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The purpose of this paper is to explore and explicate documentation ideals parallel to information policy, and by means of this analysis demonstrate how the concept “documentation ideals” is an analytical tool for engaging with political and institutional contexts of information practices.

The paper is based on a case study of documentation ideals in a debate about quality in archaeological documentation. The methodology draws on idea analysis, and on the science and technology studies’ controversy studies approach.

The paper explicates three documentation ideals, how these ideals allocate responsibility for documentation to different actors, how the ideals assign roles to practitioners, and how the ideals point to different beneficiaries of the documentation. Furthermore, the analysis highlights ideas about two different means to reach the documentation ideals.

The case’s debate reflects opinions of Northern European professionals.

The paper illuminates how documentation ideals tweak and even contest formal information policy in claims on the documentation and on the practitioners doing documentation.

Documentation ideal analysis is crucial as a complement to formal information policy analysis and to analysis guided by practice theory in attempts to understand the contexts of information practices and documentation, insights central for developing information literacies.

Sharing information about work processes has proven to be difficult. This applies especially to information shared from those who participate in a process to those who remain outsiders. The purpose of this article is to increase understanding of how professionals document their work practices with a focus on information making by analysing how archaeologists document their information work in archaeological reports.

In total 47 Swedish archaeological reports published in 2018 were analysed using close reading and constant comparative categorisation.

Even if explicit narratives of methods and work process have particular significance as documentation of information making, the evidence of information making is spread out all over the report document in (1) procedural narratives, (2) descriptions of methods and tools, (3) actors and actants, (4) photographs, (5) information sources, (6) diagrams and drawings and (7) outcomes. The usability of reports as conveyors of information on information making depends more on how a forthcoming reader can live with it as a whole rather than how to learn of the details it recites.

The study is based on a limited number of documents representing one country and one scholarly and professional field.

Increased focus on the internal coherence of documentation and the complementarity of different types of descriptions could improve information sharing. Further, descriptions of concepts that refer to work activities and the situation when information came into being could similarly improve their usability.

There is little earlier research on how professionals and academics document and describe their information activities.

Information science research has begun to broaden its traditional focus on information seeking to cover other modes of acquiring information. The purpose of this paper is to move forward on this trajectory and to present a framework for explicating how in addition to being sought, existing information are made useful and taken into use.

A conceptual enquiry draws on an empirical vignette based on an observation study of an archaeological teaching excavation. The conceptual perspective builds on Andersen’s genre approach and Huvila’s notion of situational appropriation.

This paper suggests that information becomes appropriable, and appropriated (i.e. taken into use), when informational and social genres intertwine with each other. This happens in a continuous process of (re)appropriation of information where existing information scaffolds new information and the on-going process of appropriation.

The approach is proposed as a potentially powerful conceptualisation for explicating information interactions when existing information is taken into use rather than sought that have received little attention in traditional models and theories of human information behaviour.

The purpose of this paper is to address a fundamental question that all facility directors and senior managers face. How should facility management support arrangements be positioned and repositioned to meet the needs and expectations of an organisation, its staff and customers, as priorities shift and business circumstances change?

Case studies were undertaken to investigate the precise nature and reasons for change to FM support arrangements, across a variety of organisational types and sectors. Data were collected through document searches, semi‐structured interviews, direct observations and supplementary questionnaires and follow‐up discussions. Field trials of this prototype framework were conducted to obtain expert opinions, comments, criticisms and suggestions for improvement, employing a methodology similar to that used in clinical trials for new medical procedures.

The main findings from the investigations cover the nature and purpose of change in FM and the key factors that were involved. A number of major opportunities for innovative developments in the facility management field were uncovered, together with five key areas for further research, through which to advance the role and remit of facility management generally.

The research here has produced a generic decision framework for positioning and repositioning FM support arrangements. This framework will enable facility managers to adopt a more secure approach for collecting essential information, identifying key issues and options, and should encourage a more rigorous and critical examination of alternative FM arrangements prior to implementation.

