Search

Patients in Singapore with chronic conditions such as diabetes are encouraged to participate in patient-professional partnership activities because of rising health care costs and a shortage of infrastructure and human resources. This study explores the self-care and health information seeking behaviors of diabetic patients in Singapore, as well as factors related to health and information carriers that might influence those behaviors. A pilot-tested online survey was developed based on the Comprehensive Model of Information Seeking (CMIS) and notified to the members of the Diabetic Society of Singapore (DSS) through their newsletter in January 2016. In total, 60 usable responses from the DSS members were collected. The survey revealed that more than 30% of the patients did not strictly follow doctors' instructions to regularly exercise, self-monitor blood sugar, and pay attention to type of food prepared at home. However, it was found that the majority of them had consciously limited their sugar intake. It was also revealed that respondents' most frequently used sources of health information were authoritative sources such as doctors/nurses and pamphlets/leaflets from hospitals/clinics. Understandably, respondents experiencing less distress caused by diabetes tended to report better health status, less worries, and stronger beliefs in the efficacy of their methods for diabetes control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: To investigate information literacy (IL) skills of secondary students in Singapore after integration of these skills into school curriculum. The study also explored cyber wellness skills of the students. Design/methodology/approach: A survey questionnaire was used to collect data from 14 secondary schools, located in different geographical zones of the country. A total of 3,306 secondary students participated in this survey. A scoring scheme was devised to assess IL skills of the students. Findings: The students achieved an overall mean score of 52.6%, which is considered as a "middle" level of IL competency. The students obtained high mean scores for two IL skills: "defining information task and analysing information gaps" (60.5%) and cyber wellness (60.1%). Lowest scores were achieved for two IL skills: "selecting information sources" (47.4%) and "appraising the information process and product" (48.0%). Research limitations/implications: This study has not investigated IL knowledge of teachers, responsible for teaching IL components. Similarly, content analysis of school textbooks, integrating IL skills, could be useful. Practical implications: It appeared that integration of IL skills into school curriculum showed limited success in imparting these skills. This paper suggests measures for improving the integration of IL skills into school curriculum. Findings of this survey will be useful to curriculum planners, education administrators, instructors teaching IL skills and school librarians. Originality/value: This study was unique as, in addition to standard IL skills, it also investigated cyber wellness skills. It was desirable as now social media have become a popular source for information seeking and sharing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Keywords search is intuitive, simple to use and convenient. It is also the de facto input interface for textual and multimedia retrieval. However, individuals often perform poorly when faced with exploratory search tasks that are common during learning, resulting in poor quality searches. The purpose of this paper is to examine how adolescent learners search and select videos to support self-learning. The findings allow for the identification of design concepts of video retrieval interface and features that can facilitate better exploratory searches. Design/methodology/approach: Participants were assigned two customized video search tasks. The think-aloud protocol is used to allow participants to verbalize their actions, thoughts and feeling. This approach offered rich insights to the participants' cognitive processes and considerations when performing the search tasks. Findings: This study identified five themes for exploratory video search behavior: selection of internet resources, query formulation/reformulation, selection of the video(s) for preview, getting acquainted with the video content, and making a decision for the search task. The analysis of these themes led to a number of design concepts, ranging from supporting exploration of topics to better interaction with metadata. Practical implications: The findings can inform future development of dedicated video retrieval systems interfaces that seeks to facilitate effective exploratory searches by learners. Originality/value: This study contributes by suggesting design concepts for video retrieval system developers to support exploratory video searches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose Although many interventional approaches have been proposed to address the apparent gap between novices and experts for literature review (LR) search tasks, there have been very few approaches proposed for manuscript preparation (MP) related tasks. The purpose of this paper is to describe a task and an incumbent technique for shortlisting important and unique papers from the reading list (RL) of researchers, meant for citation in a manuscript.Design/methodology/approach A user evaluation study was conducted on the prototype system which was built for supporting the shortlisting papers (SP) task along with two other LR search tasks. A total of 119 researchers who had experience in authoring research papers participated in this study. An online questionnaire was provided to the participants for evaluating the task. