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(2010)Journal ArticleThis paper investigates the academization of library and information science (LIS)educators in Australia from 1959 to 2008. Extensive data document the distribution of these academics in Australian higher education institutions over fifty years: from a slow beginning in the 1960s, to rapid growth in the 1970s, relative stability in the 1980s, and a persistent decline from the 1990s. Results of other characteristics of Australian LIS educators over the fifty-year period are presented including: previous positions held before entering academia, what and where academic qualifications were obtained, academic positions/ranks by gender, mobility within Australian higher education institutions, and years spent as Australian LIS educators. Although there has been a steady decline in the number of Australian LIS educators since the 1990s, the level of academic qualifications and percentage with doctorates have risen, thus conforming to a major requirement of academia; however, the relative decline in junior academic positions is a worrying trend. The analysis of changed characteristics over time helps define who Australian LIS academics are, and additionally provides data that contributes to LIS academic workforce planning.
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(2010)Journal ArticleConducting a literature review is a vital part of any research. Library and information science (LIS) professionals often play a central role in supporting academics in their efforts to locate relevant publications and in teaching novice researchers skills associated with literature reviews. This paper examines literature review processes with the aim to contribute to better understanding of their complexity and uncertainty and to propose a new approach to literature reviews that is capable of dealing with such complexity and uncertainty.
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(2010)Conference PaperThis paper investigates the concept of information. It follows different approaches for defining information before discussing a knowledge-in-action view on information as part of sociomaterial practices. Drawing from Stamper’s (1991) extended semiological framework the paper proposes its reinterpretation to study information as a sociomaterial phenomenon. The paper further argues that rather than focusing on finding general definitions for information, intellectual efforts should concentrate on characteristics and attributes of information. Combining earlier efforts in this direction different attributes of information such as novelty, time dependence, or goal relevance. are introduced. Locating those attributes within Stamper's extended semiological framework helps to identify different aspects of sociomaterial context affecting information. Understanding and paying attention to information through its attributes can, therefore, provide guidance for researching information and possibly help advancing the development of information systems.
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(2010)Journal ArticleThis article explores some of the issues associated with giving non-human actors a voice of their own in actor-network theory based research. What issues do we face in doing so? Does doing so increase understanding of the issue to hand, bring to life and make more accessible and interesting the stories of these actors? Or does this anthropomorphism detract from the issues at hand? We discuss these broader issues and then present some findings from an ANT field study which investigated the implementation of institutional repositories and their relations with the spread of open access to scholarly publishing. We experiment with allowing some of the non-human actors to speak for themselves. We conclude with a discussion which opens the debate: does giving voice to non-human actors bring them to life and make them better understood as intimately entangled with each other and human actors in the sociomaterial practices of the everyday? And what are the challenges in doing so?
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(2010)Conference PaperAn opportunity to explore the topic of data usages is presented by the collaborative research being undertaken by a federation of applied science research units affiliated with a number of different Australian research organizations (the Cluster). The research aims to investigate how members of the collaboration understand and work with data in their day-to-day practice.
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(2010)Journal Article
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(2010)Journal ArticleProfessional journals play an important role in the dissemination of research results and activity reports among scientists and practitioners. This article gives a brief introduction into the field of informetrics with the purpose of presenting a list of journals in the field of library and information science (LIS ; in German: IuB). By combining ten different lists of journals from databases which cover the relevant literature in this field, a comprehensive list of 1205 professional journals could be assembled. Based on the frequency of appearance in the list, it is possible to rank individual titles by significance to the field. Four different categories of journals were identified: fifteen core journals, 88 central journals, 173 selective journals, and 672 marginal journals. Further features of the study include language of publication, geographical distribution, and the overlap of various databases with one another. ---- Fachzeitschriften spielen für Wissenschaftler und Praktiker bei der Verbreitung von Forschungsergebnissen und Erfahrungsberichten eine wichtige Rolle. Der vorliegende Artikel gibt eine kurze Einführung in das Feld der Informetrie, um auf dieser Grundlage eine Zeitschriftenliste auf dem Gebiet der Informations- und Bibliothekswissenschaft (IuB) einzuführen. Durch Kombination von zehn verschiedenen Zeitschriftenlisten aus Datenbanken, die relevante Literatur auf dem Gebiet der IuB erfassen, wird eine umfassende Liste von 1205 relevanten Fachzeitschriften erstellt. Anhand ihrer Erscheinungshäufigkeit wird die Bedeutung einzelner Zeitschriften für das Gebiet der IuB eingeordnet, wobei vier verschiedene Kategorien von Zeitschriften unterschieden werden: fünfzehn Kernzeitschriften, 88 zentrale Zeitschriften, 173 selektive Zeitschriften und 672 Randzeitschriften. Betrachtet werden darüber hinaus auch Publikationssprache und geografische Verteilung der Zeitschriften sowie die Überschneidung von verschiedenen Datenbanken untereinander.
