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This paper aims to examine the situation of organizational information governance (IG) and its relationship with e-discovery in China.

This study collects laws, court opinions, cases and relevant literature as data and analyzes their content under the guidance of the framework of Information Governance Reference Model of the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM).

Inspired by discussions on the challenges of e-discovery and, in particular, the relationships between organizational IG and e-discovery in English literature, the present study attempts an examination of the relevant situations in China. It is the belief of the study that the connection between IG and the legal risk as framed in the EDRM is a necessary one for China as the country is opening its door wider and continues to seek multilateral cooperation. The study found out, through observations and analyses, the following distinctions of e-discovery and its relationship with IG in China. Despite the very similar US and Chinese digital technological environments and the similar acceptance of electronic evidence into litigations, the situations with e-discovery/electronically stored information (ESI) and IG are different within a Chinese context. Legal provisions regarding electronic evidence are brief and vague, litigating procedures rely on the explanations of the Supreme Court and the Supreme Procuratorate and, most relevantly, there is only a small portion of litigations that features a large quantity of ESI in the context of dramatically increased cases involving electronic evidence. The evidentiary qualifications of ESI, e.g. authenticity and reliability, are discussed intensively in academic writings, which, however, was done in a rather isolated manner, without referring to the relationships between and among them. The concept of proportionality, which was one of the key constructions in e-discovery discussions in English literature, was not found in these writings. As a result, organizational IG in China is not discussed in relation to e-discovery or electronic evidence, raising the question as to how e-discovery of a large quantity of ESI will be handled, should such cases emerge.

Extracted mainly from available literature in legal and information fields, this study is necessarily neither exhaustive nor definitive. However, it can be used to further strengthen other empirical data studies. It could be extended within a Chinese context with interviews with legal and IG professionals. In this regard, the reasons that lead to the distinctions as exhibited in the findings could be explored in future investigations. This study does serve as a marker of the position in China compared to the USA. This research suggests that there is an opportunity for comparable studies at a national level, thus generating complementary knowledge for the IG and e-discovery community internationally.

The findings of the study may be instructive to countries with similar situations, that is, a weak linkage between IG and e-discovery. It may serve as a call for more comparable studies, thus generating complementary knowledge for the IG and e-discovery community internationally.

The study reported in this paper is the first of its kind in terms of exploring the relationships between IG and e-discovery in the Chinese context.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the challenges confronting organizations in responding to the recent electronic discovery (e‐discovery) amendments to the US federal rules of civil procedure. Failure to comply with these rules, even unintentionally, can have significant adverse legal consequences for parties of the lawsuit. The vast majority of information and data is electronic and stored in numerous files and on a variety of media. Thus, there is a critical need to better manage electronic content and implement a strategic approach to accommodate new rules, legislation, and ever‐changing technology. In response, the authors provide recommendations for enterprise‐wide e‐discovery readiness.

To investigate the legal theory for e‐discovery, the authors examine precedent‐setting legal cases for the purpose of providing managerial recommendations for developing and implementing a comprehensive policy for compliance and litigation purposes.

According to the authors' evaluation of the amendments and applicable case law, the new rules make clear that electronic information and data are discoverable, and that failure to protect and store in a retrievable format may lead to adverse legal consequences.

To better prepare for the duties imposed by the e‐discovery amendments, the authors recommend the formation of an enterprise‐wide multi‐functional electronically stored information Discovery Team to develop, implement, and periodically review a comprehensive electronic records management policy and procedures for compliance and litigation purposes.

The authors take into consideration the dearth of information systems literature addressing the critical need to better manage electronic content and to implement an enterprise‐wide strategic approach to accommodate the requirements of e‐discovery, or face costly consequences.

The paper aims to discuss the growing importance of electronic discovery in commercial litigation; the impact of the e‐discovery amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP), and the steps corporations should take to address the new rules.

The paper reviews the impact of corporate reliance on electronic information on litigation; regulations that require corporations to protect data; significant cases that established ground rules for discovery of electronic information, including McPeek v. Aschcroft and Zubulake v. Warburg; the requirements of the e‐discovery rules that have been included for the first time in the FRCP; and outlines the steps that corporations should take to mitigate corporate e‐discovery risks.

