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The National Archives of Singapore offers reference services to members of the public on questions related to Singapore’s history and heritage. However, with only two reference officers stationed at the reference helpdesk at any one time, users may often have to queue to await servicing while the officers are busy attending to queries, telephone calls or retrieving physical documents. The Reference Enquiry Database was thus conceived to provide Web‐based access to ready reference information on frequently asked subjects by members of the public, thereby reducing waiting times for users, easing the workload of reference officers and allowing them more time to attend to more complex information needs. This paper provides the background and rationale for the system as well as discusses design and implementation issues.

Reusability is an important concept in software development because it provides many benefits, including shorter development cycles, increased software reliability and lower production costs. This paper describes the experiences of developing a portal of reusable components to support information retrieval teaching and research in a Master’s programme in information studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. The portal contains the source code of these components and covers a variety of areas in the field of information retrieval such as algorithms and data structures for lexical analysis, indexing and ranking. The portal provides users with features to search or browse for code, contribute new code under appropriate categories, participate in threaded discussions and rate source code. The portal also contains document management features that allow co‐ordinators to evaluate contributions before publishing them for general access.

Pay for performance (PFP) search engines provide search services for documents on the Web, but unlike traditional search engines, they rank documents not on content characteristics, but according to the amount of money the owner of a Web site is willing to pay if a user visits the Web site through the search results pages. A study was conducted to compare the retrieval effectiveness of Overture (a PFP search engine) and Google (a traditional search engine) using a test suite of general knowledge questions. A total of 45 queries, based on a popular game show, “Who wants to be a millionaire?”, were submitted to each of these search engines and the first ten documents returned were analysed using different relevancy criteria. Results indicated that Google outperformed Overture in terms of precision and number of queries that could be answered. Implications for this study are also discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the extent to which Web 2.0 applications are prevalent in government web sites, the ways in which Web 2.0 applications have been used in government web sites, as well as whether the presence of Web 2.0 applications correlates with the perceived quality of government web sites.

Divided equally between developing and advanced economies, a total of 200 government web sites were analysed using content analysis and multiple regression analysis.

The prevalence of seven Web 2.0 applications in descending order was: RSS, multimedia sharing services, blogs, forums, social tagging services, social networking services and wikis. More web sites in advanced countries include Web 2.0 applications than those in developing countries. The presence of Web 2.0 applications was found to have a correlation with the overall web site quality, and in particular, service quality.

This paper only covers government web sites in English. Emerging genres of Web 2.0 applications such as mashups and virtual worlds have not been included. Moreover the data were drawn solely from the public domain.

Decision makers and e‐government web developers may benchmark their own efforts in deploying Web 2.0 applications against this study. The numerous exemplars cited here serve as a springboard to generate more ideas on how Web 2.0 applications could be used and harnessed to improve the overall quality of government web sites.

This paper unites two research interests: Web 2.0 and web site quality. It also extends previous studies by investigating the suite of Web 2.0 applications found in government web sites around the world.

The purpose of this research is to develop a method for automatic construction of multi‐document summaries of sets of news articles that might be retrieved by a web search engine in response to a user query.

Based on the cross‐document discourse analysis, an event‐based framework is proposed for integrating and organizing information extracted from different news articles. It has a hierarchical structure in which the summarized information is presented at the top level and more detailed information given at the lower levels. A tree‐view interface was implemented for displaying a multi‐document summary based on the framework. A preliminary user evaluation was performed by comparing the framework‐based summaries against the sentence‐based summaries.

In a small evaluation, all the human subjects preferred the framework‐based summaries to the sentence‐based summaries. It indicates that the event‐based framework is an effective way to summarize a set of news articles reporting an event or a series of relevant events.

Limited to event‐based news articles only, not applicable to news critiques and other kinds of news articles. A summarization system based on the event‐based framework is being implemented.

Multi‐document summarization of news articles can adopt the proposed event‐based framework.

An event‐based framework for summarizing sets of news articles was developed and evaluated using a tree‐view interface for displaying such summaries.

This paper aims to examine a flagging but yet‐to‐be abandoned knowledge management (KM) project at a healthcare organisation in Asia through a case study approach.

Semi‐structured interviews with a variety of stakeholders familiar with the project were conducted. Additionally, archival data in the form of email correspondences, presentation materials and web sites were collected to triangulate against the responses given by the interviewees.

The findings which are validated against a theoretical KM failure framework afford a nuanced perspective of how the failure factors identified in the framework were germane to the case.

By exposing these factors, administrators and managers in the healthcare industry who intend to implement KM projects can be better informed of the risks involved. For researchers, this paper serves as a call for a greater inquiry into KM projects in the healthcare industry that are facing impending failures.

This paper reveals that KM project failure is a reality with which administrators, managers and researchers have to reckon.