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses were performed on the collected evaluation data.Findings Graduate research students prefer this task more than research and academic staff. The evaluation measures relevance, usefulness and certainty were identified as predictors for the output quality measure “good list”. The shortlisting feature and information cues were the preferred aspects while limited data set and rote steps in the study were ascertained as critical aspects from the qualitative feedback of the participants.Originality/value Findings point out that researchers are clearly interested in this novel task of SP from the final RL prepared during LR. This has implications for digital library, academic databases and reference management software where this task can be included to benefit researchers at the manuscript preparatory stage of the research lifecycle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose Systems to support literature review (LR) and manuscript preparation tend to focus on only one or two of the tasks involved. The purpose of this paper is to describe an intervention framework that redesigns a particular set of tasks, allowing for interconnectivity between the tasks and providing appropriate user interface display features for each task in a prototype system.Design/methodology/approach A user evaluation study was conducted on the prototype system. The system supports the three tasks: building a reading list (RL) of research papers, finding similar papers based on a set of papers and shortlisting papers from the final RL for inclusion in manuscript based on article type. A total of 119 researchers who had experience in authoring research papers, participated in the evaluation study. They had to select one of the provided 43 topics and execute the tasks offered by the system. Three questionnaires were provided for evaluating the tasks and system. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses were performed on the collected evaluation data.Findings Task redesign aspects had a positive impact in user evaluation for the second task of finding similar papers while improvement was found to be required for the first and third tasks. The tasks interconnectivity features seed basket and RL were helpful for the participants in conveniently searching for papers within the system. Two of the four proposed informational display features, namely, information cue labels and shared co-relations were the most preferred features of the system. Student user group found the task recommendations and the overall system to be more useful and effective than the staff group.Originality/value This study validates the importance of interconnected task design and novel informational display features in accentuating task-based recommendations for LR and manuscript preparatory tasks. The potential for improvement in recommendations was shown through the task redesign exercise where new requirements for the tasks were identified. The resultant prototype system helps in bridging the gap between novices and experts in terms of LR skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to assess knowledge of Singapore Grade 5 (11 years old) students’ understanding and proficiency in basic information literacy (IL) skills of defining information tasks, selecting information sources, seeking information from sources and synthesising and using information.Design/methodology/approach A 38-item multiple-choice question assessment instrument was used to assess the students’ IL skills based on the i-Competent IL model. The instrument first developed in 2010 was refined and expanded to increase the robustness and accuracy of assessment for the study. It was administered to 17 primary schools in Singapore in November 2015. The maximum possible score of 54 was scaled up to 100 to report the overall mean score for ease of reference and comparison. A total of 2,399 returns were obtained and analysed using Statistical Package for the Social Sciences 22.0 to compute the mean scores, IL stage-level scores. The study also investigated for any significant differences in performance between male and female students, and students with or without access to the internet at home.Findings The students achieved an overall mean score of 53.39 which is below a recommended acceptable score of 60 or 70 advocated in a number of past studies. The two worst performing areas of IL skills were synthesising and using information and seeking information from sources with mean scores of 45.89 and 48.81, respectively. A review of the highest number of incorrect answers suggests that students had difficulty in identifying key information from an information task narrative, understanding the use of reference sources and role of librarians, distinguishing between a fact and opinion, and adopting the best strategy for searching. Girls outperformed boys with an overall mean score of 55.38 vs 51.50. Students with internet access at home fared better than those without access to it with a score of 53.67 vs 45.81. The overall poor results of the survey suggest an urgent need to review the IL education landscape in the Singapore school system, revisit polices, priorities and assess the relevance and effectiveness of the IL curriculum, practical hands-on classes, and interventions that are currently employed in schools.Practical implications The study helped identify areas of IL skills strengths and weakness among Grade 5 students in Singapore schools. It provides recommendations for follow up actions for education authority and schools to improve the