The Internet has become a very powerful tool in improving communication, making it easier, more convenient, and faster to access or exchange information. This project takes advantage of the strengths the Internet provides by improving communication by developing a web site for a transportation company.

There is a growing expectation that school librarians function within their job descriptions beyond the role of reading promoter and resource manager. With college and career readiness standards, technology use and digital learning standards and information literacy standards now in place for student learning expectations, it is vital that students have opportunities to acquire, develop and practice such skills for future success in the global market economy. For students to receive such opportunities, there should be designed instruction delivered to students that allows for them to learn and practice information gathering techniques to access, use and apply information effectively, efficiently and ethically while developing technology skills within context of their content learning and real-world connections authentically. This study examined how school librarians conveyed information gathering techniques to students through a qualitative, constant comparative approach. Five middle school librarians in an urban school district participated in an observation and interview. Findings suggest that school librarians do claim an instructional role regarding information gathering and technology usage, although it manifests in diverse ways. Implications for future studies and practice suggest that the position become more defined such that the expectation to function in these roles is widely accepted by all stakeholders, and for the effectiveness of the instruction on the development of these skills. As school librarians embrace and adopt new and emerging technologies within their instructional delivery, examining the effectiveness of that instruction would be of interest.

Thesis (M.A. ( Information Studies)) -- University of Limpopo, 2021 / This study aimed to examine the extent of awareness and the adoption of Open Access (OA) publishing for the purpose of scholarly communication by academic staff at the University of Limpopo (UL). The study was guided by Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovation theory (1) to measure the level of awareness of academics on the availability and use of OA resources; (2) to determine the adoption and usage levels of OA publishing as a platform for information sharing by academics in scholarly communication; (3) to establish academics’ attitudes towards the use of the OA publishing platforms; and (4) to identify perspectives of academic staff with regards to challenges and benefits presented by OA publishing. A dominantly quantitative research approach was adopted using a google forms questionnaire with closed ended questions to collect data from 250 academics at the University of Limpopo. Academics were selected using the systematic simple random sampling method. To ensure the survey instrument’s reliability and validity, the researcher conducted a pilot study through a web-based survey. A descriptive statistics method of the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) was used to analyse data. The study established that the majority (82%) of academics were aware of OA publishing platforms. The internet and subject librarians were the main communication channels through which they became aware of OA publishing. The study also found that there was minimal the adoption and usage of OA publishing among academics. Their attitudes towards OA and their perceptions of the benefits and challenges of OA. The general attitudes of academics about OA were positive, signifying the acceptance of this scholarly communication mode. However, some of the challenges encountered in adopting and using OA publishing include slow internet connectivity and access, publication charges by some publishers, lack of skills to publish online, power interruptions, lack of policies on OA, fake and predatory v publishers and OA articles not being peer-reviewed. These were reported as problems that directly or indirectly hinder academics from publishing in OA platforms. The study recommends the institutionalisation of OA publishing at UL to improve research output dissemination. An area for further research will be to establish more insights regarding the feasibility of OA development and possible ways of dealing with article processing fees. Keywords: Open Access publishing, scholarly communication, Academic staff, Institutional Repositories, Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovation theory, University of Limpopo.

Copyright is essentially the right of the rightsholder of an original work to prohibit others from making or distributing unauthorised copies of his or her work. More specifically for this dissertation, when an end user deals with digital content, one of the aims of copyright becomes the balancing of the conflicting interests in ‘exclusivity’ on the one hand, and in ‘access to information’ on the other. Exclusivity is achieved by the rightsholders through technological protection measures to protect their commercial interests. Access to information is achieved where works are available to the general public without payment and technological protection measures and where the digital content is not directly marketed for commercial gain. Exclusivity and access to information are two conflicting cultures surrounding copyright in the digital era. It is submitted that unless we find a socio-economic-legal way for the dynamic coexistence of these two conflicting cultures by means of fair dealing, the culture of exclusivity will eventually dominate fair access to information. The transient nature of digital content means that rightsholders have little or no control over their works once the end user has obtained a legal digital copy of the work. The right ‘to prohibit’ end users from copying and distributing unauthorised copies is, therefore, largely meaningless unless a legal or other solution can be found to discourage end users from the unauthorised reproduction and distribution of unauthorised copies of the work. Currently, technological protection measures are used to manage such digital rights because legal permissions within the doctrine of fair dealing for works in printed (analogue) format are inadequate. It is, however, submitted that a legal solution to discourage end users from copying and distributing unauthorised copies rests on two pillars. Firstly, the solution must be embedded in state-of-the-art digital rights management systems and secondly the business model used by publishers, and academic publishers in particular, should change fundamentally from a business-to-consumer model to a business-to-business model. Empirical evidence shows that the printing of e-content will continue to be relevant far into the future. Therefore, the management of fair dealing to allow for the printing of digital content will become increasingly important at educational institutions that use e-books as prescribed course material. It is submitted that although the origination cost of print editions and e-books correspond, the relatively high retail price of e-books appears to be based on the fact that academic publishers of digital content do not have the legal or digital rights management tools to manage the challenges arising from the fair dealing doctrine. The observation that academic publishers are reluctant to grant collecting societies mandates to manage the distribution of digital content, and/or the right to manage the authorised reproduction (printing) of the digital content, supports this hypothesis. Ultimately, with technologies at our disposal, the fair use of content in digital and print format can be achieved because it should simply be cheaper to comply with copyright laws than to make unauthorised digital or printed copies of content that our society desperately needs to make South Africa a winning nation. / Mercantile Law / LL. M.

