Journal of Information Science

This paper describes a study of the teaching of knowledge organization in formal library/information courses. It is based on a questionnaire survey of academic institutions and professional associations in the UK, Australia and the USA, and of employers in various sectors in the UK, and supported by several in-depth interviews with educational specialists, and an analysis of the literature and of course content. The main findings are that: there is little divergence between the views of educators and employers/professional associations; all groups regard theoretical and conceptual knowledge as more important than practical skills; ‘cat and class’ retains its central role in the topic; there is an important role for continuing professional development.

In order to optimize access to the increasing amount of information, a classic solution has been data representation. The aim of this research is to uncover and systematize the factors and dimensions involved in the data representation issue and more exactly in the planning and design of the information products (IP) and their previous representation processes (RP). QFD (quality function deployment) is a planning tool based on user needs and expectations – quality functions – allowing the planning and design of IPs and RPs. A series of linked deployments provides the implied factors and dimensions: IP planning factors–representing, relating, filtering and seeking relevant information; IP design_dimensions–relevance, format, comprehensiveness, consistency, accuracy andcurrentness; RP planning factors–comprehension, synthesizing, structuring and selecting; and RP design dimensions – human resources, computers and tangibles. By means of these deployments, the analysis of the factors and dimensions and their corresponding relationships provides an excellent picture for the quality planning and design of information products and representation processes.

This study measures the frequency with which search engines update their indices. Therefore, 38 websites that are updated on a daily basis were analysed within a time-span of six weeks. The analysed search engines were Google, Yahoo and MSN. We find that Google performs best overall with the most pages updated on a daily basis, but only MSN is able to update all pages within a time-span of less than 20 days. Both other engines have outliers that are older. In terms of indexing patterns, we find different approaches at the different engines. While MSN shows clear update patterns, Google shows some outliers and the update process of the Yahoo index seems to be quite chaotic. Implications are that the quality of different search engine indices varies and more than one engine should be used when searching for current content.

Pre-print repositories have seen a significant increase in use over the past fifteen years across multiple research domains. Researchers are beginning to develop applications capable of using these repositories to assist the scientific community above and beyond the pure dissemination of information. The contributions set forth by this paper emphasize a deconstructed publication model in which the peer-review process is mediated by an Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) peer-review service. This peer-review service uses a social-network algorithm to determine potential reviewers for a submitted manuscript and for weighting the influence of each participating reviewer's evaluations. This paper also suggests a set of peer-review specific metadata tags that can accompany a pre-print's existing metadata record. The combinations of these contributions provide a unique repository-centric peer-review model that fits within the widely deployed OAIPMH framework.

This paper provides an overview of virtual teams in the information age, focussing on the definition of virtual teams, their salient characteristics, the communication issues they face (including information overload, geographic and social distance), the technical issues involved (linking this to theories of media use), the issues raised by cultural diversity in the teams (including identity, trust and conflict) and managerial implications. Suggestions are made on how to address the issues raised and omissions from previous research are highlighted.

Exact match queries, wildcard match queries, and k mismatch queries are widely used in various molecular biology applications including the searching of ESTs (Expressed Sequence Tags) and DNA transcription factors. In this paper, we suggest an efficient indexing and processing mechanism for such queries. Our indexing method places a sliding window at every possible location of a DNA sequence and extracts its signature by considering the occurrence frequency of each nucleotide. It then stores a set of signatures using a multi-dimensional index such as the R*-tree. Also, by assigning a weight to each position of a window, it prevents signatures from being concentrated around a few spots in indexing space. Our query processing method converts a query sequence into a multi-dimensional rectangle and searches the index for the signatures overlapping with the rectangle. Experiments with real biological data sets have revealed that the proposed approach is at least 4.4 times, 2.1 times, and several orders of magnitude faster than the previous one in performing exact match, wildcard match, and k-mismatch queries, respectively.

The paper reports on the methodology and results of a project on the perception and awareness of science, carried out by the Italian National Research Council, the British Council Italy and the Rosselli Foundation. The project, addressed to upper high school and university students, aims to clarify understanding of the interaction between science and society both by means of information and communication technologies (ICT) and by means of public debates with scientists. Different obstacles encountered by the actors involved in the project are also outlined. Three topics have been chosen to stimulate public debate: GMOs, electromagnetic pollution and space exploration. The authors discuss the innovative methodology and the key stages involved in this process of awareness. Each public debate envisages four key steps: (i) setting up and supplying students with scientific documentation on a selected topic in electronic format, in order to highlight the potential of the internet in the process of information dissemination and how it can be effective in a project of science communication to the public; (ii) informed debate in the classroom between teachers and students on the chosen topic; (iii) public debate with Italian and British scientists; and (iv) a final report to be drawn up by the students.

Collaborative tagging describes the process by which many users add metadata in the form of keywords to shared content. Recently, collaborative tagging has grown in popularity on the web, on sites that allow users to tag bookmarks, photographs and other content. In this paper we analyze the structure of collaborative tagging systems as well as their dynamic aspects. Specifically, we discovered regularities in user activity, tag frequencies, kinds of tags used, bursts of popularity in bookmarking and a remarkable stability in the relative proportions of tags within a given URL. We also present a dynamic model of collaborative tagging that predicts these stable patterns and relates them to imitation and shared knowledge.