situation.Originality/value This study was prompted to provide an assessment after a national IL initiative was launched in 2012 to inculcate IL skills among the school-going children as part of creating a value-driven education system. This is the first reported set of findings for a large-scale survey conducted to measure and ascertain the IL skills level among Grade 5 students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction.This paper looks at the issue of inadequate and omitted citations in manuscripts by collecting the experiential opinions of researchers from the dual perspectives of manuscript reviewers and authors. Method. An online survey was conducted with participation from 207 respondents who had experience of reviewing and authoring research papers. Analysis. The collected data were analysed quantitatively. Descriptive and bivariate analyses were performed. Results. Reviewer and author groups opined that manuscript authors fail to cite seminal and topically-similar papers, while the reviewer group indicated that authors include too few papers and cite irrelevant papers. The lack of experience was perceived as a major reason for inadequate and omitted citations, followed by lack of overall research experience and working in interdisciplinary research projects. Authors needed external assistance in finding papers for a literature review. Google Scholar was the most used system among the list of information sources. Conclusions. The findings may benefit subsequent studies conducted to solve the issue of inadequate and omitted citations through process improvements and technological interventions. The findings helped in identifying three tasks for a literature review and manuscript writing assistive system. The usage preferences on information sources helped in shortlisting Google Scholar's user-interface as a basis for the user-interface design for the assistive system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – This study aimed to acquire knowledge about Singapore secondary school (ages 13 to 16 years old) students' skills in searching, evaluating and using information. Design/methodology/approach – A comprehensive instrument encompassing the basic information literacy (IL) skills, as well as a new dimension of ethical usage of information and collaborative information seeking was used for data collection. From August to November 2010, a total of eight schools comprising 3,164 students participated in this study. Findings – It was a matter of concern that various kinds of libraries, including school libraries, were found to be under-utilized. From the test that was administered to assess the IL skills of students, the results were found to be generally unsatisfactory as each of the major categories of IL skills recorded a score that is below 50 (out of a maximum of 100) except for “task definition”. For skills related to “information seeking strategies”, “location & access” and “information use”, the types of schools, academic streams of study, and students' family background seemed to have significant influences. Originality/value – This study is the first large-scale survey conducted in Singapore that sought to test the IL skills of secondary school students. The findings are useful in assessing the current effectiveness of IL integration, and the need for a more planned approach towards IL competency training within the school curriculum in Singapore. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Medical and healthcare literature is growing exponentially, and medical professionals, including nurses, need to possess basic literature searching skills to retrieve information for clinical decision making. This study aims to investigate the use of different medical information sources by nurses and their literature searching skills. Questionnaire survey was adopted for data collection and a total of 1,486 nurses from two public hospitals in Singapore participated in this study. It was found that human and printed sources were used more frequently by the nurse, as compared to online sources. For literature searching, nurses used basic search features, and only less than one-quarter of them were familiar with Boolean and proximity operators. The study suggests that hospital libraries should play an active role in improving literature searching skills of nurses which may subsequently result in increased use of electronic information sources, where more updated clinical research information may be found. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: Evidence-based practice (EBP) provides nurses with a method to use critically appraised and scientifically proven evidence for delivering quality health care to a specific population. The objective of this study was to explore nurses' awareness of, knowledge of, and attitude toward EBP and factors likely to encourage or create barriers to adoption. In addition, information sources used by nurses and their literature searching skills were also investigated. Method: A total of 2,100 copies of the questionnaire were distributed to registered nurses in 2 public hospitals in Singapore, and 1,486 completed forms were returned, resulting in a response rate of 70.8%. Results: More than 64% of the nurses expressed a positive attitude toward EBP. However, they pointed out that due to heavy workload, they cannot keep up to date with new evidence. Regarding self-efficacy of EBP-related abilities, the nurses perceived themselves to possess moderate levels of skills. The nurses also felt that EBP training, time availability, and mentoring by nurses with EBP experience would encourage them to implement EBP. The top three barriers to adopting EBP