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This chapter discusses the application of community informatics (CI) principles in the rural Southern and Central Appalachian (SCA) region to further the teaching of information and communication technologies (ICT) literacy concepts in courses that formed part of two externally funded grants, “Information Technology Rural Librarian Master’s Scholarship Program Part I” (ITRL) and “Part II” (ITRL2), awarded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services’ (IMLS) Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program to the School of Information Sciences (SIS) at the University of Tennessee (UT).

The chapter documents ICT use in ITRL and ITRL2 to extend librarian technology literacy training, allowing these public information providers to become change agents in the twenty-first century. It discusses aspects of CI that influenced these two projects and shaped the training of future rural library leaders embedded in traditionally underrepresented areas to further social justice and progressive changes in the region’s rural communities.

The chapter demonstrates the role that CI principles played in the context of ITRL and ITRL2 from project inception to the graduation of the rural librarians with examples of tangible IT services/products that the students developed in their courses that were directly applicable and tailored to their SCA contexts.

ITRL and ITRL2 provided a unique opportunity to apply a CI approach to train information librarians as agents of change in the SCA regions to further economic and cultural development via technology and management competencies. These change agents will continue to play a significant role in community building and community development efforts in the future.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the widespread crisis facing the archives and records management professions, and to propose recordkeeping informatics, a single minded disciplinary approach, as a way forward.

This paper reflects an Australasian perspective on the nature of the crisis besetting archives and records management professions as people struggle to adjust to digitally converged information ecologies. It suggests recordkeeping informatics as an approach for refiguring thinking, systems, processes and practices as people confront ever increasing information convergence, chaos and complexity. It discusses continuum thinking and recordkeeping metadata as two key building blocks of the approach, along with three facets of recordkeeping analysis involving the understanding of organisational culture, business process analysis and archival access.

Discussion of information and communication technologies as a “wild frontier” highlights the breaking down of recordkeeping processes within them. The causes for this chaos are complex and there is an urgent need to develop more coherent frameworks to identify and address the issues. Such frameworks need to grow from, and be conversant with, strong symbiotic relationships between social formations, recordkeeping processes, and archives, so that they may be applicable in an increasingly diverse range of organisational and community contexts. Embracing complexity is a must if the wild frontier is not to grow wilder.

The paper outlines a new disciplinary base from which new and old recordkeeping methods can be launched that are appropriate for this era.

The Information Age during the transition from the paper era to the digital one saw the fracturing and fragmenting of the information-based specialisations. More recently, professional norms for governance have been swept aside within new business models based on information based business applications. This paper aims to support an advance towards networked cohesion based on informatics, regenerating professionalism for the complex networked age.

New regulatory approaches will have to manage monistic diversity, connecting the deeper logic of continuum thinking in which information governance exists as part of a simple whole (the monistic component) with a recognition that the parts of information governance are much more complex than the whole (the expanding diversity). A continuum approach of this type involves studying things in motion as part of evolutionary processes.

The production of information is galloping ahead of its authoritative management, and this is at the heart of many of the failings of the post-truth information era. Informatics with its emphasis upon the joint operation of technologies, social processes and knowledge forming and its ability to be an umbrella term for many specialisations can be a cohering force.

The alignment of thought, action and ethical information governance across inter-connected practices for individuals, groups and organisations can be supported by the deeper logic and grounded experience of continuum thinking.

This paper will look to expand the array of sympathisers who wish to get more in touch with studying things in motion, including those trying to cope with the need to develop more adequate ways for managing nanosecond archiving processes.

The concept of the paper is how the library can be a useful framework for designing nurses' computer skills. The overarching aim of the research is to focus on how the computer skills involved in nurses' increasing access to health informatics can be used to improve nursing practice, consequently leading to better health care delivery. The objectives involved in achieving this aim include: finding out the level of nurses' computer literacy; finding out nurses' quest for electronic information for problem‐based nursing practice; investigating nurses' level of awareness of research‐based nursing practice; and finding out areas of desirability of informatics in nursing practice.

The measuring instrument used was a self‐administered questionnaire to senior nursing cadres in the Teaching Hospitals Complex, Ile‐Ife, Nigeria. There were 230 nurses in these categories, of whom 180 were given questionnaires to fill in. The questionnaire was pre‐tested and validated. A total of 167 copies were returned and found to be usable. Simple percentages and a summation weighted index were used to analyse the data.

The paper provides empirical insight into nurses' computer skills and the library's role. The majority of the respondents did not have knowledge of computers; in the School of Nursing they learned it through various means while practising, while a few could access and retrieve information from the available databases. Some difficulties were expressed, such as workload, lack of skills, location of the library with regard to the hospital, etc. The desirability of the introduction of health informatics to the profession is high.

The study is limited to a teaching hospital and the results may not be generalisable to non‐teaching hospitals, hence the need for further studies.

The impact of health informatics on nurses' computer skills and the library's role will save nurses from routine work, enhance their productivity, and will equip them better for the challenges that information technology presents for health professionals.

This paper fulfils and identifies the need to introduce health informatics to nursing practice in order to improve patient care.

The purpose of this paper is to provide insights into contemporary challenges associated with applying informatics and big data to healthcare quality improvement.

This paper is a narrative literature review.

Informatics serve as a bridge between big data and its applications, which include artificial intelligence, predictive analytics and point-of-care clinical decision making. Healthcare investment returns, measured by overall population health, healthcare operation efficiency and quality, are currently considered to be suboptimal. The challenges posed by informatics/big data span a wide spectrum from individual patients to government/regulatory agencies and healthcare providers.

The paper utilizes informatics and big data to improve population health and healthcare quality improvement.

