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A study was conducted to present an overview of environmental scanning and information literacy skills. Environmental scanning allows organizations to detect changes and develop adaptive strategies for coping with uncertainties. Conducting effective and efficient environmental scanning activities requires information literacy skills.

A set of IR experiments was carried out to study the impact of Chinese word segmentation and its effect on information retrieval (IR) at the Division of Information Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. A total of four automatic character-based segmentation approaches and a manual word segmentation approach was first carried out to obtain the word segments for indexing and to evaluate the segmentation accuracy of these automatic approaches. The IR experiments study both the influence of different document segmentation approaches on IR effectiveness and the methods used for query segmentation. Traditional data recall and precision measures were used to gauge IR effectiveness. A number of queries were selected and subjected to further detailed analysis to further explore the influence of word segmentation on IR. The findings reveal that the segmentation approach has an effect on IR effectiveness. Better IR results are obtained by using the same method for query and document processing as this increase the probability of the query-document match. The recognition of a higher number of 2-character words generally contributes to the improvement of IR effectiveness. However, manual segmentation does not always work better than character-based segmentation as a result of the existence of longer words with more than two characters. No evidence is found that ambiguous words resulting from the segmentation process significantly affect IR. Keywords: Chinese; Information retrieval; Word segmentation; Retrieval effectiveness

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. This archive provides different artefacts, types, forming the contents in the exhibition through the reference and reuse model that can be used to meet the diverge information needs of a range of different user communities.

Ontological research methods are discussed and further research is encouraged.

A wide range of information searching, analysis and communicating tasks involved in interacting with e-documents and using e-journals are investigated. Research examines how e-documents and e-journals could be enhanced in the electronic environment to make them more valuable to end-users.

The proposal of an digital work environment for Singapore's Nanyang Technological University. School of Computer Engineering is developed.

An empirical evaluation has been applied to a proposed integrated environment for enhanced user interaction and addition of value to electronic documents. A 12-person focus group was used to identify features needed in future interactions. A review of developments in various user interface technologies, visualization and interactive techniques and consideration of new forms of information structuring and organization took place as well. Results have general implications for design of e-documents and for user interfaces.

Using co-word analysis with a traditional thesauri provides database users with more choice when performing information retrieval tasks.

The characteristic features of the Upper Tag Ontology (UTO), which focuses on the structure of tagging activities to facilitate modeling of tagging data and the integration of social tagging data from different bookmarking sites, are described. The utility of the UTO in modeling, integrating, searching and analyzing data is demonstrated using metadata gathered from three major social tagging systems.

A study discusses the salient aspects of social tagging, such as its nature, use and the method of connecting social tagging with other Web functions. An example of a Web crawler developed using the Upper Tag Ontology (UTO) to obtain tag data from several Web sites is presented, and several tagging patterns and variations identified from bookmarks, photos and videos analyzed are discussed.

The development of a knowledge management framework, to analyze the delay in the United States government's response to Hurricane Katrina, is described.

The aim of this study is to map the intellectual structure of the field of Information Retrieval (IR) during the period of 1987-1997. Co-word analysis was employed to reveal patterns and trends in the IR field by measuring the association strengths of terms representative of relevant publications or other texts produced in IR field. Data were collected from Science Citation Index (SCI) and Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) for the period of 1987-1997. In addition to the keywords added by the SCI and SSCI databases, other important keywords were extracted from titles and abstracts manually. These keywords were further standardized using vocabulary control tools. In order to trace the dynamic changes of the IR field, the whole 11-year period was further separated into two consecutive periods: 1987-1991 and 1992-1997. The results show that the IR field has some established research themes and it also changes rapidly to embrace new themes. [C] 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Co-word analysis; Information retrieval research; Research trends; Science citation index; Social science citation index

20 digital libraries were reviewed to determine their usefulness.

