Evidence-based practice : information professionals' experience of information literacy in the workplace

Evidence-based practice is increasingly being recognised as an important issue in a range of professional contexts including education, nursing, occupational therapy and librarianship. Many of these professions have observed a relationship or interface between evidence-based practice and information literacy. Using a phenomenographic approach this research explores variation in the how library and information professionals are experiencing evidence-based practice as part of their professional work. The findings of the research provide a basis for arguing that evidence-based practice represents the professional's enactment of information literacy in the workplace.

Rethinking health planning : a framework for organising information to underpin collaborative health planning

The field of collaborative health planning faces significant challenges created by the narrow focus of the available information, the absence of a framework to organise that information and the lack of systems to make information accessible and guide decision-making. These challenges have been magnified by the rise of the ‘healthy communities movement’, as a result of which, there have been more frequent calls for localised, collaborative and evidence-driven health related decision-making. This paper discusses the role of decision support systems as a mechanism to facilitate collaborative health decision-making. The paper presents a potential information management framework to underpin a health decision support system and describes the participatory process that is currently being used to create an online tool for health planners using geographic information systems. The need for a comprehensive information management framework to guide the process of planning for healthy communities has been emphasised. The paper also underlines the critical importance of the proposed framework not only in forcing planners to engage with the entire range of health determinants, but also in providing sufficient flexibility to allow exploration of the local setting-based determinants of health.

Life in the 'real world': a profile of Queensland University of Technology Library and Information Science graduates.

A graduate destination survey can provide a snap shot in time of a graduate’s career progression and outcome. This paper will present the results of a Queensland University of Technology study exploring the employment outcomes of students who had completed a library and information science course from the Faculty of Information Technology between 2000 and 2008. Seventy-four graduates completed an online questionnaire administered in July 2009. The study found that 90% of the graduates surveyed were working and living in Queensland, with over three quarters living and working in Brisbane. Nearly 70% were working full-time, while only 1.4% indicating that they were unemployed and looking for work. Over 80% of the graduates identified themselves as working in “librarianship”. This study is the first step in understanding the progression and destination of QUT’s library and information science graduates. It is recommended that this survey becomes an ongoing initiative so that the results can be analysed and compared over time.

Towards developing an integrated model of information behaviour

This paper presents the results from a study of information behaviors in the context of people's everyday lives undertaken in order to develop an integrated model of information behavior (IB). 34 participants from across 6 countries maintained a daily information journal or diary – mainly through a secure web log – for two weeks, to an aggregate of 468 participant days over five months. The text-rich diary data was analyzed using a multi-method qualitative-quantitative analysis in the following order: Grounded Theory analysis with manual coding, automated concept analysis using thesaurus-based visualization, and finally a statistical analysis of the coding data. The findings indicate that people engage in several information behaviors simultaneously throughout their everyday lives (including home and work life) and that sense-making is entangled in all aspects of them. Participants engaged in many of the information behaviors in a parallel, distributed, and concurrent fashion: many information behaviors for one information problem, one information behavior across many information problems, and many information behaviors concurrently across many information problems. Findings indicate also that information avoidance – both active and passive avoidance – is a common phenomenon and that information organizing behaviors or the lack thereof caused the most problems for participants. An integrated model of information behaviors is presented based on the findings.

ERP systems implementation and organizational culture : the case of Jordan

Jordan is adopting Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems in both its public and private sectors. Jordan's emerging private sector has historically close ties to the public sector; though a global market orientation requires a shift in its organizational culture. ERPs however embed business processes which do not necessarily fit with traditional cultural practices, and implementation success is not assured. This study looks at the perceptions of both public and private sector ERP implementations in Jordan and assesses these on various measures of success. There were few differences between public and private sectors, but the benefits actually realized in Jordanian ERPs fell short of claims made for the technology in other cultures.

Enterprise systems in universities : a teaching case

This teaching case aims to contribute to understanding the phenomenon of Enterprise Systems (ES) implementations in universities. Through this case, students will gain understanding of the importance of ‘contextual elements’ for large scale information systems (IS) implementations, in particular ES. This teaching case illustrates how these contextual factors contribute to the success or failure of such implementations, and how they can influence the decisions that dictate the lifecycle of such systems. The case describes ES implementations at a leading Australian university, and presents a rich account of the institutional, national and industry-sector contexts that have influenced the directions and decisions taken. The journey encountered with the main Enterprise Systems that support Financials, Human Resources and Facilities are described suggesting the lifecycle phases, critical success factors and lessons learnt.

Quantum theory beyond the physical : information in context

Measures and theories of information abound, but there are few formalised methods for treating the contextuality that can manifest in different information systems. Quantum theory provides one possible formalism for treating information in context. This paper introduces a quantum-like model of the human mental lexicon, and shows one set of recent experimental data suggesting that concept combinations can indeed behave non-separably. There is some reason to believe that the human mental lexicon displays entanglement.

