Search results

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the importance of diversity management initiatives using three good practice examples from employers operating in the manufacturing, IT and charity sectors in the UK.

Using IBM, Jaguar Land Rover and Scope as case studies, the paper follows the introduction and maintenance of diversity policies based on internal research and market developments.

Corporations without well thought‐out diversity policies tend to miss out on recruiting top talent as well as running the risk of a backlash among job seekers. Making diversity part of corporate culture requires buy‐in from senior management all the way through the organization and must be reflected in all facets of business dealings.

The paper presents the key drivers behind these initiatives, how they have been implemented and what measures are used to assess impact, and highlights what other organizations can learn from this.

This paper sets out to discuss the use of information extraction (IE), a natural language‐processing (NLP) technique to assist “rich” semantic indexing of diverse archaeological text resources. The focus of the research is to direct a semantic‐aware “rich” indexing of diverse natural language resources with properties capable of satisfying information retrieval from online publications and datasets associated with the Semantic Technologies for Archaeological Resources (STAR) project.

The paper proposes use of the English Heritage extension (CRM‐EH) of the standard core ontology in cultural heritage, CIDOC CRM, and exploitation of domain thesauri resources for driving and enhancing an Ontology‐Oriented Information Extraction process. The process of semantic indexing is based on a rule‐based Information Extraction technique, which is facilitated by the General Architecture of Text Engineering (GATE) toolkit and expressed by Java Annotation Pattern Engine (JAPE) rules.

Initial results suggest that the combination of information extraction with knowledge resources and standard conceptual models is capable of supporting semantic‐aware term indexing. Additional efforts are required for further exploitation of the technique and adoption of formal evaluation methods for assessing the performance of the method in measurable terms.

The value of the paper lies in the semantic indexing of 535 unpublished online documents often referred to as “Grey Literature”, from the Archaeological Data Service OASIS corpus (Online AccesS to the Index of archaeological investigationS), with respect to the CRM ontological concepts E49.Time Appellation and P19.Physical Object.

This paper puts forward a MARC-based semiautomated approach to extracting semantically rich subject facets from general and/or specialized controlled vocabularies for display in topic-oriented faceted catalog interfaces in a way that would better support users' exploratory search tasks.

Hierarchical faceted subject metadata is extracted from general and/or specialized controlled vocabularies by using standard client/server communication protocols. Rigorous facet analysis, classification and linguistic principles are applied on top of that to ensure faceting accuracy and consistency.

A shallow application of facet analysis and classification, together with poorly organized displays, is one of the major barriers to effective faceted navigation in library, archive and museum catalogs.

This paper does not deal with Web-scale discovery services.

This paper offers suggestions that can be used by the technical services departments of libraries, archives and museums in designing and developing more powerful exploratory search interfaces.

This paper addresses the problem of deriving clearly delineated topical facets from existing metadata for display in a user-friendly, high-level topical overview that is meant to encourage a multidimensional exploration of local collections as well as “learning by browsing.”

Personal readers’ histories have long had a respected place in reading research. They add a human, personalized dimension to the studies of reading practices, often reported through aggregate findings and generalized conclusions. Moreover, they introduce a private context of readers’ lives, which complements other reading contexts (e.g. historical, socio-economic and cultural) required for an understanding of reading behaviours. The purpose of this paper, based on a selected data set from a larger reading study, is to introduce a gallery of portraits of immigrant readers with the aim to facilitate the library practice with immigrant communities.

Qualitative face-to-face intensive interviews with immigrant readers.

The knowledge of reading contexts and the opportunity to see readers as individuals rather than anonymous statistics are crucial for librarians who come in contact with multicultural populations. Personal histories can also serve as a step in building interpersonal relationships between librarians and community members.

The value of the study is in introducing a methodological approach which, through collecting and writing reading histories, allows librarians to gain insight into the cultural practices of multicultural communities and to adjust their work accordingly. This approach can also be used as a prototype for researching other community groups.

The purpose of this paper is to provide evidence for the motivations of SMEs for introducing the Living Wage (LW), focussing on retail as one specific sector. It develops understanding of the strategic benefits and challenges these employers face in balancing financial, ethical and social considerations in small businesses.

The study employed mixed methods: a survey and semi-structured interviews. The interviews are presented as part of three case studies.

Findings indicate that employers were, for the most part, motivated by personal ethics and beliefs about fair wages and social justice. They suggest that SME accrue benefits from LW accreditation such as reputational benefits and higher employee morale, but that there are also potential pitfalls of LW adoption related to pay structure and incentives. The sustainability of the LW emerged as an issue in terms of the long-term strategy and brand positioning of the companies involved.

