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The research in the field of Indigenous peoples and the espousal of their cultural values in the work environment is recognised as being important as a means of overcoming workplace inequities. The purpose of this paper is to examine research about Maori, the Indigenous people of Aotearoa New Zealand that may inform future enterprises for the long-term prosperity of marginalised Indigenous peoples.

This study reviews the literature on unique cultural dynamics of whanau Maori (New Zealand Maori family/community) study practices and the importance of work/home/life balance. Furthermore, it considers strengths-based community enterprises that can lead to sustainable prosperity for Maori.

The review yielded three theoretical principles that explain mana (sociocultural and psychological well-being), which can be generalised across multiple contexts, with the workplace being one of these contexts. These principles of mana create a contextual match with whanau external realities; an experiential match of a mana empowerment framework that transfers to the study context and an interpersonal understanding of being understood and empowered within the study context.

The literature review has been limited to research from 2005 onwards and to research that investigates Maori, the Indigenous peoples of Aotearoa New Zealand. Although the review of the literature has these limitations, the review may be of interest to other studies of Indigenous peoples worldwide.

The key factors are interwoven, and their importance is considered in relation to the development of positive and supportive environments, which link to job retention, satisfaction and productivity in the workplace for Maori. This, in turn, can have beneficial knock-on effects for not only the New Zealand economy but also more importantly for enhancing sustainable livelihoods for upcoming generations.

Tied together, these factors are paramount for cultural, social and ecological benefits for nga rangatahi (young Maori adults) and the wider community in the workplace.

The literature review’s value and originality derive from a dearth of recent research on supporting nga rangatahi (young Maori adults) for sustainable prosperity.

A substantial number of models have been developed over the years, with the purpose of describing the information seeking and searching of people in various user groups and contexts. Several models have been frequently applied in user studies, but are rarely included in research on participants with impairments. Models are purposeful when developing theories. Consequently, it might be valuable to apply models when studying this user group, as well. The purpose of this study was to explore whether existing models are applicable in describing the online information seeking and searching of users with impairments, with an overall aim to increase the use of models in studies involving impairments.

Six models were selected according to the following criteria: the model should address information seeking or searching, include the interaction between users and systems whilst incorporating assistive technology. Two user groups were selected from each of the categories: cognitive, sensory and motor impairments, namely dyslexia, autism, blindness, deafness, paralysation and Parkinson's. The models were then analysed based on known barriers reported for these cohorts.

All the selected models had potential to be applied in user studies involving impairments. While three of the models had the highest potential to be used in the current form, the other three models were applicable either through minor revisions or by combining models.

This study contributes with a new perspective on the use of models in information seeking and searching research on users with impairments.

The purpose of this paper is to examine financial management in the Pre‐Reformation church in Aberdeen, Scotland during the bishopric of Bishop William Elphinstone (1488‐1514).

The paper employs a combination of literature‐based analysis, archival research and the use of biographies in order to examine aspects of financial management within the Pre‐Reformation church in Aberdeen, Scotland.

There is evidence that accounting for assets and income was mobilised in order to achieve social aims. Recording mechanisms give visibility to the church's remuneration and governance strategy. Together, these examples show that there was no evidence of a sacred/secular divide in this context.

Archives may be incomplete but can give insight into financial management in historical context and aspects of the sacred/secular divide.

This paper aids understanding of visibility and governance possibilities afforded by accounting that has been mobilised in an historic setting in order to achieve social aims.

An issue that tends to be ignored in information retrieval is the issue of updating inverted files. This is largely because inverted files were devised to provide fast query service, and much work has been done with the emphasis strongly on queries. This paper aims to study the effect of using parallel methods for the update of inverted files in order to reduce costs, by looking at two types of partitioning for inverted files: document identifier and term identifier.

Raw update service and update with query service are studied with these partitioning schemes using an incremental update strategy. The paper uses standard measures used in parallel computing such as speedup to examine the computing results and also the costs of reorganising indexes while servicing transactions.

Empirical results show that for both transaction processing and index reorganisation the document identifier method is superior. However, there is evidence that the term identifier partitioning method could be useful in a concurrent transaction processing context.

There is an increasing need to service updates, which is now becoming a requirement of inverted files (for dynamic collections such as the web), demonstrating that a shift in requirements of inverted file maintenance is needed from the past.

The paper is of value to database administrators who manage large‐scale and dynamic text collections, and who need to use parallel computing to implement their text retrieval services.