The purpose of the paper is to present a new process for the evaluation of an automotive organisation’s suppliers by corporate social responsibility (CSR) measures.

A methodology for socially responsible purchasing is detailed along with a case study outlining its use within a large automotive manufacturer.

Socially responsible purchasing has a positive impact on the performance, trust and cooperation of the supplier base. Industry practitioner’s state that cost and implementation difficulties are reasons for purchasing and supply managers’ reluctance to participate in CSR activities. The CSR evaluation process within the case study organisation identified which suppliers should be considered for CSR audit; giving the purchasing manager, of the case study organisation, an objective basis for decision-making.

Future development of the approach may involve the integration of the CSR tool more closely with strategy and policy procedures of an organisation. The CSR tool may also be developed for use in sectors beyond the automotive industry. Additional commentary is given on the potential relevance of this approach to the retail sector.

The methodology and case study descriptions provide an outline template for purchasing and supply managers with the automotive sector and guidance for interested practitioners in other industries.

This paper expands the guidance available for purchasing professionals wishing to evaluate the CSR impact of procurement decisions.

Organ donation and transplantation services represent a microcosm of modern healthcare organisations. They are complex adaptive systems. They face perpetual problems of matching supply and demand. They operate under fierce time and resource constraints. And yet they have received relatively little attention from a systems perspective. The purpose of this paper is to consider some of the fundamental issues in evaluating, improving and policy reform in such complex systems.

The paper advocates an approach based on programme theory evaluation.

The paper explains how the death to donation to transplantation process depends on the accumulation of series of embedded, institutional sub-processes. Evaluators need to be concerned with this whole system rather than with its discrete parts or sectors. Policy makers may expect disappointment if they seek to improve donation rates by applying nudges or administrative reforms at a single point in the implementation chain.

These services represent concentrated, perfect storms of complexity and the paper offers guidance to practitioners with bio-medical backgrounds on how such services might be evaluated and improved. For the methodological audience the paper caters for the burgeoning interest in programme theory evaluation while illustrating the design phase of this research strategy.

Many retrieval experiments have been based on inadequate test collections, and current research is hampered by the lack of proper collections. This short review does not attempt a fully documented survey of all the collections used in the past decade: hopefully representative examples have been studied to throw light on the requirements test collections should meet, to show how past collections have been defective, and to suggest guidelines for a future ‘ideal’ test collection. The specifications for this collection can be taken as an indirect comment on our present state of knowledge of major retrieval system variables, and experience in conducting experiments.

Successful delegated searching for publications relevant to the topic of an inquirer obeys rules whose relations to thermodynamics are unmistakable. By the continuous growth of a documentation system in the physical and conceptual respect, steadily increasing demands are made on the degree of order which prevails in the system or can be established at the specific request of an inquirer. If the order in a system cannot keep pace with the increasing requirements, its working capability will continuously decrease, because the searcher is becoming more and more overburdened in relation to his available search time, search patience, and search memory. The degree of order attainable in a growing literature collection can be estimated on the basis of six postulates. The better the requirements imposed by these postulates are approximated in a practical documentation system, the higher are its working capability and life expectancy, but the expenditure to be made on the literature analyses must also inevitably be higher.

The ideal in information storage and retrieval is a computer so specialized and so perfect that scientific writers would be compelled to write so as to conform to its input demands. Before this is achieved, however, existing documentation systems should be evaluated to see whether they are put to their optimal use. In the field of electronic machine translation, both visual and aural input have serious drawbacks. Output can be in the form of rapid print‐out, automatic composition and photography with a cathode grill or baffle‐plate, or ultrarapid aural dispersement. The disadvantages of present‐day language‐language dictionaries coded for machines are discussed. The two main difficulties in the production of abstracts, the time‐lag and the need for subject‐specialists, can be overcome with author abstracts, evaluations, and analyses by the editors at time of publication, and better titles and sub‐titles. Seven types of existing memory machines are compared from the point of view of input and storage, methods of retrieval to compare items of stored information, cost, problem‐solving time, and size.