Information Science and Knowledge Management – serie

This book brings together three great motifs of the network society: the seeking and using of information by individuals and groups; the creation and application of knowledge in organizations; and the fundamental transformation of these activities as they are enacted on the Internet and the World Wide Web. Of the three, the study of how individuals and groups seek information probably has the longest history, beginning with the early "information needs and uses" studies soon after the Second World War. The study of organizations as knowledge-based social systems is much more recent, and really gained momentum only within the last decade or so. The study of the World Wide Web as information and communication media is younger still, but has generated tremendous excitement, partly because it has the potential to reconfigure the ways in which people seek information and use knowledge, and partly because it offers new methods of analyzing and measuring how in fact such information and knowledge work gets done. As research endeavors, these streams overlap and share conceptual constructs, perspectives, and methods of analysis. Although these overlaps and shared concerns are sometimes apparent in the published research, there have been few attempts to connect these ideas explicitly and identify cross-disciplinary themes. This book is an attempt to fill this void. The three authors of this book possess contrasting backgrounds and thus adopt complementary vantage points to observe information seeking and knowledge work.

Relationships abound in the library and information science (LIS) world. Those relationships may be social in nature, as, for instance, when we deal with human relationships among library personnel or relationships (i. e. , "public relations") between an information center and its clientele. The relationships may be educational, as, for example, when we examine the relationship between the curriculum of an accredited school and the needs of the work force it is preparing students to join. Or the relationships may be economic, as when we investigate the relationship between the cost of journals and the frequency with which they are cited. Many of the relationships of concern to us reflect phenomena entirely internal to the field: the relationship between manuscript collections, archives, and special collections; the relationship between end user search behavior and the effectiveness of searches; the relationship between access to and use of information resources; the relationship between recall and precision; the relationship between various bibliometric laws; etc. The list of such relationships could go on and on. The relationships addressed in this volume are restricted to those involved in the organization of recorded knowledge, which tend to have a conceptual or semantic basis, although statistical means are sometimes used in their discovery.

The genesis of this volume was the participation of the editors in an ACMlSIGIR (Association for Computing Machinery/Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval) workshop entitled "Beyond Word Relations" (Hetzler, 1997). This workshop examined a number of relationship types with significance for information retrieval beyond the conventional topic-matching relationship. From this shared participation came the idea for an edited volume on relationships, with chapters to be solicited from researchers and practitioners throughout the world. Ultimately, one volume became two volumes. The first volume, Relationships in the Organization of Knowledge (Bean & Green, 200 I), examines the role of relationships in knowledge organization theory and practice, with emphasis given to thesaural relationships and integration across systems, languages, cultures, and disciplines. This second volume examines relationships in a broader array of contexts. The two volumes should be seen as companions, each informing the other. As with the companion volume, we are especially grateful to the authors who willingly accepted challenges of space and time to produce chapters that summarize extensive bodies of research. The value of the volume clearly resides in the quality of the individual chapters. In naming this volume The Semantics of Relationships: An Interdisciplinary Perspective, we wanted to highlight the fact that relationships are not just empty connectives. Relationships constitute important conceptual units and make significant contributions to meaning.

In this volume organizational learning theory is used to analyse various practices of managing and facilitating knowledge sharing within companies. Experiences with three types of knowledge sharing, namely knowledge acquisition, knowledge reuse, and knowledge creation, at ten large companies are discussed and analyzed. This critical analysis leads to the identification of traps and obstacles when managing knowledge sharing, when supporting knowledge sharing with IT tools, and when organizations try to learn from knowledge sharing practices. The identification of these risks is followed by a discussion of how organizations can avoid them.This work will be of interest to researchers and practitioners working in organization science and business administration. Also, consultants and organizations at large will find the book useful as it will provide them with insights into how other organizations manage and facilitate knowledge sharing and how potential failures can be prevented.