The paper concludes that electronic discovery challenges will continue to grow for corporations as e‐discovery becomes increasingly important in commercial litigation; that companies can mitigate their e‐discovery risks by proactively working to meet the new requirements; that forward‐looking companies can gain important “safe harbor” protection by instituting a reliable litigation hold strategy; and that companies can use the new federal rules as an opportunity to better manage and forecast their legal costs.

The paper provides a general review of significant e‐discovery rulings; an explanation of the impact of the amended FRCP on corporations; and practical steps that companies can take to mitigate e‐discovery risks.

For over two hundred years, our nation’s legal system has been based on the “American Rule” ‐ with each party bearing its own litigation costs. As the Supreme Court noted in 1975, this distinctly American tradition is “deeply rooted in our history and in congressional policy, and it is not for us to invade the legislature’s province by redistributing litigation costs…” Not surprisingly, the founders of our legal system did not anticipate the extent to which e‐mail would come to dominate our professional and personal lives. Experts estimate that 30 billion e‐mail messages are currently are being sent every day ‐ or an average of five e‐mails per day for every person on the planet.

As an emerging discipline, information governance (IG) presents a number of challenges to organisations and countries. For example, IG has not yet been clearly defined and current proponents present the concepts as records management, information management, enterprise content management, privacy (data protection), freedom of information, corporate governance, information risk, information security and e-discovery, to mention just a few areas. At an organisational level, initiatives focus on one of these aspects, often conflicting with the other elements, and are initiated because of some immediate business challenge, such as the introduction of the Protection of Personal Information Act (data protection or privacy legislation) in South Africa. This is compounded by the fact that the country creates many fragmented policies and pieces of legislation on the same IG aspects which are conducted in a disjointed manner. This study aims to present an integrated IG framework at the country level, comprising key success factors, required instruments (policy and legislation), principles and a proposed list of elements or disciplines, which should be managed in a cohesive manner.

This study adopted the Information Governance Initiative’s pinwheel facets of IG to design an integrated framework of elevating IG to country level. The pinwheel helped to identify different facets of information disciplines and the responsible oversight mechanism for implementation in South Africa. The study relied on data obtained through content analysis of policy documents, legislative frameworks, and literature review regarding the identified facets of IG in South Africa.

The study established that only some aspects/domains/facets of IG are legislated and driven by policy in South Africa. These domains are at different levels of maturity and different stakeholder groups are responsible for each domain; for instance, the National Archives of South Africa is responsible for records management and the State Information Technology Agency is responsible for information technology, while the newly established Information Regulator is responsible for freedom of information and data privacy. There is generally no over-arching structure responsible for overall IG in South Africa as the elements are fragmented in various oversight mechanisms and institutions. As a result, domains compete for limited resources and often lead to “knee-jerk” responses to legislative, legal or risk drivers.

It is concluded that if IG is not regulated and modelled at a country level, it is highly unlikely to filter down to organisations. Implementing IG at country level will go a long way in helping to filter it down to an organisation level.

The study is useful by presenting a framework to ensure that IG is implemented at the country level with a single coordinating body established for oversight mechanisms such as the Information Regulator (which currently has a narrow scope of privacy and freedom of information, although with limited resources).

Numerous research tools exist but their usage among researchers across the different phases of the research cycle of scholarly communication remains unknown. This research aims to address this knowledge gap by mapping the research tools frequently used by global researchers against the various phases of the research cycle of scholarly communication.

This research adopts a descriptive research design and conducts a cross-tabulation of secondary data consisting of 20,663 useable responses in a global survey of research tools for scholarly communication. This research also administered a survey to academic experts to classify the research tools according to traditional, modern, innovative and experimental categories.

This research reveals the six phases of the research cycle (i.e. discovery, analysis, writing, publication, outreach and assessment) and the research tools of scholarly communication frequently used by researchers worldwide in each phase as a whole and by roles, disciplines, regions and career stages. Notably, this research indicates that most of the research tools used by researchers are classified as “modern” and “innovative”.

The original insights herein should be useful for both established and early career researchers to gain and share research insights, as well as policymakers and existing and aspiring service providers who wish to improve the utility and usage of research tools for scholarly communication. Notably, this research represents a seminal endeavor at enhancing a global survey (secondary research) using a follow-up expert survey (primary research), which enabled the organization of research tools for scholarly communication into four refined categories. In doing so, this research contributes finer-grained insights that showcase the importance of keeping up with the advancement of technology through the use of modern, innovative and experimental research tools, thereby highlighting the need to go beyond traditional research tools for scholarly communication.

