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In this paper, we present a proposed information environment (PROPIE) for enhanced interaction and value‐adding of electronic documents (e‐documents). The design of PROPIE was based on a thorough user needs and requirements assessment in interacting with information through well‐documented findings, and a focus group with twelve participants to elicit features that were deemed desirable in future interactions. The design was also based on an earlier work which reviewed the advancements in various user interface (UI) technologies, visualisation and interactive techniques, and a consideration of novel information structuring and organisation techniques that pose important implications for the design of more advanced UIs. Providing a suite of novel features and interactive tools that can be flexibly combined, PROPIE allows users to apply multiple novel ways to query intuitively and navigate information in an e‐document. The querying and browsing processes in PROPIE are supported by various interactive and visualisation techniques. Users work within a visually sovereign, integrated environment for information gathering and organising, based on navigable, fractional information objects that are also affiliated with rich metadata and additional layers of value‐adding information. A set of interface mock‐ups was developed to demonstrate the potential of the environment in supporting the design of a new generation of electronic journals (e‐journals). We report here empirical results from a study conducted to obtain representative users‘ feedback with regard to using PROPIE for interacting with e‐journals. Twenty‐two participants from a variety of academic backgrounds participated in the evaluation. Overall, PROPIE was found to have the potential both for enhancing the user’s interaction with information captured within e‐journals and for adding value to e‐documents in various ways.

This research seeks to explore the potential of ontologies for reorganizing e‐document management in public administration with the aim of supporting administration in organizing cross‐organizational document and information management.

Since ontologies are suitable for organizing metadata for annotation of informational resources, the research question is: How can public administrations make use of ontologies for organizing and improving their e‐document management? Findings, based on an action research project in the state administration of Schleswig‐Holstein (Germany).

The research findings indicate that structuring documents and information through ontologies requires a socio‐technical infrastructure consisting of a number of regularities, services and support on the level of organization as well as information technology.

Since the case of Schleswig‐Holstein is typical for governments trying to enter the information age without having the power and resources to be on the leading edge, the recommendations based on this research may support the strategy development and solution finding in other administrations as well.

A rather small government (such as that of Schleswig‐Holstein) must be aware of its strategic goals and step ahead carefully in order to avoid the risks of misinvestment while reorganizing its e‐document management.

The paper systematically addresses the question “How can public administration make use of ontologies for organizing and improving their e‐document management?”.

Providing enhanced access and added value to electronic documents (e‐documents) will require interfaces that effectively mediate between the information seeking needs of the users and the information that the e‐document has to offer. A proposed information environment (PIE) to support effective and creative use of e‐documents to fulfil users’ various information tasks and needs is presented. Providing a suite of novel features and interactive tools that can be flexibly combined, the PIE allows users to apply multiple novel ways to intuitively query and navigate information in an e‐document. The querying and browsing processes in the PIE are supported by various interactive and visualisation techniques. Users work within a visually sovereign, integrated environment for information gathering and organising, based on navigable, fractional information objects that are also affiliated with rich metadata and additional layers of value‐adding information. This paper describes the conceptual design of the PIE and uses a representative scenario to show how the PIE is likely to be used for interacting with electronic journals (e‐journals) and the ability of the proposed environment to provide enhanced user interaction and value‐adding.

The recent unprecedented growth of information in digital form advocates the need for better ways to interact with this vast amount of richly‐conveyed information. This paper reviews and analyses the design considerations of an advanced information environment for users to interact in novel manners with online documents such as electronic journals. The interaction environment is also intended to support value‐adding of electronic documents. The design is inspired by analyses of user requirements in interacting with information, by advances in the electronic information world, and by innovations in human‐computer interaction. These led to the derivation and proposal of a set of properties in both the interaction environment and the information objects within the environment. The environment is a visually‐rich, interactive information environment based on user‐controlled malleability and integration with various interaction tools. The information objects within the environment are fractionally structured, contextualized and explicable, queriable and navigable at multiple levels of granularity, and associated with layers of additional information and metadata.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the problems of using metadata to file electronic documents as well as the problems of using a purely functional filing scheme. It aims to explore how a functional file plan can be created from a business classification scheme by inserting “metadata signpost folders” at strategic points in the filing hierarchy to create a “hybrid functional file plan”.

The paper draws on experience and published literature to discuss methods for creating a hybrid functional file plan.

The paper concludes that functional filing is the only method of filing e‐documents that can effectively support good information management practice, enabling all e‐documents to be managed in line with corporate information management policies, and that it may also be the only viable method of providing true “shared” filing in support of knowledge management and business efficiency.

The article shows that a functional filing scheme, retrieving, cross‐referencing and grouping documents by subject (or other metadata attributes) requires special measures and suggests that current IT, EDRM and related technologies may not fully meet the requirements by searching/sorting on metadata terms. It may be necessary to compromise a purely functional file plan by the inclusion of metadata “signpost” folders into the functional folder structure in order to create a hybrid functional file plan.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the evolution of the processes and procedures utilized by Jacksonville State University's Houston Cole Library to manage its varied electronic resources collection.

This paper is based upon the library's experiences managing electronic resources in five major categories: e‐books; electronic government documents; electronic journals; e‐reserves; and web sites.

Electronic resources librarians, an emerging specialty, must develop effective practices to manage the varied electronic resources that continue to be accessioned within most libraries.

This article provides a practical model to address these management issues.

Provides common practices for the management of electronic resources and insights into possible problems that can arise when creating a one‐stop shopping archetype for electronic resource management.