A study was conducted on a sample 39 highly cited information retrieval researchers to investigate transformations in the intellectual framework of information retrieval over two consecutive time periods since 1986, namely, the periods 1987-1991 and 1992-1997, using author co-citation mapping analysis. Results of the study indicate that author co-citation mapping analysis is a useful tool for investigating the intellectual structure of scholarly fields.

Background:A study was conducted at Singapore’s National University Hospital to elicit registered nurses’ attitudes, knowledge, barriers, facilitating factors, education, and training regarding evidence-based practice.Methods:A 13-question survey that was administered to all registered nurses yielded 1,114 (75.4%) usable returns for analysis.Results:Findings showed that Singapore nurses had a positive and supportive attitude toward evidence-based practice but lacked the competence and knowledge to conduct it. Time constraints were identified as the main barrier to implementing evidence-based practice. There is a need for proper training, mentoring by senior nurses, and adequate time for evidence-based practice. Nurses with a higher level of nursing education who indicated the greatest perceived barriers tended to have less difficulty applying evidence-based practice but identified a need for more training in information skills.Conclusion:Evidence-based practice is still in its infancy in Singapore compared with hospitals in other developed countries.

This paper develops techniques to mine medical and health-related social media content for information and opinions about diseases and treatments. This would allow users to benefit from the numerous postings of people’s experiences scattered all over the Web. This paper reports the results of a textual analysis of user-generated content on drug-related online sites. The aim is to determine what kinds of content can be expected on these sites, from linguistic and information points-of-view. User postings were harvested from two websites carrying different kinds of user-generated content and compared to information on the same drugs from a hospital information portal. The corpus was analyzed to identify what kinds of drugs were often reviewed, the vocabulary and medical concepts used, and the textual characteristics such as length of postings, sentence length, and part-of-speech distribution. Although drug-related user-generated content is very different from editorial content, the results of this project show that it provides useful information on many drugs. From a linguistic point-of-view, user-generated content is simpler in language and more informal in style than editorial content, but still contains useful health information that tends to be patient-oriented.

The emergence of knowledge-based organisations has seen an emphasis shift in recognising people as the prime competitive asset and the push of management to nurture social capital within organisations. This supposedly produces an environment of openness, trust, and free communication, thereby leading to greater knowledge sharing among organisational members. A well-managed knowledge management process helps to create and sustain knowledge capture, sharing, and creation of new knowledge. This paper traces the development of a knowledge management framework in an information technology environment of an international bank, focussing on the process, derivation, and implementation of the framework and presents the important lessons learnt along the way.

A journal co-citation analysis of fifty journals and other publications in the information retrieval (IR) discipline was conducted over three periods spanning the years of 1987 to 1997. Relevant data retrieved from the Science Citation Index(SCI) and Social Science Citation Index(SSCI) are analysed according to the highly cited journals in various disciplines, especially in the Library & Information Science area. The results are compared with previous research that covered the data only from the Social Science Citation Index(SSCI). The analysis reveals that there is no distinct difference between these two sets of results. The results of current study show that IR speciality is multi-disciplinary with broad relations with other specialities. The field of IR is a mature field, as the journals used for research communication remained quite stable during the study period.

The paper proposes an integrated Webbased interlibrary loan ILL system to replace and enhance the existing manualbased ILL system used by Singapore libraries. It describes the system requirements that must be supported in order to make it a viable and acceptable solution to all participating libraries. Subsequently, it presents the clientserver Webbased system architecture, database design and Java development platform that are used to implement the system. The new system exhibits a host of advantages over the manual system including the minimising of human resource by eliminating formfilling and other forms of paperwork completely, improving the access and speed of the ILL process by allowing participating libraries to update each other’s databases directly, ensuring data integrity, simplifying status tracking and supporting instantaneous status and statistical reporting.

