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The present research aims to represent the terms and concepts of civil engineering and thus design its domain structure in the form of ontology. This is an applied research and the qualitative content analysis method with summative approach is used. The research population is 12309 published articles in the scientific journals (1983 to 2016), indexed in the full-text Persian articles database at Regional Information Center for Science and Technology (RICeST). Data collection was done via SQL queries from the RICeST database. The content analysis was used to create a conceptual model of the civil engineering domain and to explain the relationships and instances. To create the conceptual model, there were consulted with 10 Subject experts in civil engineering area. The process of ontology creation has been done through METHONTOLOGY methodology and protégé ontology management software (Beta 5 edition). The made-artifact of this research has 283 concepts, along with 62 object properties, 79 data type properties, 10 annotative properties, and 976 instances. In total, in the present research, 151 semantic properties were identified between the concepts. The results of this research can serve as a guide for the RICeST experts in order to identify the users' needs and facilitate the users' interaction with RICeST databases. This can also provide the users with access to more relevant resources. This ontology can also be served as a layer of semantic web in these databases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to identify and design the axial coding pattern of the factors affecting the unplanned use behavior of users of the academic libraries and information centers. Design/methodology/approach: The study as an applied research with a qualitative approach employed the grounded theory. The data collection tool was a deep and semi-structured interview. The interviews data were analyzed and coded during three stages of open, axial and selective coding using the MAXQDA 10 qualitative analysis software. The research population consisted of faculty members and experts in three areas of library and information science, management and psychology. Using the combined targeted sampling method (targeted and then the snowball), 12 subjects were selected as the sample size. Findings: According to the research findings, the factors affecting the unplanned behavior of users in the use of academic libraries resources and services were identified as factors related to technology, environmental factors, information resources, information services, human resources, individual features, time position factor, cultural factors and social factors. Accordingly, the axial coding pattern of this type of behaviors was designed. Research limitations/implications: The research limitations include the lack of theoretical basis related to the unplanned behavior issue in the field of library and information science and the lack of full familiarity of most of the experts in the field of library and information science with this topic. These factors lead to the necessity of explaining the subject under discussion. Originality/value: The unplanned behavior of clients can be utilized to persuade users to use the information resources and library services so that the costs spent on their preparation and collection will be justifiable. The current research addressed this aspect of the unplanned information-seeking behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Importance, variability and complexity" are more common characteristics of organizations' external environment. Managers scan the external environment in order to acquire information about events and incline to plan the organization's future courses of action. This study aims first, to investigates the manner that library and information center managers of Islamic azad University (IAU) perceived the "Importance, variability and Complexity" of the environmental sectors; and secondly, it aims to calculate the "perceived Strategic Uncertainty (PSU)" and the "perceived environmental Uncertainty (PEU)", and to account their correlation with the amount of scanning in each environmental sector. Populations of this survey are library and information center managers of large and very large units of IAU, consisting of 94 units of 232 in total. Data are collected by questionnaires by mail and face to face interviews. Results indicate that the amount of scanning is related to the perceived strategic uncertainty (range from 0.339 to 0.745) and perceived environmental uncertainty (range from 0.607 to 0.770); that is PSU and PEU of each environment sector strongly correlates with the amount of scanning. In the field of library and information centers acting as service base organizations, managers who scan the environment, customers, and technologic sectors are perceived as important, variable and complex. The great mean value of competition (mean = 3.88) in the field of complexity shows the complexity of this sector and numerous factors in the field of information services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]