Search

The development of information technology and telecommunication has created both opportunities and challenges for business organizations. On the one hand, it provides various channels and applications for accessing, processing and distributing information; on the other hand, it imposes higher requirements of information literacy (IL) skills of employees for dealing with information. Despite the number of studies undertaken to investigate the role of IL in the workplace, few of them have integrated IL skills with a specific business management activity, and even fewer of them have tried to evaluate the impact of IL on real business applications. This study aims to investigate the role of IL skills in environmental scanning (ES), a strategic information system used by organizations to cope with environmental changes. It will use both quantitative and qualitative methods: the quantitative approach through questionnaire survey will focus on finding statistically significant effects; the qualitative method through face-to-face interview is expected to discover more explorative information. The scope of the research is limited to SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises), as they form a significant chunk of the economy in many countries, and they are more sensitive towards environmental uncertainties due to their limited financial resources. This study is expected to fill the knowledge gaps and build up a new model of environmental scanning as a systematic information system with consideration of the effect of IL skills and information technology applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The task of searching for documents is becoming more challenging as the volumes of data stored continues to increase, and retrieval systems produce longer results list. Graphical visualisations can assist users to more efficiently and effectively understand large volumes of information. This work investigates the use of multiple visualisations in a desktop search tool. These visualisations include a List View, Tree View, Map View, Bubble View, Tile View and Cloud View. A preliminary evaluation was undertaken by 94 participants to gauge its potential usefulness and to detect usability issues with its interface and graphical presentations. The evaluation results show that these visualisations made it easier and quicker for them to find relevant documents. All of the evaluators found at least one of the visualisations useful and over half of them found at least three of the visualisations to be useful. The evaluation results support the research premise that a combination of integrated visualisations will result in a more effective search tool. The next stage of work is to improve the current views in light of the evaluation findings in preparation for the scalability and longitudinal tests for a series of increasingly larger result sets of documents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work investigates the potential of applying a suite of visualisation for query processing in a desktop search environment. While each of these visualizations may not be totally new on its own, we have attempted to add value to each one by endowing it with useful features, and to seamless integrate them to allow easy switching of views, thereby providing the novelty in this work to create a potentially useful means to process search results and carry out query refinements and exploration. These visualisations include a List View, Tree View, Map View, Bubble View, Tile View and Cloud View. A first evaluation was undertaken by 94 M.Sc. participants to gauge the system's potential usefulness and to detect usability issues with its interface and graphical presentations. The evaluation results were encouraging and showed that these views to be both effective and useful on the whole, and support the research premise that a combination of integrated visualisations will result in a more effective search tool. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Query clustering helps users frame an optimum query to obtain relevant documents. The content-based approach to query clustering has been criticized since queries are usually very short and consist of a wide variety of keywords, making this method ineffective in finding clusters. Clustering based on similar search results URLs has also performed inadequately due to the large number of distinct URLs. Our previous work has demonstrated that a hybrid approach combining the two is effective in generating good clusters. This study aims to extend our work by using lexical knowledge from WordNet to examine the effect on the quality of query clusters. Our results show that surprisingly, the use of lexical knowledge does not produce any significant improvement in quality, thus demonstrating the robustness of the hybrid clustering approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective relevance regards retrieved documents as relevant without considering users΄ tasks. Subjective relevance, in contrast, focuses on usefulness of documents for users΄ contexts. This paper aims to enhance objective relevance and address its limitations by designing a mock-up interface based on ACM Digital Library so as to enhance its support for users΄ evaluating the subjective relevance of documents. Important features elicited using a factor analytic approach from an earlier study were used to inform the design of the search, results list and document record pages in the mock-up. A pilot study was conducted to gather users΄ feedback about usefulness of designed features. Findings indicated that majority of important features designed were useful. However, subjects suggested that the design of some features could be further improved to facilitate their support for SR. The paper concludes by discussing recommendations for improving the mock-up. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ongoing initiatives that offer potential collaboration and cooperation among LIS educators, particularly in the Asia Pacific context, are identified and discussed. By no means being exhaustive, these areas include hosting and participating in workshops, symposiums and conferences; implementing a portal for education; developing a repository of learning objects and resources; assuring quality through accreditation; and promoting and sustaining research and scholarship. These are highlighted with the aim to foster and promote dialogue among LIS educators, researchers and practitioners, and to engender participation in these activities. Collectively, these areas lay a foundation to create an informal network to improve information exchange and dissemination, knowledge sharing and creation, and research collaboration, thereby helping to further improve and ensure high standards of LIS education, practice and research in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Communication and collaboration with other people is a major theme in the information seeking process. Collaborative querying addresses this issue by sharing other users' search experiences to help users formulate appropriate queries to a search engine. This paper describes a collaborative querying system that helps users with query formulation by finding previously submitted similar queries through mining web logs. The system operates by clustering and recommending related queries to users using a hybrid query similarity identification approach. The system employs a graph-based approach to visualize the query recommendations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We report evaluation results for a collaborative querying environment. Our results show that compared with traditional information retrieval systems, collaborative querying can lead to faster information seeking when users perform unspecified tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]