Integrating information security policy management with corporate risk management for strategic alignment

Information security policy defines the governance and implementation strategy for information security in alignment with the corporate risk policy objectives and strategies. Research has established that alignment between corporate concerns may be enhanced when strategies are developed concurrently using the same development process as an integrative relationship is established. Utilizing the corporate risk management framework for security policy management establishes such an integrative relationship between information security and corporate risk management objectives and strategies. There is however limitation in the current literature on presenting a definitive approach that fully integrates security policy management with the corporate risk management framework. This paper presents an approach that adopts a conventional corporate risk management framework for security policy development and management to achieve alignment with the corporate risk policy. A case example is examined to illustrate the alignment achieved in each process step with a security policy structure being consequently derived in the process. It is shown that information security policy management outcomes become both integral drivers and major elements of the corporate-level risk management considerations. Further study should involve assessing the impact of the use of the proposed framework in enhancing alignment as perceived in this paper.

Modelling complex resource requirements in Business Process Management Systems

Real-world business processes are resource-intensive. In work environments human resources usually multitask, both human and non-human resources are typically shared between tasks, and multiple resources are sometimes necessary to undertake a single task. However, current Business Process Management Systems focus on task-resource allocation in terms of individual human resources only and lack support for a full spectrum of resource classes (e.g., human or non-human, application or non-application, individual or teamwork, schedulable or unschedulable) that could contribute to tasks within a business process. In this paper we develop a conceptual data model of resources that takes into account the various resource classes and their interactions. The resulting conceptual resource model is validated using a real-life healthcare scenario.

Using the semantic grid to build bridges between museums and indigenous communities

In this paper we describe a Semantic Grid application designed to enable museums and indigenous communities in distributed locations, to collaboratively discuss, describe and annotate digital objects and documents in museums that originally belonged to or are of cultural or historical significance to indigenous groups. By extending and refining an existing application, Vannotea, we enable users on access grid nodes to collaboratively attach descriptive, rights and tribal care metadata and annotations to digital images, video or 3D representations. The aim is to deploy the software within museums to enable the traditional owners to describe and contextualize museum content in their own words and from their own perspectives. This sharing and exchange of knowledge will hopefully revitalize cultures eroded through colonization and globalization and repair and strengthen relationships between museums and indigenous communities.

Analysis of the effect of negation on information retrieval of medical data

Most information retrieval (IR) models treat the presence of a term within a document as an indication that the document is somehow "about" that term, they do not take into account when a term might be explicitly negated. Medical data, by its nature, contains a high frequency of negated terms - e.g. "review of systems showed no chest pain or shortness of breath". This papers presents a study of the effects of negation on information retrieval. We present a number of experiments to determine whether negation has a significant negative affect on IR performance and whether language models that take negation into account might improve performance. We use a collection of real medical records as our test corpus. Our findings are that negation has some affect on system performance, but this will likely be confined to domains such as medical data where negation is prevalent.

Informed learning: a pedagogical construct attending simultaneously to information use and learning.

The idea of informed learning, applicable in academic, workplace and community settings, has been derived largely from a program of phenomenographic research in the field of information literacy, which has illuminated the experience of using information to learn. Informed learning is about simultaneous attention to information use and learning, where both information and learning are considered to be relational; and is built upon a series of key concepts such as second–order perspective, simultaneity, awareness, and relationality. Informed learning also relies heavily on reflection as a strategy for bringing about learning. As a pedagogical construct, informed learning supports inclusive curriculum design and implementation. This paper reports aspects of the informed learning research agenda which are currently being pursued at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT). The first part elaborates the idea of informed learning, examines the key concepts underpinning this pedagogical construct, and explains its emergence from the research base of the QUT Information Studies research team. The second presents a case, which demonstrates the ongoing development of informed learning theory and practice, through the development of inclusive informed learning for a culturally diverse higher education context.

A framework for successful enterprise systems implementation : preliminary findings from a case study

While critical success factors (CSFs) of enterprise system (ES) implementation are mature concepts and have received considerable attention for over a decade, researchers have very often focused on only a specific aspect of the implementation process or a specific CSF. Resultantly, there is (1) little research documented that encompasses all significant CSF considerations and (2) little empirical research into the important factors of successful ES implementation. This paper is part of a larger research effort that aims to contribute to understanding the phenomenon of ES CSFs, and reports on preliminary findings from a case study conducted at a Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in Australia. This paper reports on an empirically derived CSFs framework using a directed content analysis of 79 studies; from top IS outlets, employing the characteristics of the analytic theory, and from six different projects implemented at QUT.