleges that operated IR services by July 2014 (146 institutions overall). The research examined if IR format, size, age, nomenclature, or technology platform varied between ARL and Oberlin Group members. It asked if there is any difference in the perception of collaborative leadership traits, perceived IR success, or collaborative involvement with stakeholder communities between ARL and Oberlin Group members or between library directors and IR developers. The study found evidence of all six collaborative leadership traits being examined: assessing the environment for collaboration, creating clarity, building trust, sharing power, developing people, and self-reflection. </p><p>

Information Retrieval (IR) typically retrieves entire documents in response to a user's information need. However, many times a user would prefer to examine smaller portions of a document. One example of this is when building a frame-based representation of a text. The user would like to read all and only those portions of the text that are about predefined important features. This research addresses the problem of automatically locating text about these features, where the important features are those defined for use by a case-based reasoning (CBR) system in the form of features and values or slots and fillers. To locate important text pieces we gathered a small set of "excerpts", textual segments, when creating the original case-base representations. Each segment contains the local context for a particular feature within a document. We used these excerpts to generate queries that retrieve relevant passages. By locating passages for display to the user, we winnow a text down to sets of several sentences, greatly reducing the time and effort expended searching through each text for important features.

Millions of books from public libraries and private collections have been scanned by various organizations in the last decade. The motivation is to preserve the written human heritage in electronic format for durable storage and efficient access. The information buried in these large book collections has always been of major interest for scholars from various disciplines. Several interesting research problems can be defined over large collections of scanned books given their corresponding optical character recognition (OCR) outputs. At the highest level, one can view the entire collection as a whole and discover interesting contextual relationships or linkages between the books. A more traditional approach is to consider each scanned book separately and perform information search and mining at the book level. Here we also show that one can view each book as a whole composed of chapters, sections, paragraphs, sentences, words or even characters positioned in a particular sequential order sharing the same global context. The information inherent in the entire context of the book is referred to as "global information" and it is demonstrated by addressing a number of research questions defined for scanned book collections. The global sequence information is one of the different types of global information available in textual documents. It is useful for discovering content overlap and similarity across books. Each book has a specific flow of ideas and events which distinguishes it from other books. If this global order is changed, then the flow of events and consequently the story changes completely. This argument is true across document translations as well. Although the local order of words in a sentence might not be preserved after translation, sentences, paragraphs, sections and chapters are likely to follow the same global order. Otherwise the two texts are not considered to be translations of each other. A global sequence alignment approach is therefore proposed to discover the contextual similarity between the books. The problem is that conventional sequence alignment algorithms are slow and not robust for book length documents especially with OCR errors, additional or missing content. Here we propose a general framework which can be used to efficiently align and compare the textual content of the books at various coarseness levels and even across languages. In a nut-shell, the framework uses the sequence of words which appear only once in the entire book (referred to as "the sequence of unique words") to represent the text. This representation is compact and it is highly descriptive of the content along with the global word sequence information. It is shown to be more accurate compared to the state of the art for efficiently i) detecting which books are partial duplicates in large scanned book collections (DUPNIQ), and, ii) finding which books are translations of each other without explicitly translating the entire texts using statistical machine translation approaches (TRANSNIQ). Using the global order of unique words and their corresponding positions in the text, one can also generate the complete text alignment efficiently using a recursive approach. The Recursive Text Alignment Scheme (RETAS) is several orders of magnitude faster than the conventional sequence alignment approaches for long texts and it is later used for iii) the automatic evaluation of OCR accuracy of books given the OCR outputs and the corresponding electronic versions, iv) mapping the corresponding portions of the two books which are known to be partial duplicates, and finally it is generalized for v) aligning long noisy texts across languages (Recursive Translation Alignment - RTA). Another example of the global information is that books are mostly printed in a single global font type. Here we demonstrate that the global font feature along with the letter sequence information can be used for facilitating and/or improving text search in noisy page images. There are two contributions in this area: (vi) an efficient word spotting framework for searching text in noisy document images, and, (vii) a state of the art dependence model approach to resolve arbitrary text queries using visual features. The effectiveness of these approaches is demonstrated for books printed in different scripts for which there is no OCR engine available or the recognition accuracy is low.

Thesis (M.S.)--Rochester Institute of Technology, 1987. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 137-144).