In this paper methods for both speeding up passage processing and examining more passages using parallel computers are explored. The number of passages processed are varied in order to examine the effect on retrieval effectiveness and efficiency. The particular algorithm applied has previously been used to good effect in Okapi experiments at TREC. This algorithm and the mechanism for applying parallel computing to speed up processing are described.

The generation of inverted indexes is one of the most computationally intensive activities for information retrieval systems: indexing large multi‐gigabyte text databases can take many hours or even days to complete. We examine the generation of partitioned inverted files in order to speed up the process of indexing. Two types of index partitions are investigated: TermId and DocId.

We use standard measures used in parallel computing such as speedup and efficiency to examine the computing results and also the space costs of our trial indexing experiments.

The results from runs on both partitioning methods are compared and contrasted, concluding that DocId is the more efficient method.

The practical implications are that the DocId partitioning method would in most circumstances be used for distributing inverted file data in a parallel computer, particularly if indexing speed is the primary consideration.

The paper is of value to database administrators who manage large‐scale text collections, and who need to use parallel computing to implement their text retrieval services.

The term selection problem for selecting query terms in information filtering and routing has been investigated using hill‐climbers of various kinds, largely through the Okapi experiments in the TREC series of conferences. Although these are simple deterministic approaches, which examine the effect of changing the weight of one term at a time, they have been shown to improve the retrieval effectiveness of filtering queries in these TREC experiments. Hill‐climbers are, however, likely to get trapped in local optima, and the use of more sophisticated local search techniques for this problem that attempt to break out of these optima are worth investigating. To this end, this paper aims to apply a genetic algorithm (GA) to the same problem.

A standard TREC test collection is used from the TREC‐8 filtering track, recording mean average precision and recall measures to allow comparison between the hill‐climber and GAs. It also varies elements of the GA, such as probability of a word being included, probability of mutation and population size in order to measure the effect of these variables. Different strategies such as elitist and non‐elitist methods are used, as well as roulette wheel and rank selection GAs.

The results of tests suggest that both techniques are, on average, better than the baseline, but, the implemented GA does not match the overall performance of a hill‐climber. The Rank selection algorithm does better on average than the Roulette Wheel algorithm. There is no evidence in this study that varying word inclusion probability, mutation probability or Elitist method make much difference to the overall results. Small population sizes do not appear to be as effective as larger population sizes.

The evidence provided here would suggest that being stuck in a local optima for the term selection optimization problem does not appear to be detrimental to the overall success of the hill‐climber. The evidence from term rank order would appear to provide extra useful evidence, which hill climbers can use efficiently, and effectively, to narrow the search space.

The paper represents the first attempt to compare hill‐climbers with GAs on a problem of this type.

The progress of parallel computing in Information Retrieval (IR) is reviewed. In particular we stress the importance of the motivation in using parallel computing for text retrieval. We analyse parallel IR systems using a classification defined by Rasmussen and describe some parallel IR systems. We give a description of the retrieval models used in parallel information processing. We describe areas of research which we believe are needed.

The purpose of this paper is to resolve a gap in the knowledge of how people with dyslexia interact with information retrieval (IR) systems, specifically an understanding of their information‐searching behaviour.

The dyslexia cognitive profile is used to design a logging system, recording the difference between two sets of participants: dyslexic and control users. A standard Okapi interface is used – together with two standard TREC topics – in order to record the information searching behaviour of these users.

Using the log data, the differences in information‐searching behaviour of control and dyslexic users, i.e. in the way the two groups interact with Okapi, are established and it also established that qualitative information collected (such as experience etc.) may not be able to account for these differences. Evidence from query variables was unable to distinguish between groups, but differences on topic for the same variables were recorded. Users who view more documents tended to judge more documents as being relevant, in terms of either the user group or topic. Session data indicated that there may be an important difference between the number of iterations used in a search between the user groups, as there may be little effect from the topic on this variable.

This is the first study of the effect of dyslexia on information search behaviour, and it provides some evidence to take the field forward.

Reports on and analyses the attitudes towards standards in higher education of a random sample of senior managers, senior administrators and senior academics in a range of different types of higher education institutions. In order to construct an analytical framework for the empirical research, there is a synthesis of the current debate on standards. The research data were collected in two phases; first, by means of 21 in‐depth interviews in seven higher education institutions and, second, through the questionnaire responses of a larger number of senior staff in a greater number of institutions. Generally, the research results indicate that senior academics are more concerned about falling standards than their senior manager and senior administrator colleagues. This concern over standards appears to be more pronounced in older universities.