Snunith Shoham

Structured versus unstructured tagging: a case study

Purpose – This paper seeks to describe and discuss a tagging experiment involving images related to Israeli and Jewish cultural heritage. The aim of this experiment was to compare freely assigned tags with values (free text) assigned to predefined metadata elements.Design/methodology/approach – Two groups of participants were asked to provide tags for 12 images. The first group of participants was asked to assign descriptive tags to the images without guidance (unstructured tagging), while the second group was asked to provide free‐text values to predefined metadata elements (structured tagging).Findings – The results show that on the one hand structured tagging provides guidance to the users, but on the other hand different interpretations of the meaning of the elements may worsen the tagging quality instead of improving it. In addition, unstructured tagging allows for a wider range of tags.Research limitations/implications – The recommendation is to experiment with a system where the users provide both ...

Information needs of North American immigrants to Israel

Purpose – The main goals of this study are identifying the information needs of new North American immigrants to Israel and to ascertain which channels of information are used by the immigrants before and after immigration to try to satisfy their information needs.Design/methodology/approach – A qualitative research approach was used for this study. Qualitative interviews were implemented as the primary strategy for data with the application of the grounded theory method for analysis.Findings – General information needs categories included: housing, schooling, health, banking and finances, drivers licenses, government‐related issues, legal issues and practical information. Personal information needs related to problems of “split” or prior immigration, changing over professional licenses, starting a business, children with special needs, and alternative medicine. Many of these needs were satisfied either prior to immigration or during the absorption process while others were left open leaving the immigrant...

Knowledge processes: from managing people to managing processes

Purpose – The purpose of this article is to discuss the necessity of access to the personal knowledge of each employee in order to cope with requirements in an organizations dynamic environment. The research question posed is which type of organizational structure, working environment and management style is most conducive to this access.Design/methodology/approach – The research was a qualitative study, allowing for examination of behavior in the organizational reality as is, by analyzing interviews and observations of about 60 employees in six private, government and public organizations. The research analysis was based on five criteria regarding performance of a complex adaptive system (CAS).Findings – There are indications that in organizations where a higher number of CAS characteristics existed, employees were better able to provide immediate solutions to the dynamic requirements. To allow this, managers should focus more on the synchronization of organizational processes and less on the control an...

Characteristics of a Virtual Community for Individuals Who Are d/Deaf and Hard of Hearing

The content of 2,050 messages on a virtual forum for d/Deaf and hard of hearing people in Israel was analyzed. Interactions and behavior were monitored to determine if behavior on the forum expressed social support, and whether the community was an entirely virtual community or a real community whose members also met in other venues. Subjects discussed in messages included technical difficulties, coping with difficulties presented by hearing loss, adjusting to assistive devices, difficulties at school and work, accessibility issues, difficulties communicating with the hearing world, and rights. Messages were also used to initiate a range of social activities. Classification of behaviors per the Social Support Behavior Code (Cutrona & Suhr, 1992) showed that most were in the category of informational support. Other types of support in the model, tangible assistance, emotional support, social network support, and esteem support, were evident in fewer messages.

Digital social network technology and the complex organizational systems

Purpose – In a competitive business environment, organizations must leverage their resources efficiently in order to provide system‐wide solutions and maintain the standards all customers expect. To do so, the resources must be integrated; however, the integration of information and resources within organizations has thus far not produced satisfactory results. In contrast, it has been found that efficient, ongoing and timely transfer of information is conducted over the internet. This research seeks to examine whether the use of internet technology within organizations can indeed enhance and streamline the ability of employees to function as fractals in complex organizations.Design/methodology/approach – The research is a qualitative study, allowing for the examination of behavior in the organizational reality as is, by analyzing interviews and observations of over 60 employees in different organizations.Findings – It is found that the ability of a digital social network to create immediate system‐wide so...

Scholarly communication: a study of Israeli academic researchers

Reports results of a 1994-1995 questionnaire survey of faculty members in two Israeli universities, to discover whether changes in scholarly communication have occurred in the wake of technological changes that have added new media and tools and altered the structure and composition of library collections; 477 questionnaires were returned out of 2361. Research focused on three components of the information gathering process: the researcher’s needs and approaches, channels of access to information, and information sources. Five basic approaches to information and eight information channels were defined. Concludes that, despite extensive changes in higher education, institutions and libraries that have occurred during the previous 45 years since the interest in information gathering behaviour began, patterns for obtaining information remain conservative and have resisted transformation. Professional periodicals are still the most important tools for obtaining professional information and monographs still play a major role.

Users, end‐users, and end‐user searchers of online information: a historical overview

Discusses the changing relationships between information professionals – vendors, database producers, searchers – and end‐users, during the last three decades. Most of the time, the industry was quite vague as to who exactly the end‐users were, and consequently several different definitions were used to describe the target audience of online information systems. The needs and capabilities of the end‐user were measured conveniently through the reactions of libraries’ and information centres’ personnel who were not always the most suitable sources. The concept of the “end‐user” is examined from the beginning of the online industry in the 1970s through the menu driven systems of the 1980s and the role of the compact disk in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

A generic framework for collaborative multi‐perspective ontology acquisition

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to develop a general framework that incorporates collaborative social tagging with a novel ontology scheme conveying multiple perspectives.Design/methodology/approach – This paper proposes a framework where multiple users tag the same object (an image in this case) and an ontology is extended based on these tags while being tolerant of different points of view. Both the tagging and the ontological models are intentionally designed to suit the multi‐perspective environment. The paper develops a method based on a set of rules that determine how to associate new concepts to predefined perspectives (in addition to determining relations to topics or other concepts as typically done in previous research) and how to insert and maintain multiple perspectives.Findings – This case study experiment, with a set of selected annotated images, indicates the soundness of the proposed ontological model.Originality/value – The proposed framework characterises the underlying processes ...

Tag‐based retrieval of images through different interfaces: a user study

Purpose – The purpose of this study was to compare the ease of use and the effectiveness of several interfaces for retrieving tagged images.Design/methodology/approach – A number of participants were randomly assigned to one of four retrieval interfaces: tag search in a search box; faceted tag search in a search box; selecting terms from the tag cloud of all the tags in the database; and selecting concepts from an ontology created from the tags assigned to the images. Each interface was tested by 21 users.Findings – The results show that the highest recall on average was achieved by users of the ontology interface, for seven out of the ten tasks, however, users were more satisfied with the textbox‐based search than the cloud or the ontology.Research limitations/implications – The experiment was rather specific, and more studies are needed in order to generalize the findings.Originality/value – With the widespread use of tagging on the web it is of importance to examine whether tagging enables resource dis...

Israeli college interlibrary loan practices: implications for Israeli universities

The recent establishment of academic colleges in Israel not only has affected the make‐up of Israeli higher education, it also has affected university libraries, particularly the interlibrary loan (ILL) departments. This article describes a study that characterised the ILL borrowing practices of Israeli college libraries in general and, in particular, those of libraries that send the majority of their requests to universities. It also identified the disciplines of college library ILL requests and determined that there is a connection to the disciplines prevalent in their own collections. In addition, it identified the Israeli university libraries that received increased requests between 1997 and 2001, assessed the effects on them and identified changes implemented in interlibrary loan departments in order to deal with the increased demand.