A web site usually contains a large number of concept entities, each consisting of one or more web pages connected by hyperlinks. In order to discover these concept entities for more expressive web site queries and other applications, the web unit mining problem has been proposed. Web unit mining aims to determine web pages that constitute a concept entity and classify concept entities into categories. Nevertheless, the performance of an existing web unit mining algorithm, iWUM, suffers as it may create more than one web unit (incomplete web units) from a single concept entity. This paper presents two methods to solve this problem. The first method introduces a more effective web fragment construction method so as reduce later classification errors. The second method incorporates site‐specific knowledge to discover and handle incomplete web units. Experiments show that incomplete web units can be removed and overall accuracy has been significantly improved, especially on the precision and F1 measures.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how perceived usability and user characteristics influence the intention to use a crowdsourcing application for finding potentially trafficked children. As part of this effort, the authors also attempt to uncover the usability concerns surrounding the use of this application.

The authors first describe Zhongxun, which is the application used in the present paper. Next, they conducted a survey eliciting usability perceptions of Zhongxun. A total of 287 participants were recruited for the survey which used constructs adapted from the Computer System Usability Questionnaire as well as various demographic variables. Hierarchical regression analysis was used to ascertain factors influencing intention to use Zhongxun. Participants' qualitative feedback was also analyzed to derive themes pertaining to areas of improvement.

The results showed that system usefulness was the factor that most positively influenced intention to use Zhongxun, followed by information quality and interface quality. Interestingly, a higher level of education was negatively associated with intention to use the application. Qualitative feedback suggested various ways of improving Zhongxun's functionality. Participants recommended the incorporation of gamification mechanisms as a new feature of the application. Cultivating awareness of Zhongxun was also suggested as a means to attract new users.

The work can help inform the design of crowdsourcing applications for finding missing and potentially trafficked children, as well as similar systems. Implications include the need for simplicity of design, communication strategies to attract new and retain existing users, and instilling confidence in the quality of crowdsourced contributions.

Prior research in evaluating the usability of crowdsourcing applications has been performed but not in the context of finding missing and potentially trafficked children. The task of finding such children is markedly different from previous usage contexts and could impact perceptions of usability and usefulness. Hence, the present study attempts to plug this research gap.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate tertiary students’ acceptance of digital game-based learning (DGBL). Specifically, it investigated the influence of learning motivation, enjoyment, and perceived usefulness on students’ behavioral intention to play an information literacy (IL) game.

In total, 150 tertiary students were recruited to play an IL game, and fill in a survey questionnaire. Multiple linear regression was performed.

Results indicated that attention, satisfaction, affective enjoyment, and perceived usefulness were significant determinants for the behavioral intention to play IL games. However, relevance, confidence, cognitive enjoyment, and behavioral enjoyment were not found to predict their behavioral intention.

The authors did not consider other factors in the hypotheses, such as the mediating effects of enjoyment on behavioral intention, and the influence of students’ individual characters such as learning styles or personalities on their behavioral intention of using DGBL. Further, the IL game used in the study, Library Escape, may reduce generalizability of the results. The study used self-reported attitudinal data from survey questionnaires, while behavioral data were not considered.

The results showed that pedagogical features, enjoyment factors, and perceived usefulness remain critical in the uptake of IL games by students. Further, the study demonstrated that instead of behavioral or cognitive dimensions of enjoyment, players are more concerned with affective enjoyment. Hence, developing DGBL with affective features should be pursued.

By taking into consideration both pedagogical and gameplay characteristics of DGBL to explain students’ acceptance of IL games, this study integrates and extends previous studies in the context of IL games. Additionally, instead of using perceived enjoyment as a single dimensional construct, this study adopted a multifaceted, more nuanced perspective on the perceived enjoyment of DGBL.

Through the lens of self-directed theory, the purpose of this paper is to investigate if social technologies such as YouTube will be viable to disseminate educational instructions and in the process empowering learners to take charge of their learning.

A total of 150 educational videos on YouTube were selected and 29,386 comments extracted using the authors’ customized extraction software application. Sentiment and qualitative content analyses were performed.

Results indicate that YouTube can play important roles in facilitating online self-directed learning (SDL) as the findings uncovered a variety of learning and social affordances of YouTube. However, caution should be exercised as high views and well-commented videos might not imply quality and credibility. This study concludes that YouTube generally provides a conducive a learning environment that affords learners the resources to meet their SDL objectives.

To the best of knowledge, this is the first study that investigates SDL in social media by combining both qualitative content and sentiment analyses. The study shows that such a hybrid approach of combining two diverse analytical techniques provides an innovative means to make sense of comments expressed in social media.

The results will help educational institutions and policy-makers to craft better programs for public education and create policies to help self-directed learners in evaluating online video resources.

Despite a wealth of literature on the use of technologies to support learning, the majority of work done to date has dealt in the classroom context. Studies on SDL using educational content on YouTube are limited. Hence, this research contributes by providing insights on how educational institutions can move toward the direction of building collaborative digital learning platforms with relevant educational instruction and resources to enable users to participate in lifelong self-learning and education.