Adopting an informational perspective towards knowledge work, this book investigates how enterprise portals can promote knowledge creation, distribution, and use. Moving beyond the design and delivery of portals as mere information retrieval tools, an enterprise portal is viewed as a shared information work space that can facilitate communication and collaboration among organizational workers, as well as support the browsing, searching, and retrieval of information content. Adopting an information vantage point, the book uniquely explores the human issues surrounding enterprise portal adoption and use, as well as the utilization of intelligent agents to ameliorate the use of portals for knowledge-based tasks. The result is a novel, rich and comprehensive discussion on the factors affecting the design and utilization of enterprise portals for knowledge work, suitable for both graduate-level students and organizational workers alike.

This book brings together results from the Web search studies we conducted from 1997 through 2004. The aim of our studies has been twofold: to examine how the public at large searches the Web and to highlight trends in public Web searching. The eight-year period from 1997 to 2004 saw the beginnings and maturity of public Web searching. Commercial Web search engines have come and gone, or endured, through the fall of the dot.com companies. We saw the rise and, in some cases, the demise of several high profile, publicly available Web search engines. The study of the Web search is an exciting and important area of interdisciplinary research. Our book provides a valuable insight into the growth and development of human interaction with Web search engines. In this book, our focus is on the human aspect of the interaction between user and Web search engine. We do not investigate the Web search engines themselves or their constantly changing interfaces, algorithms and features. We focus on exploring the cognitive and user aspects of public Web searching in the aggregate. We use a variety of quantitative and qualitative methods within the overall methodology known as transaction log analysis.

Classification is the essential first step in science. The study of science, as well as the practice of science, will thus benefit from a detailed classification of different types of science. In this book, science - defined broadly to include the social sciences and humanities - is first unpacked into its constituent elements: the phenomena studied, the data used, the theories employed, the methods applied, and the practices of scientists. These five elements are then classified in turn. Notably, the classifications of both theory types and methods allow the key strengths and weaknesses of different theories and methods to be readily discerned and compared. Connections across classifications are explored: should certain theories or phenomena be investigated only with certain methods? What is the proper function and form of scientific paradigms? Are certain common errors and biases in scientific practice associated with particular phenomena, data, theories, or methods? The classifications point to several ways of improving both specialized and interdisciplinary research and teaching, and especially of enhancing communication across communities of scholars. The classifications also support a superior system of document classification that would allow searches by theory and method used as well as causal links investigated.

New Directions in Human Information Behavior, co-edited by Drs. Amanda Spink and Charles Cole provides an understanding of the new directions, leading edge theories and models in human information behavior. Information behavior is conceptualized as complex human information related processes that are embedded within an individual’s everyday social and life processes.The book presents chapters by an interdisciplinary range of scholars who show new  directions that often challenge the established views and paradigms of information behavior studies. Beginning with an evolutionary framework, the book examines information behaviors over various epochs of human existence from the Palaeolithic Era and within pre-literate societies, to contemporary behaviors by 21st century humans. Drawing upon social and psychological science theories the book presents a more integrated and holistic approach to the understanding of information behaviors that include multitasking and non-linear longitudinal processes, individuals’ information ground, information practices and information sharing, digital behaviors and human information organizing behaviors. The final chapter of the book integrates these new approaches and presents an overview of the key trends, theories and models for further research.This book is directly relevant to information scientists, librarians, social and evolutionary psychologists. Undergraduate and graduate students, academics and information professionals interested in human information behavior will find this book of particular benefit.

This book is written for members of the scholarly research community, and for persons involved in research evaluation and research policy. More specifically, it is directed towards the following four main groups of readers: – All scientists and scholars who have been or will be subjected to a quantitative assessment of research performance using citation analysis. – Research policy makers and managers who wish to become conversant with the basic features of citation analysis, and about its potentialities and limitations. – Members of peer review committees and other evaluators, who consider the use of citation analysis as a tool in their assessments. – Practitioners and students in the field of quantitative science and technology studies, informetrics, and library and information science. Citation analysis involves the construction and application of a series of indicators of the ‘impact’, ‘influence’ or ‘quality’ of scholarly work, derived from citation data, i.e. data on references cited in footnotes or bibliographies of scholarly research publications. Such indicators are applied both in the study of scholarly communication and in the assessment of research performance. The term ‘scholarly’ comprises all domains of science and scholarship, including not only those fields that are normally denoted as science – the natural and life sciences, mathematical and technical sciences – but also social sciences and humanities.