The purpose of this study is to assess the effects of discovery and creation behaviour in opportunity identification on firm performance in a developing country context. By doing so, the study adds new knowledge and insights in researching the entrepreneurial behaviour types at the start-up phase and their eventual effects on firm performance.

The study was conducted amongst Ethiopian tour operators (n = 118), which are formally established small tourism firms. A survey questionnaire, which is the main data gathering tool in this study, was prepared based on a distinction between discovery and creation behaviour with regard to the seven entrepreneurial actions described by Alvarez and Barney (2007). Hence, 14 multiple-item measurement scales were derived to define the entrepreneurial behaviour types. Firm performance was measured using four indicators. A regression analysis was conducted to predict the effect of entrepreneurial behaviour at the start-up phase on firm performance.

The findings of this study provide consistent support for the hypothesis that tour-operating firms in Ethiopia founded through creation behaviour instead of discovery behaviour are performing better in terms of sales, employment, profit and asset size change.

The theoretical contribution of this study is two-fold. First, it provides a scale for measuring the extent to which discovery and/or creation opportunity identification played a role in the start-up phase of the business. Second, the study assesses the effects of discovery behaviour and creation behaviour in opportunity identification on firm performance in a developing country context.

The entrepreneurs' behaviour through which they identify and pursue new opportunities may have a considerable effect on the subsequent performance of their newly established firms. It is, therefore, important to understand effects, which result from differences in entrepreneurs' behaviour at the start-up phase, in terms of outcomes such as firm performance among small businesses. Nonetheless, there is little empirical research conducted in this regard, particularly in the context of developing countries. This study contributes to the literature of entrepreneurship by applying entrepreneurial behaviour types, i.e. discovery and creation, as determinants of small firms' performance in a developing country context. Furthermore, it is one of the few studies concentrating on formal instead of informal operations in an African context.

This paper aims to describe the use of electronic resources and services provided at the social science library of Jimma University, Jimma. The paper is focused to find out the use of those resources by the students of information science and how frequently they are using, from where the information is accessed. Also, they have been requested about their preferences between an electronic and print journal format.

The questionnaire method is used for collecting the data from the undergraduate students of information science (2015/2016 batch). The questionnaire was distributed to 182 students, and the response rate 81.32 per cent was encouraging.

It has been found that the usage of e-journals is increasing; this is due to awareness among the students of information science about the e-resources and services. Owing to an easy access available at various places in the university, they are accessing these resources at hostels and departments more as compared to the library. Their visits to library have decreased.

The study has been limited to Jimma University undergraduate students of information science only

It suggests for future improvised solutions.

The present paper will help other institutions to understand the need for library electronic resources and motivate them to update their resources in the larger interest of the students. The paper also indicates how a suitably designed survey can show the awareness and use of types of information services, in this case, e-journals. There is a dearth of such studies in India and abroad. The methodology and findings can be applied to other libraries to reveal similar trends, as well as comparisons.

This study aims to provide an overview of recent efforts relating to natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning applied to archival processing, particularly appraisal and sensitivity reviews, and propose functional requirements and workflow considerations for transitioning from experimental to operational use of these tools.

The paper has four main sections. 1) A short overview of the NLP and machine learning concepts referenced in the paper. 2) A review of the literature reporting on NLP and machine learning applied to archival processes. 3) An overview and commentary on key existing and developing tools that use NLP or machine learning techniques for archives. 4) This review and analysis will inform a discussion of functional requirements and workflow considerations for NLP and machine learning tools for archival processing.

Applications for processing e-mail have received the most attention so far, although most initiatives have been experimental or project based. It now seems feasible to branch out to develop more generalized tools for born-digital, unstructured records. Effective NLP and machine learning tools for archival processing should be usable, interoperable, flexible, iterative and configurable.

Most implementations of NLP for archives have been experimental or project based. The main exception that has moved into production is ePADD, which includes robust NLP features through its named entity recognition module. This paper takes a broader view, assessing the prospects and possible directions for integrating NLP tools and techniques into archival workflows.