were lack of time, inability to understand statistical terms, and inadequate understanding of the jargon used in research articles. For literature searching, nurses were using basic search features and less than one-quarter of them were familiar with Boolean and proximity operators. Conclusion: Although nurses showed a positive attitude toward EBP, certain barriers were hindering their smooth adoption. It is, therefore, desirable that hospital management in Southeast Asia, particularly in Singapore, develop a comprehensive strategy for building EBP competencies through proper training. Moreover, hospital libraries should also play an active role in developing adequate information literacy skills among the nurses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Online virtual exhibitions (VEs) are acknowledged as important complimentary counterparts to physical exhibitions. It overcomes space, time and location restrictions and allows global visitors to access these priceless and exciting treasures that are stored in museums, archives and other institutions on a 24/ 7/365 basis. Well constructed VEs can offer alternative experiences to the "real thing" and open up other opportunities that include learning, more content beyond physical exhibits, active participation and contribution by visitors through forums and uploads, online shopping, and others. This paper provides a state-of-the-art review, and illustrates concepts and design considerations for the development of VEs that can be highly effective and efficient with minimal technological knowledge. By considering the important issues of metadata, system architecture design and development techniques, it becomes possible to generate a series of VEs to meet the needs of different user groups and at the same time cater to the constraints of the client computers, thereby providing the users the best possible experience in engaging with the VEs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many studies have revealed that appropriate information literacy (IL) skills can improve the learning process, performance, and achievements of students and ultimately guide them in the desired direction of becoming knowledge workers. However, traditional methods of teaching IL have not always been successful due to several limitations, including short-term effectiveness and shallow application of skills and knowledge. Novel ways of teaching IL need to be experimented with and developed so that IL can be taught more effectively with students having enriched lessons and a more holistic learning experience. This paper provides an overview of a quasi-experimental study conducted with two clusters of 13-year-old students who did a project-based assignment. One cluster of students received personalised coaching (experimental) while another cluster did not receive such coaching (control). The findings of the study show that students who received personalised coaching obtained better scores for their project and showed better mastery of the learning and research process through the ability to use various information sources, present more reliable and authoritative information, and include proper citations and a complete bibliography in their project reports. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital Work Environment (DWE) is a task-based digital library that interfaces various types of academic users with a comprehensive set of internal and external information resources for completing specific users' tasks. This study advances the initial DWE system to examine the provision of additional value-adding in the form of identifying new information attributes associated with the e-journal resource to serve as additional information for users to better identify and select the most appropriate e-journal to complete their task. These e-journal attributes can be distinguished at the journal, issue and article level of the user interface. This paper details the identification of these attributes, incorporation of them in a DWE mock-up, and the ensuing user evaluation study on 26 participants to assess the usefulness of these attributes. These included the incorporation of the subject coverage information at the journal level, article abstract and keywords at the issue level, and the capability to retrieve other articles having same keywords. The findings showed that these new features were welcomed by more than 75% of the respondents. They provided useful information for decision making and facilitated faster and more efficient access to journal articles and saved users' time to locate information resources. Keyword linking which allows other related articles to be retrieved was also found useful. Other findings suggest the use of information organisation tools such as subject headings and thesauri to support hierarchical browsing, allowing more user control to display a fixed number of lines of abstract or to use pagination to overcome the potential information overload problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper discusses the design, development and evaluation of a task-based digital library, the Digital Work Environment (DWE), for the academic community of higher education institutions (HEI) with Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, as a test case. Three different information organization approaches (alphabetical subject category and task-based) were used to organize the wide range of heterogeneous information resources that were interfaced to DWE. A user evaluation study using a series of task scenarios was carried out to gauge the effectiveness and usefulness of DWE and these information organization approaches. The time taken by respondents to identify and access the relevant information resources for individual tasks was also measured The findings show that the task-based approach took the least time in identifying information resources. Regression analysis of information resource location time with gender, age, computer experience and digital resource experience of the participants are also reported. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A virtual exhibition system was designed and implemented to interface with the National Archives of Singapore digital archive to support the creation of online virtual exhibitions. The XML-based digital archive provides different artefact types that form the contents in the exhibition through the reference and reuse model. Artefacts and exhibitions are endowed with rich metadata that include the Dublin Core elements to support enhanced search support for field and free text searches. An authoring tool using a grid-layout approach is used to define and lay out the exhibition contents. XML's Cascading Style Sheet and Extended Style Sheets are then selected and applied to the XML documents from the digital archive to yield the final exhibition in HTML format. By supporting the use of information layering in the descriptors of the artefacts and the application of different style sheets, it becomes possible to create multiple versions of the same exhibition that vary in content, layout and interface so that it can be used to meet the diverse information needs of a range of different user communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is the second of a two-part paper to review ontology research and development, in particular, ontology mapping and evolving. Ontology is defined as a formal explicit specification of a shared conceptualization. Ontology itself is not a static model so that it must have the potential to capture changes of meanings and relations. As such, mapping and evolving ontologies is part of an essential task of ontology learning and development. Ontology mapping is concerned with reusing existing ontologies, expanding and combining them by some means and enabling a larger pool of information and knowledge in different domains to be integrated to support new communication and use. Ontology evolving, likewise, is concerned with maintaining existing ontologies and extending them as appropriate when new information or knowledge is acquired. It is apparent from the reviews that current research into semi-automatic or automatic ontology research in all the three aspects of generation, mapping and evolving have so far achieved limited success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the advent of Internet technology, it is now feasible to provide effective and efficient helpdesk service over the global Internet to meet customers' requirements and satisfaction. In this research, we have designed and developed a Web-based intelligent helpdesk-support environment, WebHotLine, to support the customer service centre of a large multinational corporation in the electronics industry. The paper describes the basic architecture of the environment that supports the major functions of Web-based fault information retrieval, online multilingual translation capability, different operating modes of video-conferencing for enhanced support and direct intelligent fault diagnosis by customers or customer support engineers. As a result, WebHotLine helps to save cost in eliminating the expensive overseas telephone charges, reduction in machine down time and number of on-site visits by service engineers as in traditional helpdesk environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The WWW has become one of the most important media for sharing information. Web information provides another emerging and important avenue and source of competitive intelligence (CI) for companies. CI is critical for companies to stay competitive in the marketplace. Apart from business users, there are other types of CI users such as technical users, casual users, news awareness users and others who would like to be kept informed on the latest development of their interested areas over the WWW. To discover web information, CI users need to constantly monitor certain web sites and web pages for related information. However, the dynamic nature of the web has made such monitoring task complicated and time-consuming. This paper proposes a web monitoring system, WebMon, to help users monitor specified web pages for latest changes and updates in information. Four monitoring functions including date monitoring, keywords monitoring, link monitoring and portion monitoring are supported by the system. The performance of these monitoring functions is also evaluated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Part I. Examines the importance of oncology research and development. Enhancement of information management; Improvement of content-based access; Techniques in natural language processing.

Examines how electronic documents such as electronic journals could be enhanced in the electronic environment to make them more valuable to end-users. Information searching, analysis and communication of tasks; Single user interface environment; Features, tools and interaction justified as desirable and required in future e-journals systems.

Investigates the potentialities of a proposed information environment (PROPIE) for user interaction and value-adding of electronic documents. Overview of PROPIE; PROPIE evaluation design; Integration of workspace; User-controlled malleability; Visual sovereignty; Integration with appropriate tools; Malleable information objects; Multiple representations/views.