“The more narrowly we examine language, the sharper becomes the con?ict - tween it and our requirement. (For the crystalline purity of logic was, of course, not a result of investigation; it was a requirement. ) The con?ict becomes intolerable; the requirement is now in danger of becoming empty. —We have got onto slippery ice where there is no friction and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal, but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk; so we need 1 friction. Back to the rough ground!” —Ludwig Wittgenstein This manuscript consists of four related parts: a brief overview of Wittgenstein’s p- losophy of language and its relevance to information systems; a detailed explanation of Wittgenstein’s late philosophy of language and mind; an extended discussion of the re- vance of his philosophy to understanding some of the problems inherent in information systems, especially those systems which rely on retrieval based on some representation of the intellectual content of that information. And, fourthly, a series of detailed footnotes which cite the sources of the numerous quotations and provide some discussion of the related issues that the text inspires. The ?rst three of these parts can each be read by itself with some pro?t, although they are related and do form a conceptual whole.

1. The birth of the electronic journal In the autumn of 1987 Michael Ehringhaus and Bird Stasz of Syracuse U- versity launched New horizons in adult education, probably the very rst ref- 1 ereed scienti c journal to be published in electronic form ( g. 1. 1). The rst issue was sent over the Adult Education Network (AEDNET). The journal still 2 exists today. In March 1991 Ted Jennings of the University at Albany (State 3 University of New York) launched EJournal, described as an ‘electronic jo- nal concerned with the implications of electronic networks and texts’ ( g. 1. 2), coining the now popular term e-journal. The Online journal of current cli- cal trials, published from September 1991, has been described as the rst peer 45 reviewed electronic journal in medicine. How signi cant is the phenomenon of the scienti c electronic journaltoday, more than a decade and a half after its introduction? Over this period inf- mation and communication technologies (ICT) have been an important factor in the development of scienti c communication. Applications such as c- munication over digital networks (converging towards a single network – the Internet), the use of computerized systems for creating, storing and retrieving 1 The scienti c journal is also referred to as ‘scholarly’ or ‘research’ journal. We use the former term in this study. 2 Although no longer distributed over AEDNET but through the World Wide Web. The rst issue is now ? available at http://www. nova. edu/ aed/horizons/vol1n1.

