Search

Discusses ways in which people discover, shape, or create information as part of their lives and work; considers how resources and rules of people's situations facilitate or limit discovery of information; and introduces the idea of a socio-technical systems design science that is founded in part on understanding the discovery of information in context. (Contains 104 references.) (LRW)

An introduction to the journal is presented in which the editors discuss an article that offers ideas on the life course perspective and the process of translating this into Library and Information Science design, the article "Where Are They Now?" that offers an overview of the Workforce Issues in Library and Information Science one study, and another article on the Canadian 8Rs study.

Abstract: Dissertation advising is an important form of mentoring. To investigate the impact of dissertation advising over time, advisor and committee member names were collected for 2400 dissertations completed over a 40-year period (1964–2004) in 32 North American information and library science schools. Several mentoring impact metrics are reported for a subset of the data, including the number of dissertations advised, the number of dissertation committees served on, the ratio of advising to committee membership, and the fractional “mpact” that weights advising and committee membership. The subset consists of data for six schools that produced at least three dozen dissertations and for which complete data is available. The data and resulting “mpact” metrics offer new ways to assess faculty impact and to investigate the nature and growth of a field. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Explores movement patterns in the use of relevance criteria during real-time document evaluation processes through a laboratory experiment and naturalistic study. Relevance judgement; Criteria distribution across the decision-making process; Factor analysis and a priori classification of criteria; Criteria reshaping through interaction with increasingly elaborate text.

Part I. Explores the information behavior in sense making of participants in the annual work planning of a unit of a public agency, using the methods of ethnography of communication. How dynamic time aspects were captured; Information on the use of the term sense making; What was revealed in the analysis.

Part III. Explores the individual information behavior in sense making, using the methods of an ethnography of communication. Focus on the capture of information by persons for their situation; Identification of personal sense making styles in the analysis; Effects of diversity of approach, perspective, opinion and interpretation.

Part II. Explores the social elements of information behavior in sense making, using the methods of ethnography of communication. What is considered in the organizational sense-making analysis; Social role of various communicative events; What is provided by communicative events.

This article reports research that explored children's information retrieval behavior using an online public access catalog (OPAC) in an elementary school library. The study considers the impact of a variety of factors including user characteristics, the school setting, interface usability, and information access features on children's information retrieval success and breakdown. The study reports the overall pat-terns of children's behavior that influence success and breakdown in information retrieval as well as findings about the intentions, moves, plans, strategies, and search terms of children in grades one through six. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]