The nature of the research was exploratory and thus the study only allows for limited generalisation. Recommended avenues for further research include gathering data from different levels of organisations and from different stakeholders.

This is the first paper to investigate the drivers for, and implementation of, the LW in SMEs. The specific characteristics of SMEs – their ethos, low visibility, reliance on trusting relationships and limited resources, among others – make the study of why and how they choose to implement the LW very interesting. This study is the first to gather and analyse data from SME retailers and wholesalers that have implemented the LW.

SINCE we wrote last the African victories have changed the atmosphere in a remarkable way. Lately pessimism had been absent and a calm confidence existed but now there is a sense of expectation. But we have been warned that the really tough conflict is still before us. However that may be, there is scarcely a library where the externals of the conflict are not reflected in the eyes and words of our readers, even affecting to an extent their reading. It must, of course, be so because it is a commonplace that books are good or bad in our estimation in accord with the mood in which we read.

This study aims to collect distributed knowledge organization systems (KOSs) from various domains, enrich each with meta information and link them to the multilingual KOS registry, facilitating integrated search alongside KOSs from various languages and regions.

This research involved collecting and organizing KOS information through three primary steps. The initial phase involved finding KOSs from Web search results, supplemented by the Korea ON-line E-Procurement System (KONEPS) and the National R&D Integrated Notification Service. After obtaining these KOSs, they were enriched by structuring contextual meta information using Basic Register of Thesauri, Ontologies and Classification (BARTOC) metadata elements and established dedicated media wiki pages for each. Finally, the KOSs were linked to the multilingual KOS registry, BARTOC, ensuring seamless integration with KOSs from various languages and regions and creating connections between each registry entry and its associated KOS wiki page.

The research findings revealed several insights, as follows: (1) importance of a stable source for collecting KOS: no national body currently oversees KOS registration, underscoring the need for a systematic approach to collect dispersed KOSs. For Korean KOSs (K-KOSs), KONEPS and National R&D Integrated Notification Service are effective data sources. (2) Importance of enhanced metadata: merely collecting KOSs were not enough. Enhanced metadata bridges access gaps and dedicated wiki pages aid user identification and understanding. (3) Observations from multilingual registry uploads: When adding KOSs to a multilingual registry, similarities were observed across languages and regions. Recognizing this, the K-KOSs were linked with their international counterparts, fostering potential global collaboration.

Due to the absence of a dedicated KOS registry agency, the study might have missed KOSs from certain fields or potentially over-collected from others. Furthermore, this study primarily focused on K-KOSs and their integration into the BARTOC registry, which might influence the methods and perspectives on collecting and establishing links among analogous KOSs in the registry.

This research pursued a stable method to detect KOS development and revisions across various fields. To facilitate this, we used the integrated e-procurement and R&D notification system and added meta information to aid in the identification and understanding of KOSs, which includes media wiki pages. Furthermore, link information was provided between the BARTOC registry and the Korean KOS websites and media wiki pages.

The following is an annotated list of materials dealing with information literacy including instruction in the use of information resources, research, and computer skills related to retrieving, using, and evaluating information. This review, the eighteenth to be published in Reference Services Review, includes items in English published in 1991. A few are not annotated because the compiler could not obtain copies of them for this review.

The Integrative Levels Classification (ILC) is a comprehensive “freely faceted” knowledge organization system not previously expressed as SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization System). This paper reports and reflects on work converting the ILC to SKOS representation.

The design of the ILC representation and the various steps in the conversion to SKOS are described and located within the context of previous work considering the representation of complex classification schemes in SKOS. Various issues and trade-offs emerging from the conversion are discussed. The conversion implementation employed the STELETO transformation tool.

The ILC conversion captures some of the ILC facet structure by a limited extension beyond the SKOS standard. SPARQL examples illustrate how this extension could be used to create faceted, compound descriptors when indexing or cataloguing. Basic query patterns are provided that might underpin search systems. Possible routes for reducing complexity are discussed.

Complex classification schemes, such as the ILC, have features which are not straight forward to represent in SKOS and which extend beyond the functionality of the SKOS standard. The ILC's facet indicators are modelled as rdf:Property sub-hierarchies that accompany the SKOS RDF statements. The ILC's top-level fundamental facet relationships are modelled by extensions of the associative relationship – specialised sub-properties of skos:related. An approach for representing faceted compound descriptions in ILC and other faceted classification schemes is proposed.