When Don Swanson hypothesized a connection between Raynaud's phenomenon anddietary?shoil,the?eldofliterature-baseddiscovery(LBD)wasborn. During thesubsequenttwodecadesasteadystreamofresearchershavepublishedarticles aboutLBDandthe?eldhasmadesteadyprogressinlayingfoundationsandc- ating an identity. It is curiously signi?cant that LBD is not "owned" by any p- ticulardiscipline,forexample, knowledge discoveryortextmining. Rather,LBD researchersoriginatefromarangeof?eldsincludinginformationscience,infor- tionretrieval,logic,andthebiomedicalsciences. Thisre?ectsthefactLBDisan inherentlymulti-disciplinaryenterprisewherecollaborationsbetweentheinfor- tionandbiomedicalsciencesarereadilyencountered. Thismulti-disciplinaryaspect ofLBDhasmadeitharderforthe?eldtoplanta?ag,sotospeak. Thepresentv- umecanbeseenasanattempttoredressthis. Itpresentschaptersprovidingabroad brushstrokeofLBDbyleadingresearchersprovidinganoverviewofthestateofthe art,themodelsandtheoriesused,experimentalstudies,lessonslearnt,application areas,andfuturechallenges. Inshort,itattemptstoconveyalearnedimpressionof whereandhowLBDisbeingdeployed. DonSwansonhaskindlyagreedtoprovide theintroductorychapter.Itisthehopeandintentionthatthisvolumewillplanta ?aginthegroundandinspirenewresearcherstotheLBDchallenge. PeterBruza July2007 MarcWeeber v Contents Preface...v Contributors...ix Part I General Outlook and Possibilities Literature-Based Discovery? The Very Idea ...3 D. R. Swanson The Place of Literature-Based Discovery in Contemporary Scienti?c Practice ...13 NeilR. SmalheiserandVetleI. Torvik The Tip of the Iceberg: The Quest for Innovation at the Base of the Pyramid...23 M. D. GordonandN. F. Awad The 'Open Discovery' Challenge...39 JonathanD. Wren Where is the Discovery in Literature-Based Discovery?...57 R. N. Kostoff Part II Methodology and Applications Analyzing LBD Methods using a General Framework...75 A. K. Sehgal,X. Y. Qiu,andP. Srinivasan Evaluation of Literature-Based Discovery Systems...101 M. Yetisgen-YildizandW. Pratt vii viii Contents Factor Analytic Approach to Transitive Text Mining using Medline Descriptors...115 J. StegmannandG. Grohmann Literature-Based Knowledge Discovery using Natural Language Processing ...133 D. Hristovski,C. Friedman,T. C. Rind?esch,andB. Peterlin Information Retrieval in Literature-Based Discovery...153 W.Hersh Biomedical Application of Knowledge Discovery ...173 A. Koike Index...193 Contributors NeveenFaragAwad SchoolofBusiness,WayneStateUniversity,USA CarolFriedman DepartmentofBiomedicalInformatics,ColumbiaUniversity,622West168St, NewYork,NY10032,USA MichaelD. Gordon RossSchoolofBusiness,UniversityofMichigan,USA mdgordon@umich. edu GuenterGrohmann Charite-Institute ' ofMedicalInformatics,12203Berlin,Germany guenter. grohmann@charite. de WilliamHersh DepartmentofMedicalInformaticsandClinicalEpidemiology, SchoolofMedicine,OregonHealthandScienceUniversity, 3181SWSamJacksonParkRd. ,Portland,OR97239,USA hersh@ohsu. edu DimitarHristovski InstituteofBiomedicalInformatics,MedicalFaculty,UniversityofLjubljana, Vrazovtrg2/2,1104Ljubljana,Slovenia dimitar. hristovski@mf. uni-lj. si AsakoKoike CentralResearchLaboratory,HitachiLtd.

Rethinking Knowledge Management: From Knowledge Objects to Knowledge Processes readdresses fundamental issues in knowledge management, leading to a new area of study: knowledge processes. These integrate research across a variety of fields, thus reasserting the fundamental insights of knowledge management in organizations and societies. Knowledge processes go far beyond traditional information acquisition and processing by stressing the importance and creative potential of human expression, communication, and learning for successful economic planning and meaningful personal and social existence.McInerney’s and Day’s superb authors from various disciplines offer new and exciting views on knowledge acquisition, generation, sharing and management in a post-industrial environment. Their contributions discuss problems of knowledge acquisition, handling, and learning from a variety of perspectives. Rather than the traditional notion of stores of knowledge that we hold in our mind, the view presented in this book is that of a constantly changing notion of what we know, of feelings related to that knowledge, and of a more holistic understanding of the act of knowing.

The inspiration for this book emerged from the editors’ participation in a panel d- cussion on Web search engines at an annual meeting of the Association of Internet Researchers. This multidisciplinary panel of Web search researches revealed the diversity of scholars interested in Web searching, coupled with a broad range of questions, attitudes, and approaches. It became clear that more “cross-fertilization” was necessary between the disciplines to ensure Web search engines (the entities) and Web searching (the user behavior) received the thorough scholarly attention they deserved. This book is a result of that realization, and an important first step in achieving new levels of awareness and collaboration across disciplines. The book represents a core theme within the intellectual pursuits of the editors. The first editor (Spink) is an information scientist who has worked with, taught and has researched the informational dimensions of Web searching since 1997. The second editor (Zimmer) is a scholar of culture and communication who focuses on the political and ethical dimensions of new media and information technologies, and whose dissertation research focused on the value-related consequences of the quest for the “perfect” search engine.