The Internet has become an important and preferred source of health information. Although the literature has highlighted several key predictors that influence an individual’s online health information seeking behavior, insufficient attention has been paid to the changes in the predictors’ roles and effects over time. This study explores and compares the effects that specific predictors had on online health information seeking behavior over a period of 10 years by integrating and analyzing two Pew datasets collected in 2002 and 2012. Hierarchical regression analyses indicate that socio-demographic factors and overall health condition are significant predictors that had an increasing impact on online health information seeking behavior. However, the impact of Internet usage decreased significantly from 2002 to 2012. A comparison across time contributes to a vertical understanding of the changes in online health information seeking behavior and its predictors and helps health professionals and researchers tailor their informational interventions to meet the up-to-date needs and preferences of users. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this study was to assess the information literacy (IL) and cyber-wellness skills of Secondary 3 (grade 9) students, age 14-15, in Singapore. The Ministry of Education in Singapore has introduced aspects of IL in schools through incorporating components into the syllabi of various subjects. A pilot-tested online survey, validated by IL experts from Canada, Hong Kong, Kuwait and Thailand, was used for data collection. The survey was taken by 2,458 students from 11 secondary schools in different geographical zones of Singapore. It was found that the use of school libraries and their resources was at a very low level. The majority of the students approached classmates and friends for help in solving their information-related problems. Only a small fraction consulted their school librarian. The overall IL assessment score showed that the students possessed a 'middle' level of IL skills which is better than previous (pre-curriculum integration) IL assessment studies in Singapore. As curriculum-embedded IL skills are taught by subject teachers, their level of preparedness could be a matter of concern. Similarly, fragmentation of IL concepts in different subject textbooks may cause co-ordination problems among teachers. This paper highlights the need for developing a roadmap for providing IL skills at different grade levels and in different subject areas. It is expected that the findings of this study will be useful to curriculum planners, teachers, schools librarians and others involved in IL education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Depression is a major public health concern in current society. In recent years many studies began to investigate the potential benefits of exergames on depression. The current study aimed to provide a systematic review to synthesize the existing studies and discover the overall effect size of exergames on treating depression. A comprehensive literature search was conducted among major bibliographic databases in computer technology, psychology, and medical science. Key study characteristics of participants, interventions, and experiment were extracted in the systematic review. Both studies using independent groups and matched groups were included in meta-analysis. Overall effect size of Hedges' g was calculated, followed by subgroup analyses. Nine studies included in the review, while eight studies applying exergames of Nintendo's Wii or Wii Fit. A random effects meta-analysis on eight studies resulted an overall significant effect size of g = 0.21. Demographic factors, depression severity, number of session, and game type were found to be significant moderators for the effectiveness. The study has not only supported the positive effect of exergames on alleviating depression, but also provided many theoretical and practical implications for health professionals and police makers. More rigorous experimental controlled studies are needed in this new research field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Depression is the most common mental and emotional disorder that emerges in the late stages of life. It is closely associated with poor health, disability, mortality, and suicide. The study examines the risk factors of depression in late life, especially the psychosocial factors, among a sample comprising 162 community-dwelling Singaporean adults aged 65 years and above. An interview-based structured survey was conducted in multiple senior activity centers located in different parts of Singapore. Results from the hierarchical regression analysis show that 32.9% of the variance in geriatric depression can be explained by the three psychosocial factors, among which loneliness, perceived social support, and the emotional regulation component of resilience are significantly associated with depression in older adults. Large-scale studies should be conducted to confirm the findings of the present study, and to further examine the predictive effects of these psychosocial factors on depression among older adults. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this study was to review the existing literature on game-based digital interventions for depression systematically and examine their effectiveness through a meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials (RCTs). Database searching was conducted using specific search terms and inclusion criteria. A standard meta-analysis was also conducted of available RCT studies with a random effects model. The standard mean difference (Cohen's d) was used to calculate the effect size of each study. Nineteen studies were included in the review, and 10 RCTs (eight studies) were included in the meta-analysis. Four types of game interventions-psycho-education and training, virtual reality exposure therapy, exercising, and entertainment-were identified, with various types of support delivered and populations targeted. The meta-analysis revealed a moderate effect size of the game interventions for depression therapy at posttreatment ( d=−0.47 [95% CI −0.69 to −0.24]). A subgroup analysis showed that interventions based on psycho-education and training had a smaller effect than those based on the other forms, and that self-help interventions yielded better outcomes than supported interventions. A higher effect was achieved when a waiting list was used as the control. The review and meta-analysis support the