During the 21st century, electronic resources have become an important component in every sector of society and the academic sector is no exception. Academic libraries worldwide have adopted the technologies involved in electronic resources, with some replacing their traditional collections with e-resources, which are more accessible by users. This study was conducted at the University of South Africa (Unisa) and was aimed at investigating the levels of awareness and usage of e-resources by third-year students in the School of Arts. The study used the descriptive survey study design, which is quantitative in approach. The target population comprised of 5 377 third-year students enrolled in the seven departments in the School of Arts and a proportional sample of 360 students was drawn from the population by using stratified random sampling. Library staff was also included in the study, in order to determine students’ usage patterns of e-resources and to establish initiatives available at the Unisa Library to increase awareness and use of e-resources. Online questionnaires distributed via Survey Monkey were used as the data collection instrument. The study established that the Unisa Library subscribes to a wide range of e-resources and has a number of initiatives in place to encourage the awareness and usage of these resources. However, 50, 3% of the student respondents were unaware of the availability of Unisa e-resources. The study also established that the majority of students use e-resources for study and research and that, although they have basic information and communication technologies (ICTs) skills, the majority of students lack advanced information search and retrieval skills, which are required to utilise e-resources properly. The four main barriers that prevent students from accessing and using e-resources were the cost of access to the internet, unavailability of relevant literature for studies, lack of time to do online searches and preference for information freely available on the internet. To encourage increased awareness and use of e-resources, the study recommend the development of an e-resources marketing strategy, the introduction of an information literacy module for all first-year students, the provision of infrastructure and technologies for access, development of specialised library assistance services, balancing of the electronic library collections across different subjects, tutors including more e-resources references in study guides and tutorial letters and hiring of more library staff. The study concludes that the Unisa Library has a wide variety of electronic library resources and services needed in academic institutions, but awareness and usage of the resources is quite low, due to several factors highlighted in the study. Therefore, the Library should step forward and ensure that the resources are fully utilised by following the recommendations suggested in the study. / Information Science / M. Inf.

E-government is a means of improving provision of government information and services to citizens. The aim of this study was to investigate the current situation and factors influencing access of e-government information and e-government adoption in Tanzania. A triangulation approach for data gathering was adopted. Specifically, a semi-structured questionnaire was used to collect data from 448 respondents. In addition, interviews involving five policy makers were conducted to complement the questionnaire survey. Factor analyses were performed and multiple linear regression analyses were carried out to assess the relationships between variables. The findings revealed that, the current state of e-government in the selected districts of Tanzania is characterized by web presence stage. Various enhancing factors and challenges for e-government were noted in this study. The enhancing factors include necessary knowledge, necessary resources, awareness, confidence to use the website, availability and reliability of internet connections, positive incentives that have resulted from using the internet to search for government information, and getting information on demand. Other enhancing factors are guidance for internet use, possession of ICTs, availability of up-to-date information in the website, education, income and social influence. There are some e-government adoption barriers that include worrying about security and privacy of information, lack of support from the government, unreliable power supply, inaccessibility of internet services due to geographical locations, and people not getting as much information about the services as possible. Other barriers are system quality, cultural barriers, age, and information content produced in English, which is a language that the majority do not understand. The study has implications for policy makers and to e-government project teams. Policy makers should consider e-government adoption barriers in order to formulate policies of eliminating them. Likewise, e-government project teams should consider these barriers in order overcome them before the implementation of e-government systems. / Information Science / D. Litt et. Phil. (Information Science)

While there are powerful keyword search systems that index all kinds of resources including emails and web pages, people have trouble recalling semantic facts such as the name, location, edit dates and keywords that uniquely identifies resources in their personal repositories. Reusing information exasperates this problem. A rarely used approach is to leverage episodic memory of file provenance. Provenance is traditionally defined as "the history of ownership of a valued object". In terms of documents, we consider not only the ownership, but also the operations performed on the document, especially those that related it to other people, events, or resources. This thesis investigates the potential advantages of using provenance data in desktop search, and consists of two manuscripts. First, a numerical analysis using field data from a longitudinal study shows that provenance information can effectively be used to identify files and resources in realistic repositories. We introduce the Leyline, the first provenance-based search system that supports dynamic relations between files and resources such as copy/paste, save as, file rename. The Leyline allows users to search by drawing search queries as graphs in a sketchpad. The Leyline overlays provenance information that may help users identify targets or explore information flow. A limited controlled experiment showed that this approach is feasible in terms of time and effort. Second, we explore the design of the Leyline, compare it to previous provenance-based desktop search systems, including their underlying assumptions and focus, search coverage and flexibility, and features and limitations. / Graduation date: 2012