The present study aims to assess the resource procurement preferences among the leading academic libraries of the institutes of higher learning across India. The study analyses the amount and percentage of budget spent by the institutions under study during the period 2012-2013, 2013-2014 and 2014-2015 on the procurement of print and electronic resources in their libraries. The study also discusses about concerns with regard to the subscription of e-resources and the reasons for weaning interest among the Indian academicians towards the print resources.

By and large, the scope of the study is limited to institutes of higher learning across India, but reflects a great deal of relevance to the global higher education practices. The study has been undertaken on the 20 leading institutes each from Universities, Institutes of Management and Institutes of Technology in India, based on the ranking list released by the Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India, on 4 April 2016.

The electronic documents are the dominant forms of present day library procurements in India, with the print struggling to retain its readership. The Institutes of Engineering and Technology and Management have almost similar procurement preferences, spending almost three-fourth of their library budgets on the procurement of e-documents. On average, the University libraries in India have spent 43.54 per cent of their budget on the procurement of print resources and 56.46 per cent of their budget on the procurement of electronic resources during the period of study. Similarly, on average, each Institute of Engineering and Technology has spent 24.04 per cent of their library budget on the procurement of print documents and 75.96 per cent towards the procurement of electronic resources, whereas 27.51 per cent of the library budget by the Institutes of Management in India is being spent on the procurement of print resources and 72.49 per cent towards the procurement of electronic resources.

The study is original and is first of its kind, undertaken on three different category of institutions, based on the national ranking of the country.

The purpose of this paper is Identifying the degree of compatibility of the current situation of the Persian bibliographic records (PBRs) with FRBR, as well as identifying the possible approaches and strategies for appropriate application of the model to Persian. The required data were gathered via two checklists were devised for the purpose of this research and each of which was dedicated to “Shahname” and “Nahjolbalaghe”. Also, to determine the characteristics of a suitable functional requirements for bibliographic records (FRBR) model for Iran, 18 implementation projects round the world were surveyed and analysed. Results of the study show that some FRBR requirements were readily available in Persian bibliographic records (PBRs), but in some cases, there are some deficiencies due to some likely reasons, such as lack of commitment to the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules 2, specifications of the library software structure and neglecting bibliographic and family relations in catalogues.

The main goal of this research was to identify the degree of compatibility of the current situation of the PBRs with FRBR, as well as identifying the possible approaches and strategies for appropriate application of the model to Persian records. Research publication was 3,502 records in the National Bibliography of Iran for “Shahname” and “Nahjolbalaghe” of which 365 records were selected using systematic sampling method. Resources types included in the study were books, audio-visual resources, geographical resources, theses, lithographic books, manuscripts and journals.

Results of the study also showed that the appropriate method for implementing FRBR in Iran is the comparative model. According to this model, the current records are saved while they are compared to FRBR model, as a result of which, anomalies are identified and resolved. In another part of this research, 16 important challenges that could exist in implementing the model in Iran were identified and introduced. Also, eight characteristics of a suitable implementation model in Iran are introduced.

FRBR, is a conceptual entity-relationship model, released by IFLA and aimed to determine a minimum level of catalogue functions based on user’s needs. This model consists of four main parts: entities, attributes, relations and user tasks. This research has studied the feasibility of implementing application of the model to Iranian library records. Any research before the present paper (based on PhD thesis) has not been conducted yet in Iran.

This study aims to discuss a system constructed to satisfy scholars' personal information management requirements when collecting e‐documents, and to include generation of a citation format that can aid paper writing. The system compiles records and personal publications of specific domains collected by individual scholars to form a knowledge set for other scholars to use as a reference. It not only simplifies the data collection process, but also increases the visibility of scholars themselves, along with their papers.

This study analyzes the mechanism of increasing cited frequency of scholars' publications and aggregating relevant documents. It then enables the design of feasible system structures based on this mechanism to form a knowledge set by combining scholars' publications within specific academic domains. In addition, it expedites the gathering of relevant documents by scholars in order to create an accessible archive for subsequent researchers.

By way of an effective system for publication sharing, and not merely offering a reference for scholars in other relevant fields, this system can also improve the visibility of scholars' publications and further enhance the cited frequency of publications.

Combining collected documents and personal publications and sharing those with other scholars for reference can establish a highly effective personal research domain. It not only simplifies the data collection process, but also increases the visibility of personal academic works.

e‐Supply chains are fast becoming a reality. In order to manage such supply chains efficiently and effectively, traditional measures of supply chain performance are not adequate. The literature search revealed lack of measures and metrics for e‐supply chains. The purpose of this paper is to develop new measures and metrics for monitoring the performance of e‐supply chains.

A framework based on the benefits of e‐supply chains has been used to develop the metrics and measures. The study makes use of focus group discussion by assembling eight experts and practitioners in the field of e‐supply chain to come up with the measures and metrics. A questionnaire is designed with these measures and metrics and is sent to about 300 electronic component manufacturing companies in Malaysia to obtain feedback from the industry practitioners. Appropriate reliability and validity tests are conducted to measure the reliability of the instrument and validity of the constructs.

Through the focus group discussion, this study identifies six metrics and 21 measures. Further validation through the industry practitioners, reveals that these measures are important and some are in use by the industries. The six metrics are: web‐enabled service, data reliability, time and cost, e‐response, invoice presentation and payment and e‐document management metrics.

The study uses a simple framework and a sound methodology to develop new measures and metrics that are relevant for e‐supply chains.