Informatics and big data utilization have the potential to improve population health and service quality. This paper discusses the challenges posed by these methods as the author strives to achieve the aims.

This paper aims to examine the role a recordkeeping informatics approach can play in understanding and addressing these challenges. In 2011, the Wind Tunnel located at the Defence Science Technology Organisation (DTSO)’s Fisherman’s Bend site in Melbourne and managed by the Flight Systems Branch (FSB) celebrated its 70th anniversary. While cause for celebration, it also raised concerns for DSTO aeronautical scientists and engineers as to capacities to effectively and efficiently manage the data legacy of such an important research facility for the next 70 years, given increased technological, organisational and collaboration complexities.

This paper will detail how, through a collaborative action research project, the twin pillars of continuum thinking and recordkeeping metadata and the three facets of organisational culture, business process analysis and archival access, were used to examine the data, information, records and knowledge management challenges in this research data context. It will discuss how this perspective, was presented, engaged with and evolved into a set of strategies for the sustained development of FSB’s data, information and records management infrastructure, along with what is learnt about the approach through the action research process.

The project found that stressing the underlying principles of recordkeeping, applied to information resources of all kinds, resonated with the scientific community of FSB. It identified appropriate strategic, policy and process frameworks to better govern information management activities.

The utility of a recordkeeping informatics approach to unpack, explore and develop strategies in technically and organisationally complex recordkeeping environment is demonstrated, along with the kinds of professional collaboration required to tackle research data challenges.

In embracing technical and organisational complexity, the project has provided FSB with a strategic framework for the development of their information architecture so that it is both responsive to local needs, and consistent with broader DSTO requirements.

This paper further develops recordkeeping informatics as an emerging approach for tackling the recordkeeping challenges of our era in relation to maintaining and sustaining the evidential authenticity, integrity and reliability of big complex research data sets.

This paper looks at a number of approaches to health informatics that support decision‐making relevant to the integrated development and management of information systems with clinical and managerial practices in healthcare. Its main aim is to explore three such approaches for integrated development, the soft information systems and technologies methodology, participative simulation modelling and stakeholder analysis. A description of the health informatics research and development environment in the UK is given as necessary background to the paper. Organisational and social aspects are examined through these approaches including information and clinical process development, telemedicine, ethical issues of drug use and management, health policies and information management and strategies, tele‐education and modelling structures. In the conclusion the synergies between the three approaches are discussed and some principles are extracted for future research and development in integrated approaches to health informatics research.

Purpose – The purpose of the chapter is to provide an analytical overview of information research in the United Kingdom and of the role of the Research Assessment Exercises (RAE) in shaping the form and structure of that research.

Design/methodology/approach – The approach adopted is a detailed content analysis of the submissions made to the last UK RAE. This analysis is carried out in relation to four broad subject categorisations, and specific analysis of accounts of research carried out in the departments and research groups.

Findings – The RAE have played a key role in promoting research specialisms in library and information studies (LIS) research in the United Kingdom. The former general approach to research in information studies has been replaced by more focused research activities carried out in a variety of research groups spread across a diverse range of disciplines and departments, from LIS, to business and management, information systems, and computing and engineering.

Research implications – The prospects for general LIS research departments may be increasingly limited, as research becomes concentrated in sub-groups within larger organisational structures, subverting both departmental lines and conventional subject boundaries.

Originality/value – This overview provides a novel synthesis of information research in the United Kingdom in relation to four broad categories of research in information studies and information science, information management and social informatics, information systems and information interaction, and social computing and computational informatics. The account brings together a fragmented field of research in a compact and intelligible form.

The purpose of the study is to assess the environmental and socio‐economic impacts and risks of climate change through GIS database management system (DBMS) on land use‐informatics and climate‐informatics. The Dabka watershed constitutes a part of the Kosi Basin in the Lesser Himalaya, India in district Nainital has been selected for the case illustration.

Land use‐informatics consists of land use mapping and change diction, i.e. decadal changes and annual changes. Climate‐informatics consists of climate change detection through daily, monthly and annual weather data for a period of 25 years.

The exercise revealed that oak and pine forests have decreased, respectively, by 25 percent (4.48 km²) and 3 percent (0.28 km²) thus bringing a decline of 4.76 km² forest in the watershed during 1990 to 2010. But, due to climate change the mixed forest taking place of oak forest in certain pockets and consequently the mixed forest in the catchment increased by 18 percent (2.3 km²) during the same period which reduced the overall loss of forests in the region but its not eco‐friendly as the oak forest. Barren land increased 1.21 km² (56 percent), riverbed increased 0.78 km² (52 percent) and cultivated land increased about 0.63 km² (3 percent) during the period of 1990 to 2010. Out of the total seven classes of the land use land cover, five classes (i.e. Oak, Pine, Mixed, Barren and Riverbed) are being changed dominantly due to climate change factor and anthropogenic factors plays a supporting role whereas only two classes (scrub land and agricultural land) are being changed dominantly by anthropogenic factors and climate change factors plays a supporting role. Expansion of mixed forest land brought out due to upslope shifting of existing forest species due to climate change factor only because upslope areas getting warmer than past with the rate of 9°C‐12°C/two decades. Consequently, the results concluded that the high rate of land use change accelerating several environmental problems such as high runoff, flash flood, river‐line flood and soil erosion during monsoon season and drought during non‐monsoon period. These environmental problems cause great loss to life and property and poses serious threat to the process of development with have far‐reaching economic and social consequences.

This study generated primary data on land use‐informatics and climate‐informatics to integrate each‐other for impact assessment and mitigation through sustainable land use as constitutes a part of a multidisciplinary project, Department of Science and Technology (D.S.T.) Government of India.