effectiveness of game-based digital interventions for depression. More large-scale, high-quality RCT studies with sufficient long-term data for treatment evaluation are needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Environmental scanning, the radar to detect environmental signals, is serving as an effective way for organizations to cope with uncertainties and formulate adaptive strategies. Strategists and strategic management scholars also believe that effective environmental scanning would help organizations to achieve better alignment with rapidly changing external factors and hence improve their performance. It is, therefore, desirable to explore the relationship among environmental uncertainty, environmental scanning, and organizational performance. This paper starts with the definition and process of environmental scanning, followed by the introduction of environmental uncertainty as well as the indirect impact of environmental scanning on organization performance. Prior empirical studies trying to discover or demonstrate the potential relationships are also reviewed. Finally, the refined theoretical model as well as the proposed research methodology is presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The business environment is increasingly becoming uncertain and complex. Environmental scanning is a systematic way for organizations to detect changes, and hence formulate adaptive strategies for coping with uncertainties. Information literacy skills are required to conduct effective and efficient environmental scanning activities as it is an information intensive process. Moreover, the development of information technology and telecommunication provides various channels and applications for accessing, processing and distributing information, which also proposes higher requirements of information literacy skills for dealing with environmental information. However, despite the number of studies undertaken to investigate the role of information literacy at the workplace, few have integrated information literacy skills with a specific business management activity or have tried to evaluate the impact of information literacy on real business applications. This paper provides an overview of environmental scanning and information literacy skills. A refined model, showing the relationship between environmental uncertainty, information literacy skills and environmental scanning, is also presented. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Research has shown that mastering information literacy (IL) competencies helps students perform better academically or otherwise. However, there is limited evidence that indicates a relationship between IL teaching methods and IL competencies. This study investigates the impact of IL teaching that incorporates appropriate pedagogical approaches on students' applicability of IL competencies. The study was carried out in four secondary schools in Singapore. Students were organized into groups of five and were assigned a group project. Those in the experimental sub-clusters were exposed to various intervention approaches, while the control sub-clusters were left on their own to carry out the project. Three independent, neutral teacher-examiners evaluated the results of the group reports and projects. The results showed significant differences in the achievements of students in the experimental groups that underwent both interventions as compared to the control groups. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In contrast to many recent large-scale catastrophic events, such as the Turkish earthquake in 1999, the 9/11 attack in New York in 2001, the Bali Bombing in 2002, and the Asian Tsunami in 2004, the initial rescue effort towards Hurricane Katrina in the U.S. in 2005 had been sluggish. Even as Congress has promised to convene a formal inquiry into the response to Katrina, this article offers another perspective by analyzing the delayed response through the lens of knowledge management (KM). A KM framework situated in the context of disaster management is developed to study three distinct but overlapping KM processes, namely, knowledge creation, knowledge transfer, and knowledge reuse. Drawing from a total of more than 400 documents—including local, national, and foreign news articles, newswires, congressional reports, and television interview transcripts, as well as Internet resources such as wikipedia and blogs— 14 major delay causes in Katrina are presented. The extent to which the delay causes were a result of the lapses in KM processes within and across the government agencies are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although it is widely believed that information literacy (IL) skills are useful in helping students perform better, academically or otherwise, limited empirical evidence is available showing the relationship between IL skills and IL education. A quasi-experimental pretest-posttest control group study was carried out to investigate the impact of IL teaching approaches, which are grounded in pedagogy, on students' level and applicability of IL skills. The study was carried out with a cluster of 13- to 15-year-old students from four schools in Singapore. The 476 students who participated in the study were given a pre-intervention test in the beginning. Out of this, 279 students (from two schools) were put through the mediated learning intervention programme (with experimental and control sub-clusters), while the remaining 197 students (from the remaining two schools) were put through the multiple intelligence intervention programme (with experimental and control sub-clusters). A post-intervention test was administered to all students at the end of the intervention programmes. From the results of the pre- and post-intervention tests, it was found that the application of mediated learning (or close coaching) helps students perform better in the learning and application of IL skills, whilst the application of multiple intelligences in helping students learn, facilitated better student learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Proposes an architecture for a prototype digital work environment (DWE) designed to lead users of an academic community to the required information resources based on their tasks. Growth of digital library collections and services; Objectives and functions of the proposed DWE; Issues addressed in the development of a prototype system; Issues involved in the implementation of DWE; Advantages and process of using DWE.