1.1 Introduction Each year corporations spend millions of dollars training and educating their - ployees. On average, these corporations spend approximately one thousand dollars 1 per employee each year. As businesses struggle to stay on the cutting-edge and to keep their employees educated and up-to-speed with professional trends as well as ever-changing information needs, it is easy to see why corporations are investing more time and money than ever in their efforts to support their employees’ prof- sional development. During the Industrial Age, companies strove to control natural resources. The more resources they controlled, the greater their competitive edge in the mark- place. Senge (1993) refers to this kind of organization as resource-based. In the Information Age, companies must create, disseminate, and effectively use kno- edge within their organization in order to maintain their market share. Senge - scribes this kind of organization as knowledge-based. Given that knowledge-based organizations willcontinuetobeadrivingforcebehindtheeconomy, itisimperative that corporations support the knowledge and information needs of their workers.

When Don Swanson hypothesized a connection between Raynaud's phenomenon anddietary?shoil,the?eldofliterature-baseddiscovery(LBD)wasborn. During thesubsequenttwodecadesasteadystreamofresearchershavepublishedarticles aboutLBDandthe?eldhasmadesteadyprogressinlayingfoundationsandc- ating an identity. It is curiously signi?cant that LBD is not "owned" by any p- ticulardiscipline,forexample, knowledge discoveryortextmining. Rather,LBD researchersoriginatefromarangeof?eldsincludinginformationscience,infor- tionretrieval,logic,andthebiomedicalsciences. Thisre?ectsthefactLBDisan inherentlymulti-disciplinaryenterprisewherecollaborationsbetweentheinfor- tionandbiomedicalsciencesarereadilyencountered. Thismulti-disciplinaryaspect ofLBDhasmadeitharderforthe?eldtoplanta?ag,sotospeak. Thepresentv- umecanbeseenasanattempttoredressthis. Itpresentschaptersprovidingabroad brushstrokeofLBDbyleadingresearchersprovidinganoverviewofthestateofthe art,themodelsandtheoriesused,experimentalstudies,lessonslearnt,application areas,andfuturechallenges. Inshort,itattemptstoconveyalearnedimpressionof whereandhowLBDisbeingdeployed. DonSwansonhaskindlyagreedtoprovide theintroductorychapter.Itisthehopeandintentionthatthisvolumewillplanta ?aginthegroundandinspirenewresearcherstotheLBDchallenge. PeterBruza July2007 MarcWeeber v Contents Preface...v Contributors...ix Part I General Outlook and Possibilities Literature-Based Discovery? The Very Idea ...3 D. R. Swanson The Place of Literature-Based Discovery in Contemporary Scienti?c Practice ...13 NeilR. SmalheiserandVetleI. Torvik The Tip of the Iceberg: The Quest for Innovation at the Base of the Pyramid...23 M. D. GordonandN. F. Awad The 'Open Discovery' Challenge...39 JonathanD. Wren Where is the Discovery in Literature-Based Discovery?...57 R. N. Kostoff Part II Methodology and Applications Analyzing LBD Methods using a General Framework...75 A. K. Sehgal,X. Y. Qiu,andP. Srinivasan Evaluation of Literature-Based Discovery Systems...101 M. Yetisgen-YildizandW. Pratt vii viii Contents Factor Analytic Approach to Transitive Text Mining using Medline Descriptors...115 J. StegmannandG. Grohmann Literature-Based Knowledge Discovery using Natural Language Processing ...133 D. Hristovski,C. Friedman,T. C. Rind?esch,andB. Peterlin Information Retrieval in Literature-Based Discovery...153 W.Hersh Biomedical Application of Knowledge Discovery ...173 A. Koike Index...193 Contributors NeveenFaragAwad SchoolofBusiness,WayneStateUniversity,USA CarolFriedman DepartmentofBiomedicalInformatics,ColumbiaUniversity,622West168St, NewYork,NY10032,USA MichaelD. Gordon RossSchoolofBusiness,UniversityofMichigan,USA mdgordon@umich. edu GuenterGrohmann Charite-Institute ' ofMedicalInformatics,12203Berlin,Germany guenter. grohmann@charite. de WilliamHersh DepartmentofMedicalInformaticsandClinicalEpidemiology, SchoolofMedicine,OregonHealthandScienceUniversity, 3181SWSamJacksonParkRd. ,Portland,OR97239,USA hersh@ohsu. edu DimitarHristovski InstituteofBiomedicalInformatics,MedicalFaculty,UniversityofLjubljana, Vrazovtrg2/2,1104Ljubljana,Slovenia dimitar. hristovski@mf. uni-lj. si AsakoKoike CentralResearchLaboratory,HitachiLtd.