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(2010)Journal ArticleThis article introduces the Impact Factor squared or IF²-index, an h-like indicator of research performance. This indicator reflects the degree to which large entities such as countries and/or their states participate in top-level research in a field or subfield. The IF²-index uses the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) of research publications instead of the number of citations. This concept is applied to other h-type indexes and their results compared to the IF²-index. These JIF-based indexes are then used to assess the overall performance of cancer research in Australia and its states over 8 years from 1999 to 2006. The IF²-index has three advantages when evaluating larger research units: firstly, it provides a stable value that does not change over time, reflecting the degree to which a research unit participated in top-level research in a given year; secondly, it can be calculated closely approximating the publication date of yearly datasets; and finally, it provides an additional dimension when a full article-based citation analysis is not feasible. As the index reflects the degree of participation in top-level research it may favor larger units when units of different sizes are compared.
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(2011)ThesisIn the Information Systems (IS) discipline there has been a continued interest in understanding how IT or IS development, implementation and use draw from and impact on social and power relations and the distribution of power in various contexts. This thesis aims to understand the role that the implementation and use of an enterprise system such as ERP can play in the (re)configuration, (re)construction and exercise of power in organisational contexts. To achieve the aim, the thesis i) draws from extensive literature related to IS (and specifically ERP) and power, ii) develops a Foucauldian theoretical foundation to study ERP and power in organisational contexts and iii) examines a case of an ERP implementation and use in a State Owned Enterprise (SOE) in China as part of an ongoing modernization program. The thesis answers the following empirical research questions: 1. How are various forms of exercise of power and control enacted through the ERP system implementation and use in business processes and practices? 2. How do these enactments reconfigure power relations and reconstitute the regime of truth? 3. What is the role of the ERP system in such a process of power (re)construction? The case study demonstrates how the ERP implementation aimed at rationalizing business processes led to largely covert attempts at increasing surveillance, standardization, disciplining, and subjugation. These attempts are met with counteraction in various forms through a ‘care of the self’, including overt resistance, e.g. openly challenging and arguing, non-participation, and covert resistance, e.g. distancing, persistence, creating workarounds. The analysis reveals the outcomes of the ERP implementation do not only result from the perception of technological (mis)fit or the interpretation by powerful groups but more importantly spring from mutual constitution of the ERP system and the human actors leading to reconfiguration of power relations. This is explained by proposing a concept of power-technology nexus as an instance of the broader notion of power/knowledge discussed by Foucault. The emergence of power-technology nexus indicates that the more ERP enabled processes get enacted, the more ERP becomes integral to the circulation and exercise of power, and the more the ERP system becomes a material embodiment of the power/knowledge nexus, thus a transformative agent. These empirical and theoretical results contribute not only to better understanding of the mutual reconstruction of power and technology, but also provide a theoretical foundation for a more critical view of the wider societal and political consequences of technology that can help inform both research and practice.
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(2011)ThesisThe field of software engineering for computer supported cooperative work aims at designing and developing software engineering models, methods and tools that assist individuals and groups to cooperate. However, the cooperation is significantly influenced by participants’ awareness of relevant information. The objective of this thesis is to propose a software engineering methodology to design and develop applications that assist individuals to identify their awareness. The present study is based on three main observations from the literature. First, studies on the utilisation of information technology for cooperation emphasise the role of awareness for identifying the relevance of information in the midst of an abundance of inputs. Second, there are bodies of work that indicate the significant contributions of agents to design and develop software applications to assist individuals to maintain their awareness. Third, the literature lacks formalised software engineering methods on how to identify and implement awareness. The objective is to provide a mechanism that can be applied with intelligent agents in order to design and develop software applications to identify awareness. This study introduces Policy-based Awareness Management (PAM), a software engineering methodology that proposes the use of existing policy rules as a source to identify awareness. This methodology presents a formalised framework for policy-based awareness and a step-by-step process for awareness identification. The formalism has been built on the logic of general awareness, and its implementation is based on the platform of policy rules in Directory Enabled Networks (DEN). The research also proposes a systematic software engineering methodology for designing and developing architecture of software applications. The present thesis develops a design methodology for software agents to implement the proposed formalism. In this study, PAM using software agents has been evaluated in terms of its efficacy and cost-efficiency by a triangulation of two simulation studies on hypothetical examples and wireless communication procedures in a hospital environment. The original contributions of this study are illustrated through three applications; two in disaster management and one in healthcare. The results of these evaluations show that PAM is effective and cost-efficient subject to the limitations of the study.