Search results

This paper aims to understand how students experience the search tools Google Scholar and Metalib and the role of prior instruction.

A total of 32 undergraduate students searched academic articles for their thesis work. Searches were recorded using Morae software and were analysed along with the number of articles saved and responses to a questionnaire. All searched with both tools. Half of the students received training before searching.

Google Scholar performed better in almost all measures. Training had a positive effect on the amount and quality of articles saved. Responses to Google Scholar were more positive than to Metalib. However, the students were not overwhelmingly enthusiastic about either of the tools. Research limitations/implications – Each Metalib implementation is to some extent unique, which limits the extent to which results can be generalised to other implementations.

Training is valuable for both tools. The user interface to Metalib does not conform with students' expectations and needs further improvement. Both tools strive to be a first alternative search tool for academic literature but neither performed well enough in this study to recommend it to be used in that role in an academic library setting.

These tools are important to academic libraries but few user studies have been published, particularly on Google Scholar. To one's knowledge no other user study on these tools has looked at the effects of instruction.

The purpose of this report is to outline‐few selected presentations of the ETD 2007 symposium based on the main theme “Added values to e‐theses” and highlight major events of the symposium held at Uppsala library, Sweden, during 13‐16 June 2007.

Conference report.

The four‐day meeting provided unique opportunity to professional librarians, academicians and other stakeholders of ETDs to explore the collaborative agenda emerged due to the changes in scholarly communication, long‐term digital preservation, ETD repository development and open access movement.

The author, who was also a speaker, provides an overview of the ETD 2007 international symposium, which carried out a variety of program viz. keynote and plenary sessions, paper presentations, poster sessions and local sight seeing tours to national museum, Linnaeus garden and libraries at Uppsala.

This paper investigates the everyday CEO communication in social media, with particular focus on Twitter. The purpose of this paper is to contribute with insights into how expectations on corporate leaders to be present in social media are translated into everyday communication practice and thereby add to literature on narrative leadership.

A content analysis of the Twitter feed of Håkan Nygren, the CEO of the Swedish digital bank Nordnet. In order to answer the question – what are the stories and the rhetoric of a CEO in the banking sector an ordinary day? – the data set covers the totality of tweets by Nygren from 10 April 2013 to 31 December 2015.

The everyday Twitter narrative of Nyberg challenges established ideas of social media about personalised tone and interactions by highlighting three characteristics: limited scope of actors and content including the local Nordnet sphere, a formal tone in the tweets mainly based on corporate information and presentation, and few examples of dialogue and a limited number of voices outside of Nordnet. The data set of Nyberg’s Twitter feed during a period without any major events or crises for Nordnet paints a picture of a rather non-personal CEO with limited ideas on his mind to share online and with few friends.

Studies on social media and corporate communication have largely focussed on organisational crises. This study focuses on everyday narratives of managers and proves that the role of social media must be interpreted more broadly and as playing multiple roles, and that these roles are changing due to time and situation.

The effects of affect, as measured by the dispositional traits of positive affectivity (PA) and negative affectivity (NA), on risk perceptions and risk intentions were tested among 149 managers from a variety of industries and companies. A risk‐assessment instrument consisting of systematically varied business scenarios was used to measure managerial perceptions of the risk dimensions of uncertainty, gains/losses, framing and personal involvement. Findings suggest that positive affect (high PA) managers viewed risk‐related uncertainty and personal involvement more optimistically, but were not more willing to seek risk. Negative affect (high NA) decision makers perceived risk‐related gains more negatively and were also significantly more likely to avoid risk.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the measures of social distancing and home confinement have been perceived and experienced in the Italian socio-cultural context, how they reshaped everyday life and which are their social implications.

The study was exploratory and interpretative in nature and a qualitative research design was adopted accordingly. A total of 60 in-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted.

Research findings highlight the fact that the boundaries of everyday practices have been completely reframed during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown in Italy. Informants show that scarcity of personal spaces, intertwined with the collapse of the boundaries between private and professional life, and also the lack of physical contact, resulted in a complex management of different social roles and in a stress overload.

There are no prior studies that critically analyse the lived experiences of individuals during the lockdown and the impact of home confinement on their meaning-making processes. This paper sheds light on the reframing of everyday life, thereby enhancing our understanding of a novel issue that is of primary concern for social scientists.

Through the results from part of a formative evaluation in England and Wales of the Integrated Children's System, the authors aim to illustrate the diverse ways in which policy, technology and practice interests challenge conventional assumptions regarding the construction and use of evidence in children's services. We identify four connected consequences of the ICS for practice. The ICS actively shapes practice, brings issues into focus, renders social work visible and distances the services user. We interpret the findings in terms of the persistence and diversification of professional discretion and the interplay of standardisation and case‐based practice. We challenge some accepted academic understandings of the relationship between technology and professional practice.

The research problem investigated in this paper addresses how love can intentionally be reflected in decision-making processes. The study is built on a theoretical and a practical foundation. The theoretical foundation comprises two parts with perspectives from theology and organizational theory. The practical foundation is derived from field research in the area of public administration and church leadership. Examples from field research indicate that trust and building of relationship will change adversarial behaviour into cooperative behaviour. Three network strategies are identified to make decision-making intentionally relational. The conceptual contribution is original, although the authors draw on existing insights from theology and public administration.

Two distinct literatures have investigated the impact of negotiator frames. Both literatures demonstrate that negotiator frames significantly influence both bargaining behavior and negotiated outcomes. These two literatures, however, offer completely different conceptualizations of what negotiator frames actually are. In this article we classify these two conceptualizations as reference frames, the referent‐dependent perception of outcomes, and conflict frames, a multi‐dimensional orientation toward conflict. We report results from an experiment that links these two types of frames. We find that loss‐framed negotiators adopt conflict frames that are more win‐oriented and task‐oriented than the conflict frames gain‐framed negotiators adopt. Our results offer insight into the frame adoption process and have implications for dispute resolution and negotiation practice.

This study investigates how communication is used by a Swedish public authority to legitimate the responsibilization of preparedness, i.e. how the state encourages individual citizens to take more responsibility for their security.

A multimodal discursive approach drawing on multimodal narrative analysis of video clips and multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA) is used to examine how the responsibilization of preparedness is legitimated in video material published on Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency's (MSB’s) YouTube channel.

The study finds that the responsibilization of preparedness is legitimated through an ongoing but evolving normalization of threat. The findings also show how responsibilization is legitimated in moralizing terms of individual contribution to society, which may indicate a return from neo-liberal values to more traditional Swedish collectivist values.

The study shows how communication around preparedness and responsibilization is discursively constructed and legitimated through multimodal features, while previous research has mainly focused on verbal or written communication.