Rethinking Knowledge Management: From Knowledge Objects to Knowledge Processes readdresses fundamental issues in knowledge management, leading to a new area of study: knowledge processes. These integrate research across a variety of fields, thus reasserting the fundamental insights of knowledge management in organizations and societies. Knowledge processes go far beyond traditional information acquisition and processing by stressing the importance and creative potential of human expression, communication, and learning for successful economic planning and meaningful personal and social existence.McInerney’s and Day’s superb authors from various disciplines offer new and exciting views on knowledge acquisition, generation, sharing and management in a post-industrial environment. Their contributions discuss problems of knowledge acquisition, handling, and learning from a variety of perspectives. Rather than the traditional notion of stores of knowledge that we hold in our mind, the view presented in this book is that of a constantly changing notion of what we know, of feelings related to that knowledge, and of a more holistic understanding of the act of knowing.

The inspiration for this book emerged from the editors’ participation in a panel d- cussion on Web search engines at an annual meeting of the Association of Internet Researchers. This multidisciplinary panel of Web search researches revealed the diversity of scholars interested in Web searching, coupled with a broad range of questions, attitudes, and approaches. It became clear that more “cross-fertilization” was necessary between the disciplines to ensure Web search engines (the entities) and Web searching (the user behavior) received the thorough scholarly attention they deserved. This book is a result of that realization, and an important first step in achieving new levels of awareness and collaboration across disciplines. The book represents a core theme within the intellectual pursuits of the editors. The first editor (Spink) is an information scientist who has worked with, taught and has researched the informational dimensions of Web searching since 1997. The second editor (Zimmer) is a scholar of culture and communication who focuses on the political and ethical dimensions of new media and information technologies, and whose dissertation research focused on the value-related consequences of the quest for the “perfect” search engine.

1.1 Introduction Each year corporations spend millions of dollars training and educating their - ployees. On average, these corporations spend approximately one thousand dollars 1 per employee each year. As businesses struggle to stay on the cutting-edge and to keep their employees educated and up-to-speed with professional trends as well as ever-changing information needs, it is easy to see why corporations are investing more time and money than ever in their efforts to support their employees’ prof- sional development. During the Industrial Age, companies strove to control natural resources. The more resources they controlled, the greater their competitive edge in the mark- place. Senge (1993) refers to this kind of organization as resource-based. In the Information Age, companies must create, disseminate, and effectively use kno- edge within their organization in order to maintain their market share. Senge - scribes this kind of organization as knowledge-based. Given that knowledge-based organizations willcontinuetobeadrivingforcebehindtheeconomy, itisimperative that corporations support the knowledge and information needs of their workers.

Information behavior has emerged as an important aspect of human life, however our knowledge and understanding of it is incomplete and underdeveloped scientifically. Research on the topic is largely contemporary in focus and has generally not incorporated results from other disciplines.In this monograph Spink provides a new understanding of information behavior by incorporating related findings, theories and models from social sciences, psychology and cognition. In her presentation, she argues that information behavior is an important instinctive sociocognitive ability that can only be fully understood with a highly interdisciplinary approach. The leitmotivs of her examination are three important research questions: First, what is the evolutionary, biological and developmental nature of information behavior? Second, what is the role of instinct versus environment in shaping information behavior? And, third, how have information behavior capabilities evolved and developed over time?Written for researchers in information science as well as social and cognitive sciences, Spink’s controversial text lays the foundation for a new interdisciplinary theoretical perspective on information behavior that will not only provide a more holistic framework for this field but will also impact those sciences, and thus also open up many new research directions.