Traditional solutions to information security in communication systems act in the application layer and are oblivious to the effects in the physical layer. Physical-layer security methods, of which information-theoretic security is a special case, try to extract security from the random effects in the physical layer. In information-theoretic security, there are two asymptotic notions of secrecy---weak and strong secrecy This dissertation investigates the problem of information-theoretic strong secrecy on the binary erasure wiretap channel (BEWC) with a specific focus on designing practical codes. The codes designed in this work are based on analysis and techniques from error-correcting codes. In particular, the dual codes of certain low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes are shown to achieve strong secrecy in a coset coding scheme. First, we analyze the asymptotic block-error rate of short-cycle-free LDPC codes when they are transmitted over a binary erasure channel (BEC) and decoded using the belief propagation (BP) decoder. Under certain conditions, we show that the asymptotic block-error rate falls according to an inverse square law in block length, which is shown to be a sufficient condition for the dual codes to achieve strong secrecy. Next, we construct large-girth LDPC codes using algorithms from graph theory and show that the asymptotic bit-error rate of these codes follow a sub-exponential decay as the block length increases, which is a sufficient condition for strong secrecy. The secrecy rates achieved by the duals of large-girth LDPC codes are shown to be an improvement over that of the duals of short-cycle-free LDPC codes.

INTRODUCTION While the concept is widely defined and interpreted, all Web 2.0 tools have certain characteristics in common; they are collaborative in nature, interactive, and dynamic. The Science and Engineering librarians at the University of British Columbia are collaborating with their liaison departments to record science and engineering podcasts, host them and share them with a wider audience. OBJECTIVES In this session, we discuss the use of podcasting as an outreach tool that connects a large academic science and engineering library with its users and raises users’ awareness of additional library services. Functionality, usability and practical applications of podcasting tools are reviewed. OUTCOMES At the end of this session, we will have demonstrated: 1) Overall usability of podcasting academic science and engineering content; tips and tricks when creating and tailoring podcasts to your community needs; 2) Use of podcasting as an outreach and community engagement tool in academic libraries and as a supplement for the traditional academic information resources. DISCUSSION The strength of podcasting, to allow content to be created by the users for the users, makes it an appealing addition to the academic librarians’ toolbox. Podcasting is a service that many of our users might not expect from their library, which makes it a unique and attractive offering. It requires few resources, and the end result might exceed librarians’ expectations. We found podcasting to be a robust outreach tool and a service that raises the profile of the library and as such creates an opportunity for users to find additional library resources. Nevertheless, it is necessary for academic librarians to critically evaluate the continuous innovations of Web 2.0 technologies on an ongoing basis so that they are best prepared to put them into the appropriate context amongst other relevant and important information.

由於數位時代來臨，網路科技興盛，人類生活中許多事物漸漸被數位化、電子化的產品所包圍或取代，資訊和服務更透過網路的便利性快速傳達。而圖書館館藏類型也隨著這股潮流與需求的影響產生了相當大的轉變。其中大量的電子資訊資源進入圖書館，不但改變了館藏的類型、服務的形式、館員專業技能的培訓、圖書館軟硬體設備等，也改變了圖書館在採購經費上的分配。網路行銷是目前國內外電子商務大量應用的新行銷模式，而圖書館也逐漸注意應用網路進行館藏資訊與服務的行銷。 本研究主要目的在探討國內網路行銷在大學圖書館電子資訊服務之應用，瞭解大學圖書館應用網路進行圖書館電子資訊服務的行銷現況，以及從研究結果中擬定出適用於圖書館電子資訊服務網路行銷之模式。 本研究採用文獻分析法與深度訪談法，參考蒐集之國內外文獻，進行圖書館與網路行銷理論的歸納整理，撰寫出圖書館網路行銷理論，並以此一理論架構作為設計訪談問題綱要之基礎。 本研究發現，大學圖書館電子資訊資源與電子資訊服務的類型豐富且多元。目前圖書館應用了許多網路行銷之工具進行電子資訊服務的行銷推廣，例如：網站、e-mail、BBS、電子報、線上學習等，但多未實際進行圖書館網路行銷規劃，也未針對館員進行網路行銷與相關技能的培訓或與校內系所進行合作計畫。 根據研究結果，歸納出圖書館網路行銷規劃架構應包含六項步驟：(1)情境分析；(2)數位任務與目標；(3)網路行銷組合；(4)行銷預算；(5)執行與評估；(6)顧客關係管理。其中網路行銷組合採用Eileen Elliott de Saez所提之5ePs做探討，分別是電子化產品、電子化通路、電子化推廣、電子化價格、以及電子化的公共關係。 最後本研究提出六項建議：(1)圖書館應積極從事網路行銷；(2)圖書館應對不同電子資訊服務進行網路行銷的區分；(3)圖書館網路行銷應區分社群並多加經營；(4)加強館員網路行銷教育與訓練；(5)應積極建立電子資訊資源使用量統計標準；(6)應進行圖書館網路行銷使用者研究評估。