This first of a kind book places spatial data within the broader domain of information technology (IT) while providing a comprehensive and coherent explanation of the guiding principles, methods, ...implementation and operational management of spatial databases within the workplace. The text explains the key concepts, issues and processes of spatial data implementation and provides a holistic management perspective that complements the technical aspects of spatial data stressed in other textbooks. In this respect, this book is unique in its coverage of spatial database principles and architecture, database modelling including UML, database and spatial data standards, spatial data infrastructure, database implementation, and workplace-oriented project management including user needs study and end user education. The text first overviews the current state of spatial information technology and it concludes with a speculative account of likely future developments. Cutting edge research and practical workplace needs are defined and explained. Topics covered, among others, include strategies for end user education, current spatial data standards and their importance, legal issues and liabilities in the ownership and use of spatial data, spatial metadata use within distributed databases, the Internet and Web-based solutions to database deployment, quality assurance and quality control in database implementation and use, spatial decision support, and spatial data mining. The book applies equally to senior undergraduate and graduate courses and students, as well as spatial data managers and practitioners already in the workplace. It will enhance their technical and human-resource based understanding of spatial data management. Certification courses that seek to prepare students for careers in the spatial information industry and courses targeted at enhancing needed geospatial workplace knowledge and skills will benefit greatly from its content.
Paradoxes of Media and Information Literacy contributes to ongoing conversations about control of knowledge and different ways of knowing. It does so by analysing why media and information literacy ...(MIL) is proposed as a solution for addressing the current information crisis. Questioning why MIL is commonly believed to wield such power, the book throws into sharp relief several paradoxes that are built into common understandings of such literacies. Haider and Sundin take the reader on a journey across different fields of practice, research and policymaking, including librarianship, information studies, teaching and journalism, media and communication and the educational sciences. The authors also consider national information policy proposals and the recommendations of NGOs or international bodies, such as UNESCO and the OECD. Showing that MIL plays an active role in contemporary controversies, such as those on climate change or vaccination, Haider and Sundin argue that such controversies challenge existing notions of fact and ignorance, trust and doubt, and our understanding of information access and information control. The book thus argues for the need to unpack and understand the contradictions forming around these notions in relation to MIL, rather than attempting to arrive at a single, comprehensive definition. Paradoxes of Media and Information Literacy combines careful analytical and conceptual discussions with an in-depth understanding of information practices and of the contemporary information infrastructure. It is essential reading for scholars and students engaged in library and information studies, media and communication, journalism studies and the educational sciences.
The research landscape is changing, with key global research funders now requiring institutions to demonstrate how they will preserve and share research data. However, the practice of structured ...research data management is very new, and the construction of services remains experimental and in need of models and standards of approach. This groundbreaking guide will lead researchers, institutions and policy makers through the processes needed to set up and run effective institutional research data management services. This ‘how to' guide provides a step-by-step explanation of the components for an institutional service. Case studies from the newly emerging service infrastructures in the UK, USA and Australia draw out the lessons learnt. Different approaches are highlighted and compared; for example, a researcher-focused strategy from Australia is contrasted with a national, top-down approach, and a national research data management service is discussed as an alternative to institutional services. The key topics covered are: research data provision; options and approaches to research data management (RDM) service provision; a spectrum of roles, responsibilities and competences; a pathway to sustainable research data services; the range and components of RDM infrastructure and services; case studies of Johns Hopkins University, University of Southampton, Monash University, the UK Data Service and Jisc Managing Research Data programmes. This book will be an invaluable guide to those entering a new and untried enterprise. It will be particularly relevant to heads of libraries, information technology managers, research support office staff and research directors planning for these types of services. It will also be of interest to researchers, funders and policy makers as a reference tool for understanding how shifts in policy will have a range of ramifications within institutions. Library and information science students will find it an informative window on an emerging area of practice.
Over the last several decades, employers have increasingly replaced permanent employees with temporary workers and independent contractors to cut labor costs and enhance flexibility. Although ...commentators have focused largely on low-wage temporary work, the use of skilled contractors has also grown exponentially, especially in high-technology areas. Yet almost nothing is known about contracting or about the people who do it. This book seeks to break the silence.
This comprehensive book outlines and explains the parameters of design science research. It demonstrates how to conduct such research, and provides examples of various types of research that have ...been conducted using design science.
Invisible Search and Online Search Engines considers the use of search engines in contemporary everyday life and the challenges this poses for media and information literacy. Looking for mediated ...information is mostly done online and arbitrated by the various tools and devices that people carry with them on a daily basis. Because of this, search engines have a significant impact on the structure of our lives, and personal and public memories. Haider and Sundin consider what this means for society, whilst also uniting research on information retrieval with research on how people actually look for and encounter information. Search engines are now one of society’s key infrastructures for knowing and becoming informed. While their use is dispersed across myriads of social practices, where they have acquired close to naturalised positions, they are commercially and technically centralised. Arguing that search, searching, and search engines have become so widely used that we have stopped noticing them, Haider and Sundin consider what it means to be so reliant on this all-encompassing and increasingly invisible information infrastructure. Invisible Search and Online Search Engines is the first book to approach search and search engines from a perspective that combines insights from the technical expertise of information science research with a social science and humanities approach. As such, the book should be essential reading for academics, researchers, and students working on and studying information science, library and information science (LIS), media studies, journalism, digital cultures, and educational sciences.
New Directions in Information Organization, co-edited by Dr. Jung-ran Park and Dr. Lynne Howarth seeks to provide an overview and understanding of the future directions, leading edge theories and ...models for research and practice in information organization. New information standards and digital library technologies are being developed at a rapid pace as diverse communities of practice seek new ways to organize massive quantities of digital resources. Today's digital information explosion creates an increased demand for new perspectives, methods and tools for research and practice in information organization. This new direction in information organization is even more critical owing to changing user needs and expectations in conjunction with the collaborative and decentralized nature of bibliographic control. The general aim of this book is to present the current state of the digital information revolution with the associated opportunities and challenges to information organization. Through an interdisciplinary perspective, it presents broad, holist and more integrated perspective on the nature of information organization and examines new direction in information organization research and thinking. The book highlights the need to understand information organization and the Web 2.0 in the context of the rapidly changing information world and provides an overview of key trends and further research.
Indexing It All Day, Ronald E
2014, 20140919, 20140912, 2014-09-26, 2014-11-04
eBook
In this book, Ronald Day offers a critical history of the modern tradition of documentation. Focusing on the documentary index (understood as a mode of social positioning), and drawing on the work of ...the French documentalist Suzanne Briet, Day explores the understanding and uses of indexicality. He examines the transition as indexes went from being explicit professional structures that mediated users and documents to being implicit infrastructural devices used in everyday information and communication acts. Doing so, he also traces three epistemic eras in the representation of individuals and groups, first in the forms of documents, then information, then data. Day investigates five cases from the modern tradition of documentation. He considers the socio-technical instrumentalism of Paul Otlet, "the father of European documentation" (contrasting it to the hermeneutic perspective of Martin Heidegger); the shift from documentation to information science and the accompanying transformation of persons and texts into users and information; social media's use of algorithms, further subsuming persons and texts; attempts to build android robots--to embody human agency within an information system that resembles a human being; and social "big data" as a technique of neoliberal governance that employs indexing and analytics for purposes of surveillance. Finally, Day considers the status of critique and judgment at a time when people and their rights of judgment are increasingly mediated, displaced, and replaced by modern documentary techniques.
