Coagmento

The author describes Coagmento, a system that provides integrated tools and workflow for doing collaborative information seeking in online environment. Coagmento’s inception followed a need to provide essential tools to collaborators without them having to learn an entirely new system or work in an unfamiliar environment. Here they describe how the author designed, developed, and deployed Coagmento. The design of this system was facilitated using several pilot runs and cognitive walkthroughs. A fully functional version of Coagmento was then developed and evaluated using laboratory study, and its design optimized using participatory design sessions. Finally, the author describes how they made the enhanced version of Coagmento available to wider group of users, along with issues and challenges faced. They summarize lessons learned and provide a guideline for designing and developing such collaborative information seeking systems.

Academic Libraries as Complex Systems

The purpose of this chapter is to describe how the concepts and principles from the Systems Approach may be helpful in understanding and modeling the collaborative group cognitive processes in information handling in an academic library. In order to address complexity and dynamics, this chapter analyzes several theoretical positions, which together may help us to shape the academic library from a comprehensive and systemic point of view (such as Systems Approach, Communities of Practice, Activity Theory and the Viable System Model). This chapter suggests focalizing on the activity (performed by a community) as the basic unit of analysis in studying the complexity of academic libraries. This activity is what allows the transmission of tacit and explicit knowledge and the skills from an expert to a novice. Other elements in the activity are objectives, rules and regulations, and importantly the learning processes that occur dialectically between subjects and community. A model such as Beer´s in the way the authors presented it in this chapter fits well to decompose reality and synthesize it to analyze the proposed complexity. This may allow facing organizational problems by focusing in the way people act to transform the inputs into products and add value to them by teaching and learning.

Management Systems of User Interfaces Functionalities in Latin

Taking into account the fundamental role of online public access catalogs in the dissemination of scientific and technical information, it was considered relevant to look into the situation of user interfaces of OPACs Web of university, special, public and national libraries in Latin America. A quantitative methodology has been adopted and a checklist of system functions (Hildreth, 1982) updated was used as data collection tool. A sample of 846 OPACs was obtained from predefined search queries and classified according to type of software, type of library and country. A subset of 374 units was selected of those whose system presented a frequency of appearance = 10. The percentage of presence of functionalities in each area was calculated and functionalities were compared according to type of software by test of independence. It was then possible to typify the interfaces of the analyzed OPACs according to the selected types of software and in relation to their category.

Review and Brief History of Collaborative Systems

E-collaboration and collaborative systems bring geographically dispersed teams together, supporting communication, coordination and cooperation. From the scientific perspective, the development of theories and mechanisms to enable building collaborative systems presents exciting research challenges across information subfields. From the applications perspective, the capability to collaborate with users and other systems is essential if large-scale information systems of the future are to assist users in finding the information they need and solving the problems they have. This chapter presents a review of research in the area of creating collaborative applications and taxonomies. The author analyzes previous literature, and examines some practice cases and research prototypes in the domain of collaborative computing. Finally the chapter provides a list of basic collaboration services, and tools are presented relating to the services they provide. All surveyed tools are then classified under categories of functional services. In conclusion, the chapter highlights a number of areas for consideration and improvement that arise when studying collaborative applications.

Adaptive Information Retrieval Based on Task Context

This chapter discusses using context in Information Retrieval systems and Intelligent Assistant Agents in order to improve the performance of these systems. The notion of context is introduced and the state of the art in Contextual Information Retrieval is presented which illustrates various categories of contexts that can be taken into account when solving user queries. In this framework, the authors focus on the issue of task-based context which takes into account the current activity the user is involved in when he puts a query. Finally they introduce promising research directions that promote the use of Intelligent Assistant Agents capable of symbolic reasoning about users’ tasks for supporting the query process.

What is Information?

This chapter uses the concept of system to enquire into the concept of information, trying to separate the different senses in which this core concept is used in Information Science and other sciences, that is, physical or “raw” information, messages, knowledge, news, documentation and meta-information. The concept of information is studied as a system of layers or levels, in which each new sense emerges from the previous one. Once each of these senses is clearly established, it is possible to provide more specific insights about the real scientific domain of Information Science: a science related to the design and maintenance of external social memories and the process of referring their contents to relevant personal and social activities. Its focus is, therefore, the optimization of the processes of social memory. So, in conclusion, Information Science is, first, a science of social memory and its use, and, even more specifically, of the methodologies and technologies (social or technical) that exist to optimize its functioning by means of external memories, references (metadata) and systems of metadata (ontologies).

Vertical Integration of Science

In this chapter, there is an attempt to consider an organization of knowledge regarding a vertical integration of science, which is focused as a systems unity of greater complexity then what has been considered before. An ascending or descending vertical integration of science might be to interpret questions posed by human in general and information scientist in particular. It could provide answers that they are looking for. All aspects of the global information could have a widest sense, appear to be treated, and the problems need to be freshly addend as required solutions. This vertical integration of science is considered here from the vision of the systems science theories. A study of this integration, with all its complexity could provide important solutions for an adequate organization of knowledge.

Metadata for Information Retrieval in Archives

This chapter is an attempt to analyse which technological elements and which description and indexing elements directly impact information retrieval of documents. As a result of the analysis, some requirements are proposed that must be observed in archival information systems installed in organisations with the aim of optimising effective information retrieval.

The Complexity of Finding Information in Collaborative Information Systems

This chapter reflects objective and subjective principles to organize and disseminate information. It presents the human condition in the dynamic of searching and using information by making explicit the informational need of the user with learning theories, information organization, and user studies as subsidies. This is done in order to increase the development of cognitive trajectories to search, select, and use information, bearing in mind the permanent process of modifiability to face new environments. Finally, the text focuses on the social and economic development promoted by the science and technology advances, pointing out the social gap that has emerged from this reality.

Informationism, Information and Its Neuronal Theories

In this chapter an epistemology, based in the information, as the paradigm, that rules our lives, is stated - Informationism -. Information, or perhaps the message, reaches the brain as tiny impulses - quanta or useful information -, hitting and activating the neurones; as a consequence becoming quanta of useful information which produce knowledge, science and wisdom. Some definitions of information are quoted, as well as its connotations and peculiarities. The physical, psychic and pragmatic, etc. connotations of information are studied, including its energetic aspect; within a Cosmovision of it. Some neuronal theories are also studied.