Collaboration practices vary greatly per scientific area and discipline and influence the scientific performance and its scholarly communication. In this study, the collaborative pattern of the Information Retrieval (IR) research field is analyzed using co-authored articles retrieved from Social Science Citation Indexfor a period of 11 years from 1987 to 1997. The level of collaboration, journal collaborative distribution, disciplinary collaborative distribution and country collaboration are probed according to IR collaborative research. Findings are discussed from the above perspectives in detail. In particular, this study reveals a perceptible upward trend of collaborative IR research with the results of these research efforts being reported in all major core IR journals. The inter-disciplinary and intra-disciplinary scholarly communications in collaborative researches are very much in evidence and cover broad areas like psychology, and computer and medical sciences, respectively.

Abstract: This paper examines the feasibility of providing multimedia mail, in particular video mail, on the existing World-Wide-Web platform. In this instance, the Web browser will act as the user agent of the mailing system. With this, users will be able to compose, send and read video mail directly on the Web. This paper examines a number of different system architectures which can be employed for the development of Video Mail. Based on the following key issues: portability of system, flexibility of system, Internet standard support, security and authentication, and message compression and storage, a final architecture was chosen to build Video Mail. The approach taken is that the system will be interfaced to the Web using a standard Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) server and a standard Web browser. This is achieved through the use of Common Gateway Interface (CGI) programs and forms which reside in a standard HTTP server to provide the functionality of video mail, and a separate mail server for the storage and management of messages. This will cause th HTTP server to behave as if it is an electronic mail system. The paper also addresses implementation issues pertaining to the use of CGI programs, mail server development, and video and audio composition and playback.

Inter-Library Loan (ILL) service is one of the services provided by libraries that offers users a way to access library resources beyond their affiliated libraries. Additionally, it allows participating libraries to share and maximize their resources. This work examines the ILL process used by libraries in Singapore and proposes that the existing paper-based manual system be replaced by a Web-based ILL system. Such a Web-based system has been successfully designed and implemented at the Nanyang Technological University. The paper presents an overview of the system requirements and architecture, implementation details and demonstrates the feasibility and advantages of the new system.

The Nanyang Technological University admits predominantly two large groups of entrants annually for its computer engineering undergraduate course, namely, junior college graduates with GCE 'A' levels and polytechnic graduates with Technician Diplomas. This study is aimed at assessing these engineering undergraduates' common difficulties and identifying differences in their study processes and habits in order to provide guidelines to help them attain better study methods.A survey methodology utilising two sets of questionnaires to assess the two dimensions of study processes and study habits was carried out using a sample of 55 undergraduates. On the basis of the results of the study, it was found that contrary to expectations both groups of students are not distinctly different in their study process and habits. The students demonstrated a preference in adopting the surface approach to learning with focus on rote-learning strategies to minimally meet course requirements. This is contrary to the general trend in higher education that advocates the deep or deep-achieving approach to learning. In this paper, a framework to reverse such a trend and improve students' study methods is proposed. It adopts a parallel approach to help students at the individual, small-group and class level. Through this framework, it should be possible to transform students to adopt a deep-achievement approach in their learning in order to benefit from the university's education system.

This study was initiated to examine the feasibility of providing multimedia mail, in particular video mail, on the existing World Wide Web platform. In this instance, the Web browser will act as the user agent of the mailing system. With this, users will be able to compose, send and read video mail directly on the Web. This paper examines a number of possible system architectures that can be employed for the development of video mail. Based on the following key issues: portability of system, flexibility of system, Internet standard support, security and authentication, and message compression and storage, a final architecture was selected to build video mail. The approach taken is that the system will be interfaced to the Web using a standard HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) server and a standard Web browser. This is achieved through the use of Common Gateway Interface (CGI) programs and forms which reside in a standard HTTP server to provide the functionality of video mail, and a separate mail server for the storage and management of messages. This will cause the HTTP server to behave as if it is an electronic mail (E-mail) system. Video mail has been successfully implemented at the School of Applied Science, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. The development work has been carried out on a Sun SPARC5 workstation and the Typhoon relational database system was used to construct the mail server. All software codes were written in C or C++. A video capturing application used in conjunction with a SunVideo card has been developed for video and audio recording. The paper also addresses implementation issues pertaining to the use of CGI programs, mail server development, and video and audio management.