Research Students Group

Autumn Term

Thursday 18th November
Batlang Comma Serema: "Information Infrastructure for Public Policy Making in Botswana"

The need for a well-placed structure and synthesised information accessible across all government sectors for the purpose of evaluating alternatives as policies are formulated cannot be overstated. This study posits that if governments are to make meaningful policy decisions it is important that they put in place a well thought-out and correctly used information infrastructure. It is hypothesised that the absence of a well placed information infrastructure accessible to information providers undermines policy making in Botswana. The study looks at information flows in the ministries by identifying and assessing information sources for policy makers. It also investigates the information use process within government ministries during policy formulation. The idea is to be able to challenge theories of policy making by studying what takes place in Botswana and then comparing it to the existing theories to generate new information.

Back to top

Thursday 16th December:
Lucy Gildersleeves"Pre-school Organisations and Public Libraries: are we talking the same language?":

Background to research: my interest in exploring how successfully libraries support pre-school organisations in the UK was prompted by:

• my own experiences as a public children’s librarian involved in delivery of such services;
• my experiences as a public library manager constrained in resources demanded by these services;
• the changing understanding of pre-school literacy development;
• the political agendas for early years education.

Original aims and planned outcomes of research:

• Present a review of investigations conducted by library services into their support for pre-school providers as a national picture of available research, and draw out any relevancy for this research.
• Investigate nature and levels of support and provision by public and educational library services, at national range (UK).
• Investigate nature and levels of take-up by pre-school organisations of this support and provision, within selected sample areas.
• Investigate the nature and sources of book/book-related resources used by pre-school organisations, library-provided and otherwise, within the sample areas.
• Examine the potential impact on service provision to pre-school organisations of Nursery Voucher and Early Years Education policies.
• Explore the nature of resource needs and preferences of pre-school organisations.
• Provide a database of research conducted by libraries, with contacts, in order to enable wider access to research in this field (largely done internally by libraries and not published)

Methodology: research involved a combination of literature-based study on background context and policy, questionnaire-based investigation of practice and direct interviews and observations. The findings of these areas are now being compared.

Today’s focus: some findings arising from the comparison of two of the questionnaire sets - the results of a national survey of public libraries and educational support libraries and the results of a survey of members of the Pre-school Learning Alliance in England and Wales. The findings from a number of interviews with library management and observational visits to pre-school settings are included here.

Key areas:

Impact on the original research aims and planned outcomes:

The aims remain the same. Planned outcomes have been extended in the light of findings, to include:

• creation of a resource bank of good practice ideas for use in pre-schools, which might be provided or supported by libraries
• draft guidelines for book resource management for early years settings - with a view to having these published (ideally as LA guidelines)

Spring (Lent) Term 2000

Thursday 10th February:
Diana Dixon - " The Problems of Finding Out and Using English Provincial Newspapers"

This paper looks at the problems that readers face when they try to locate and use English provincial newspapers in libraries.

Theoretically, legal deposit should guarantee that copies of all English provincial newspapers are deposited in the British Library Newspaper Library at Colindale. Its catalogue should be a complete record of all newspapers published in Britain. Unfortunately, this is far from the truth. The printed version of the catalogue is now 25 years old and although there is an up-dated catalogue at Colindale (available on-line at the British Library), users need to visit London to find out titles are held at Colindale.

The reality is that even for current newspapers, holdings at Colindale are not complete. A recent survey showed that a number of free newspapers never reach the British Library or local public libraries. The newspaper library holds newspapers from the eighteenth century but for many titles the files are incomplete. The problem was made worse by the serious damage to the collection by bombing in the second World War.

An ambitious project, the Bibliography of British Newspapers, was started in 1975 but so far only seven volumes have appeared. Older regional bibliographies and catalogues of local studies collections often list newspapers that can no longer be traced. Newspapers were intended to be ephemeral and were printed on poor quality paper, especially from 1860 onwards. The result is that many have crumbled away and are unusable. The NEWSPLAN project was initiated by the British Library to audit the physical state of British provincial newspapers and establish priorities for microfilming them. As a result ten reports were published between 1984 and 1996 and regional implementation committees were established. The success of the project resulted in the recent £5 million award by the Heritage Lottery Fund to microfilm the titles most at risk.

The ten NEWSPLAN reports act as an interim bibliography and finding list for newspapers. However, information in the earlier ones is now out of date and most regions are actively involved in up-dating the information. Often the news is good, with new titles being discovered and many more titles being made available as a result of co-operative microfilming. It is hoped that all the reports will be available on the Internet and some already are.