Objective: The aim of this study is to investigate the relationship between five domain-specific skills of health literacy: Find Health Information (FHI), Appraise Health Information (AHI), Understand Health Information to act (UHI), Actively Manage One's Health (AMH), and E-health literacy (e-Heals), and health information seeking behaviors and three categories of health outcomes.Methods: A survey was implemented and data was collected from 1062 college going adults and analyzed using bivariate tests and multiple regression analysis.Results: Among the five domain-specific Health Literacy skills, AHI and e-Heals were significantly associated with the use of traditional sources and the Internet for healthcare information respectively. Similarly and AMH and e-Heals were significantly associated with the use of traditional sources and the Internet for health lifestyle information respectively. Lastly AHI, AMH and e-Heals were significantly associated with the three categories of outcomes, and AFH was significantly associated with cognitive and instrumental outcomes, but not doctor-patient communication outcomes.Conclusion: Consumers' ability to use different health sources for both healthcare and health lifestyle information, and the three categories of health outcomes are associated with different domain-specific health literacy skills.Practice Implications: Health literacy initiatives may be improved by focusing on clients to develop domain-specific skills that increase the likelihood of using health information sources and accrue benefits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights: [•] Team interviewed several doctors and key TB informants in India. [•] We explored factors influencing TB control and management. [•] Alert, Care and Education emerged as themes to address for better TB control. [•] Suggested social media solutions on Alert, Care and Education for TB patient care. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Highlights: [•] We describe a social media system for dengue prevention in Sri Lanka. [•] System comprises predictive surveillance, civic engagement and health communication. [•] System forewarns authorities and citizens about outbreaks, catalyzes preventive action. [•] System establishes real-time communication between authorities and citizens. [•] System can be replicated and adapted for other infectious disease outbreaks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Appropriately measuring information literacy (IL) skills is essential to understand their educational impact as well as exploring pedagogies to improve teaching of these skills. This paper reports findings of a baseline study to understand the IL level of secondary school students in Singapore. A comprehensive instrument encompassing a new dimension of ethical usage of information as well as major IL principles and guidelines was developed for data collection. A total of 298 responses were gathered through the online survey. The findings indicate that overall there was a scope to improve students' IL skills. That stated, higher order IL skills (such as information use, synthesis, and evaluation) demand more attention, as comparatively lower levels of proficiency were observed in this study [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Data integration and mediation have become central concerns of information technology over the past few decades. With the advent of the Web and the rapid increases in the amount of data and the number of Web documents and users, researchers have focused on enhancing the interoperability of data through the development of metadata schemes. Other researchers have looked to the wealth of metadata generated by bookmarking sites on the Social Web. While several existing ontologies have capitalized on the semantics of metadata created by tagging activities, the Upper Tag Ontology (UTO) emphasizes the structure of tagging activities to facilitate modeling of tagging data and the integration of data from different bookmarking sites as well as the alignment of tagging ontologies. UTO is described and its utility in modeling, harvesting, integrating, searching, and analyzing data is demonstrated with metadata harvested from three major social tagging systems (Delicious, Flickr, and YouTube). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social tagging is one of the major phenomena transforming the World Wide Web from a static platform into an actively shared information space. This paper addresses various aspects of social tagging, including different views on the nature of social tagging, how to make use of social tags, and how to bridge social tagging with other Web functionalities; it discusses the use of facets to facilitate browsing and searching of tagging data; and it presents an analogy between bibliometrics and tagometrics, arguing that established bibliometric methodologies can be applied to analyze tagging behavior on the Web. Based on the Upper Tag Ontology (UTO), a Web crawler was built to harvest tag data from Delicious, Flickr, and YouTube in September 2007. In total, 1.8 million objects, including bookmarks, photos, and videos, 3.1 million taggers, and 12.1 million tags were collected and analyzed. Some tagging patterns and variations are identified and discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]