Information behavior has emerged as an important aspect of human life, however our knowledge and understanding of it is incomplete and underdeveloped scientifically. Research on the topic is largely contemporary in focus and has generally not incorporated results from other disciplines.In this monograph Spink provides a new understanding of information behavior by incorporating related findings, theories and models from social sciences, psychology and cognition. In her presentation, she argues that information behavior is an important instinctive sociocognitive ability that can only be fully understood with a highly interdisciplinary approach. The leitmotivs of her examination are three important research questions: First, what is the evolutionary, biological and developmental nature of information behavior? Second, what is the role of instinct versus environment in shaping information behavior? And, third, how have information behavior capabilities evolved and developed over time?Written for researchers in information science as well as social and cognitive sciences, Spink’s controversial text lays the foundation for a new interdisciplinary theoretical perspective on information behavior that will not only provide a more holistic framework for this field but will also impact those sciences, and thus also open up many new research directions.

This book brings together three great motifs of the network society: the seeking and using of information by individuals and groups; the creation and application of knowledge in organizations; and the fundamental transformation of these activities as they are enacted on the Internet and the World Wide Web. Of the three, the study of how individuals and groups seek information probably has the longest history, beginning with the early "information needs and uses" studies soon after the Second World War. The study of organizations as knowledge-based social systems is much more recent, and really gained momentum only within the last decade or so. The study of the World Wide Web as information and communication media is younger still, but has generated tremendous excitement, partly because it has the potential to reconfigure the ways in which people seek information and use knowledge, and partly because it offers new methods of analyzing and measuring how in fact such information and knowledge work gets done. As research endeavors, these streams overlap and share conceptual constructs, perspectives, and methods of analysis. Although these overlaps and shared concerns are sometimes apparent in the published research, there have been few attempts to connect these ideas explicitly and identify cross-disciplinary themes. This book is an attempt to fill this void. The three authors of this book possess contrasting backgrounds and thus adopt complementary vantage points to observe information seeking and knowledge work.

Relationships abound in the library and information science (LIS) world. Those relationships may be social in nature, as, for instance, when we deal with human relationships among library personnel or relationships (i. e. , "public relations") between an information center and its clientele. The relationships may be educational, as, for example, when we examine the relationship between the curriculum of an accredited school and the needs of the work force it is preparing students to join. Or the relationships may be economic, as when we investigate the relationship between the cost of journals and the frequency with which they are cited. Many of the relationships of concern to us reflect phenomena entirely internal to the field: the relationship between manuscript collections, archives, and special collections; the relationship between end user search behavior and the effectiveness of searches; the relationship between access to and use of information resources; the relationship between recall and precision; the relationship between various bibliometric laws; etc. The list of such relationships could go on and on. The relationships addressed in this volume are restricted to those involved in the organization of recorded knowledge, which tend to have a conceptual or semantic basis, although statistical means are sometimes used in their discovery.

The genesis of this volume was the participation of the editors in an ACMlSIGIR (Association for Computing Machinery/Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval) workshop entitled "Beyond Word Relations" (Hetzler, 1997). This workshop examined a number of relationship types with significance for information retrieval beyond the conventional topic-matching relationship. From this shared participation came the idea for an edited volume on relationships, with chapters to be solicited from researchers and practitioners throughout the world. Ultimately, one volume became two volumes. The first volume, Relationships in the Organization of Knowledge (Bean & Green, 200 I), examines the role of relationships in knowledge organization theory and practice, with emphasis given to thesaural relationships and integration across systems, languages, cultures, and disciplines. This second volume examines relationships in a broader array of contexts. The two volumes should be seen as companions, each informing the other. As with the companion volume, we are especially grateful to the authors who willingly accepted challenges of space and time to produce chapters that summarize extensive bodies of research. The value of the volume clearly resides in the quality of the individual chapters. In naming this volume The Semantics of Relationships: An Interdisciplinary Perspective, we wanted to highlight the fact that relationships are not just empty connectives. Relationships constitute important conceptual units and make significant contributions to meaning.