With older newspapers, readers are daunted by the large number of files or reels of film, but they require speedy access to the contents of newspapers. Although many older newspapers have been indexed, at least in part, there is no reliable and currently available listing of indexed English provincial newspapers at present. With the co-operation of the local NEWSPLAN committees it is hoped that this project will produce such a listing.

There is also the problem that even when indexes exist, they may be poorly compiled and inconsistent. There is a real need for some guidelines to assist librarians charged with responsibility for indexing local newspapers.

Back to top

Thursday 17th March:
Jennifer Hogarth - " E-MIN: A Migration Information Network for Europe"

E-MIN (European Migration Information Network) is a Web-based project designed to provide "one-stop-shopping" for information on human migration in Europe. It is intended that it will eventually present a fully integrated system of statistical, documentary and directory resources.
The project is based in the Migration Research Unit (MRU) of the Department of Geography at UCL and is the direct result of the recommendations contained in a feasibility study carried out in 1995/1996 for the European Commission. The purpose of the study was to determine whether there was a need for a European Migration Observatory. Three research teams were involved, from the United Kingdom (the project was co-ordinated and directed by the MRU), The Netherlands, and France. The study examined the existing information networks used by policy makers within the European Union together with those of a range of other groups and individuals and sought to identify gaps in their information provision. These gaps were usually caused by problems in locating and/or accessing relevant information due to the sheer volume and complexity of the subject and the lack of resources to digest and evaluate what was available.

One of the major gaps identified was that of timely, reliable and harmonised statistics. The first two stages of implementation of the E-MIN are intended to ameliorate this situation, working in close collaboration with the Odysseus legal network based in the Université Libre de Bruxelles. The EMO study identified another important gap. Although documentation systems (mostly automated) catering for human migration studies exist in most of the major political, social and research institutions of Europe, there is very little collaboration or networking between them. Nor are there as yet standardised cataloguing and indexing systems. Standards on migration vocabulary and definitions for data recording and resource discovery have not been set up, although they have been proposed. At the time of the EMO study attempts at networking some documentation centres within the field of human migration were beginning. Later this year I propose to carry out a scoping study to assess any developments in the second half of the 1990s which might have prepared the documentation centres for participation in the E-MIN system. I will also look at ways of facilitating participation as part of the third stage of implementation of the E-MIN, bearing in mind that success depends largely on co-operation.

Back to top

Summer Term

Thursday 4th May:
Peter Gillman - "Internet Search Engines: How They (Don't) Help the Searcher"

The vast majority of searching done today is by untrained individuals, unsupported by information professionals. This is true whether they are searching the Web, the resources of a large and complex office automation system, or their own local files and databases.
Untrained searchers are largely unaware of the complications of keyword searching; the different means by which resources are indexed; and the methods of operation of indexing and searching systems.

The 'help' facilitates that the major Internet search engines give to users is, broadly, very limited. Where there are sophisticated options such as Boolean operators, these are hard to find and often explained in ways which are not helpful. The effects of implicit Boolean searching (for instance that a space between two keywords is taken as AND) is not often explained. Searchers must work out for themselves whether searches should be refined, and how. The use of synonyms is rarely mentioned. A simple keyword search on one of the principal search engines may generate well over 100,000 hits, yet yield almost nothing relevant to the searcher.

All of this calls in to question the classic definitions of relevance and recall. It also requires that we question the commercial pressures on the search engines that lead to this situation.

This paper will explore the issues above, with examples of the help (or lack of it) provided to searchers, and an analysis of how and why this situation has arisen.

Back to top

Thursday 15th June:
Vanda Broughton - "How Notations Convey Intellectual Content"

The ways in which notation can be used to express the content of documents to which it relates are various. At the most superficial level notation can correspond to the hierarchical structure of the schedules or link to literal components. The notation of compound concepts can express the structure and composition of the compound, and systems exist in which symbols denote the functional roles of the constituent elements and the relationships between them. At the highest level notation can be used to mirror the actual structure of those entities which it represents, as in the case of mathematical systems or chemical compounds. Methods of displaying these structures are examined, with particular reference to recent revision work on the chemistry class of the Bliss Bibliographic Classification 2nd edition.

Back to top

You may also view a list of past seminars.

Page created by Jennifer Hogarth
Last modified on 13 June 2000.

Return to the RSG lead page...
Return to the SLAIS Home Page...