Search results

The variable applications of information technology (IT) have brought with it remarkable changes in the total setting of the information professionals' (IPs') preparation programs around the world. In Oman, several considerations have been taken into account as they are related to the information profession and professionals, including the establishment of the Department of Library and Information Science (DLIS), the Omani Librarianship Association (OLA), Learning Recourse Centers, and the Omani e‐Government Project. It is, then, the aim of this paper to investigate such developments and to explore the Omani IPs' perspectives toward a list of competencies that they are effectively participating in and agreed with for managing their information institutions, resources, services, and others related to their attitudes toward the use of technology and their professional personality.

To investigate the Omani IPs' perspectives toward the set of competencies, a questionnaire was developed based on the predefined competencies for IP. The list and definitions of the competencies were prepared by the Special Committee on Competencies for Special Librarians for the Special Libraries Association Board of Directors in 2003.

The results show that Omani IPs are generally carrying positive perspectives toward the list of different groups of competencies for common satisfaction of their users. Yet, their prominence perspectives center on technical skills, general awareness of technology, and current awareness competencies, but are less concentrated on and agreed with competencies related to new tools and techniques of management such as evidence‐based librarianship, negotiation, consultation, association networks, and satisfaction measurement.

The paper provides an inclusive view of the Omani IPs' perspectives toward the predefined list of competences and recommends that the DLIS and the OLA and the parent organizations should cooperate together to develop a kind of “job approach” preparation and training approach so that a new picture of the Omani IPs as being effective partners in their workplace will be achieved.

The role of medical and health organizations within their communities has been altered to include knowledge services as a basic issue facing the current era of complexities as related to health. Knowledge transfer (KT) can provide the right vehicle for transferring the needed knowledge through different means suitable to each group of receivers, including patients. This study aims to identify the management of activities that help in facilitating KT (the environment), the groups or individuals with when the respondents are communicating, the frequency and type of communications that respondents share with others, the effective forms of communications they use, and the knowledge and learning instruments which are used to transfer and share knowledge.

The study focuses on how health organizations in the Sultanate of Oman view their corporate knowledge and utilize it to improve practices and subsequently reinforce quality standards, while sustaining the image of learning organizations. Based on that, the study attempts to gain a comprehensive picture of the process of KT to show how physicians at two hospitals look at the knowledge of its participants and to discover how participants are willing to share, transfer and receive knowledge.

The results indicate that junior physicians suffered from work overload and senior ones had negative attitudes and were unwilling to share knowledge. In addition, social activities at both places were not strong enough to encourage the communication process among physicians to share insights and reduce medical errors.

The paper provides a comprehensive overview of the process of KT in two hospitals.

As the internet has become the biggest virtual library of digital libraries and publishers have become the e‐agents of online knowledge, large integrated online databases have been developed. On the other hand, most libraries put their library systems on their parent organizations' server to facilitate direct use by end‐users of the sytem to which libraries subscribe. With such a transformation, information services such as the SDI have been changed, becoming e‐type services using e‐mail to inform readers and databases' indexes when matching users' interests as reflected by searching subjects. Moreover, users themselves find from these e‐sources, specifically e‐journals, the most important, up‐to‐date sources of information where they can browse and retrieve the contents from their desktop connection through the organization's servers. The current study aims to explore the following: how far do researchers at Sultan Qaboos University (SQU) use e‐journals and databases available at the University libraries? The paper also seeks to explore whether researchers are knowledgeable about these services and choose to use them.

To determine the respondents' experience with the main e‐journals features as related to alert services and whether or not they are using them, as well as the level of their usage, a questionnaire was adopted from the Stanford E‐Journal User Survey and modified to fit the purposes of the research. The questionnaire was then distributed to 100 SQU faculty members who were relatively familiar with electronic journals and the alert services available through the databases to which SQU libraries subscribed and its system on the local area network.

The results indicate that 50 percent of researchers depend on the University libraries' subscriptions, while only 19 researchers subscribe personally to e‐journals related to their field for free access to full‐text articles published in these journals. According to those who have not yet subscribed to new e‐journal functions (basically an alerting service), they would rather use general purpose search engines such as Google and Yahoo! This group of respondents suffers from numerous, irrelevant, and uninteresting results.

The study provides a comprehensive overview of researchers' perspectives towards the use of e‐journals and e‐services provided by Sultan Qaboos University.