In this volume organizational learning theory is used to analyse various practices of managing and facilitating knowledge sharing within companies. Experiences with three types of knowledge sharing, namely knowledge acquisition, knowledge reuse, and knowledge creation, at ten large companies are discussed and analyzed. This critical analysis leads to the identification of traps and obstacles when managing knowledge sharing, when supporting knowledge sharing with IT tools, and when organizations try to learn from knowledge sharing practices. The identification of these risks is followed by a discussion of how organizations can avoid them.This work will be of interest to researchers and practitioners working in organization science and business administration. Also, consultants and organizations at large will find the book useful as it will provide them with insights into how other organizations manage and facilitate knowledge sharing and how potential failures can be prevented.

Adopting an informational perspective towards knowledge work, this book investigates how enterprise portals can promote knowledge creation, distribution, and use. Moving beyond the design and delivery of portals as mere information retrieval tools, an enterprise portal is viewed as a shared information work space that can facilitate communication and collaboration among organizational workers, as well as support the browsing, searching, and retrieval of information content. Adopting an information vantage point, the book uniquely explores the human issues surrounding enterprise portal adoption and use, as well as the utilization of intelligent agents to ameliorate the use of portals for knowledge-based tasks. The result is a novel, rich and comprehensive discussion on the factors affecting the design and utilization of enterprise portals for knowledge work, suitable for both graduate-level students and organizational workers alike.

This book brings together results from the Web search studies we conducted from 1997 through 2004. The aim of our studies has been twofold: to examine how the public at large searches the Web and to highlight trends in public Web searching. The eight-year period from 1997 to 2004 saw the beginnings and maturity of public Web searching. Commercial Web search engines have come and gone, or endured, through the fall of the dot.com companies. We saw the rise and, in some cases, the demise of several high profile, publicly available Web search engines. The study of the Web search is an exciting and important area of interdisciplinary research. Our book provides a valuable insight into the growth and development of human interaction with Web search engines. In this book, our focus is on the human aspect of the interaction between user and Web search engine. We do not investigate the Web search engines themselves or their constantly changing interfaces, algorithms and features. We focus on exploring the cognitive and user aspects of public Web searching in the aggregate. We use a variety of quantitative and qualitative methods within the overall methodology known as transaction log analysis.

Classification is the essential first step in science. The study of science, as well as the practice of science, will thus benefit from a detailed classification of different types of science. In this book, science - defined broadly to include the social sciences and humanities - is first unpacked into its constituent elements: the phenomena studied, the data used, the theories employed, the methods applied, and the practices of scientists. These five elements are then classified in turn. Notably, the classifications of both theory types and methods allow the key strengths and weaknesses of different theories and methods to be readily discerned and compared. Connections across classifications are explored: should certain theories or phenomena be investigated only with certain methods? What is the proper function and form of scientific paradigms? Are certain common errors and biases in scientific practice associated with particular phenomena, data, theories, or methods? The classifications point to several ways of improving both specialized and interdisciplinary research and teaching, and especially of enhancing communication across communities of scholars. The classifications also support a superior system of document classification that would allow searches by theory and method used as well as causal links investigated.

New Directions in Human Information Behavior, co-edited by Drs. Amanda Spink and Charles Cole provides an understanding of the new directions, leading edge theories and models in human information behavior. Information behavior is conceptualized as complex human information related processes that are embedded within an individual’s everyday social and life processes.The book presents chapters by an interdisciplinary range of scholars who show new  directions that often challenge the established views and paradigms of information behavior studies. Beginning with an evolutionary framework, the book examines information behaviors over various epochs of human existence from the Palaeolithic Era and within pre-literate societies, to contemporary behaviors by 21st century humans. Drawing upon social and psychological science theories the book presents a more integrated and holistic approach to the understanding of information behaviors that include multitasking and non-linear longitudinal processes, individuals’ information ground, information practices and information sharing, digital behaviors and human information organizing behaviors. The final chapter of the book integrates these new approaches and presents an overview of the key trends, theories and models for further research.This book is directly relevant to information scientists, librarians, social and evolutionary psychologists. Undergraduate and graduate students, academics and information professionals interested in human information behavior will find this book of particular benefit.