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Misinformation (i.e. information identified as false) spreads widely and quickly on social media – a space where crowds of ordinary citizens can become leading voices – during a crisis when information is in short supply. Using the theoretical lenses of socially curated flow and networked gatekeeping frameworks, we address the following three aims: First, we identify emergent opinion leaders in misinformation-related conversations on social media. Second, we explore distinct groups that contribute to online discourses about misinformation. Lastly, we investigate the actual dominance of misinformation within disparate groups in the early phases of mass shooting crises.

This paper used network and cluster analyses of Twitter data that focused on the four most prevalent misinformation themes surrounding the El Paso mass shooting.

A total of seven clusters of users emerged, which were classified into five categories: (1) boundary-spanning hubs, (2) broadly popular individuals, (3) reputation-building hubs, (4) locally popular individuals and (5) non-opinion leaders. Additionally, a content analysis of 128 tweets in six clusters, excluding the cluster of non-opinion leaders, further demonstrated that the opinion leaders heavily focused on reiterating and propagating misinformation (102 out of 128 tweets) and collectively made zero corrective tweets.

These findings expand the intellectual understanding of how various types of opinion leaders can shape the flow of (mis)information in a crisis. Importantly, this study provides new insights into the role of trans-boundary opinion leaders in creating an echo chamber of misinformation by serving as bridges between otherwise fragmented discourses.

Libraries and the information community have moved rapidly into an era of powerful networked scholarly workstations, large quantities of information accessible in electronic formats, and dispersed information sources connected to regional and national networks. This rich diversity poses new challenges for the provision of appropriate reference services. The University of Texas at Austin General Libraries successfully implemented and tested a prototype solution to the problem of providing reference assistance to scholars who are accessing networked information resources and who are at locations remote from expert librarians. Librarians were able to intervene directly in information access and retrieval sessions, remotely assisting the user during the real‐time, online process. The testbed for the project was a CD‐ROM network delivering U.S. government information to DOS workstations via Ethernets connected to a routed TCP/IP wide‐area network and utilizing off‐the‐shelf remote control software. Although problems with existing technology were discovered, this mode of providing reference assistance is a valid model for future services.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effectiveness of intrusion detection systems as an access control supplement in protecting electronic information resources and networks in information‐centric organisations. The study focuses on the strengths and vulnerabilities of intrusion detection systems (IDSs).

A qualitative case study is conducted with a retail organisation, and an educational institution in Cape Town, South Africa. Using purposive sampling, interviews are held with network administrators of sample institutions to unpack security priorities and the functionalities of IDSs, the significance of the system in concept, whether it is understood within network departments, the cost factor, and its value in securing networks against all possible security challenges. The activity theory is applied as a lens to understanding the security process, and to inform a future security frameworks and research initiatives.

The findings are clear. Although IDSs have vulnerabilities, they offer an added cushion to conventional network access control efforts. Access control for example, guards the gate but IDSs are the watchdogs in your yard, and IDS closes a gap in a network security that only IDSs can. It alerts you of a potential attacker, enabling you to respond promptly, in whichever way you like. It does however, require deliberate reaction against a detected intrusion to be effective, but remains a useful security tool that should become standard to all network security initiatives. A framework presenting network security as a work activity – with actors who are guided by goals – is offered to guide planning, implementations of network security and further research in future.

Security awareness is crucial to effective e‐citizenry, but complacency could be a threat. As a unique contribution, the paper presents an activity‐theory work‐activity framework of analysing network security. Further, the paper presents original, industry‐specific interview findings, raising awareness that existing security measures need to be viewed as a continuous work‐activity whose planning and implementations are embedded on goals and processes towards pursued outcomes. Access controls themselves should be monitored. They should be supplemented by effective intrusion detection systems if unauthorised access is to be effectively minimised.

Many of the activities people perform with the Internet are new, and possibly could not have been conceived before the network became available. Describes innovative uses of the Internet by staff of two Australian universities. While the Internet provides opportunities for communication among its users, it poses challenges to the computing and information systems professionals who support them. It also presents librarians with the opportunity to apply their established skills as educators, information managers, custodians, information providers, and change agents in their work with Internet users.

Although social networks are considered influential to employment outcomes, little is known about the behavioural manifestation of networking during job search. The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of networking amongst 16–24 year old active jobseekers living in Scotland.

A sequential, mixed methods approach was applied to gather data, including interviews (no. of participants=7), a focus group (no. of participants=6) and a survey questionnaire (no. of participants=558). The study design was underpinned by a prominent model from the field of Information Science. As such, job search networking has been treated as an information behaviour.

The findings show that young people acquire different types of information from network contacts throughout job search, and that frequent networking is associated with positive outcomes. This is especially true of engaging with family members, acquaintances and employers. However, barriers such as a lack of confidence or awareness mean that few young people make the most of their social contacts when seeking work.

Careers professionals can use this knowledge to advise clients on maximising the potential of social networks as sources of job search information.

A key contribution of this work is that it provides a detailed insight into a topic that has been neglected in previous studies: that of the process of job search networking as an information behaviour.

Many of the activities people perform with the Internet are new, and possibly could not have been conceived before the network became available. Describes innovative uses of the Internet by staff of two Australian universities. While the Internet provides opportunities for communication among its users, it poses challenges to the computing and information systems professionals who support them. It also presents librarians with the opportunity to apply their established skills as educators, information managers, custodians, information providers and change agents in their work with Internet users.

Information carriers (including mass media and We-Media) play important roles in information diffusion on social networks. The purpose of this paper is to investigate changes in the dissemination of information combing with data analysis.

This work analyzed nearly 200 years of coverage of different information carriers during different periods of human society, from the period of only mouth-to-mouth communication to the period of modern society. Information diffusion models are built to illustrate how the information dynamic changes with time and combined box office data of several movies to predict the process of information diffusion. In addition, a metric is defined to identify which information would become news in the future.

Results show that with the development of information carriers, information spreads faster and wider nowadays. The correctness of the metric proposed has been validated.

The structure of social networks influences the dissemination of information. There are an enormous number of factors that influence the formation of hotspots.

The results and conclusion of this work will benefit by predicting the evolution of information carriers. The metric proposed will aid in searching hot news in the future.

This work may shed some light on a better understanding of information diffusion, spreading not only on social networks but also on the carriers used for the information spreading.

The need for effective directories of networked information resources becomes more critical as these resources—online library catalogs, file archives, online journal article repositories, and information servers—proliferate, and as demand grows for intelligent tools to navigate and use such information resources. The existing approaches are based primarily on print‐oriented directories, but print‐oriented directories will not scale to support the future services that will help network users navigate tens of thousands of resources. The paper first explores the “user” perspective in various usage scenarios for employing a database of descriptive information to navigate or access networked information resources. It then considers specific data elements that will be required in a description of these networked information resources. Classification of networked information resources will ultimately rely on large‐scale prototypes, coupled with a new generation of advanced information‐seeking tools, and within the reality of economics.

Online web searches have played crucial roles in influencing consumers’ purchasing decisions. Web search traffic information enables researchers and practitioners to better understand consumers in terms of their preferences and interests, among other things. The purpose of this paper is to use web search traffic information provided by Google Trends to derive relationships among product brands as well as those between product brands and product attributes to propose a method to enhance the visibility of consumer brand positioning.

This study builds upon the interesting observation that consumers’ behavior in performing simultaneous searches, or searches including two or more keywords, can be converted into data indicating relationships among brands as well as those between brands and their attributes. The study focuses on the cases of hybrid cars and tablet PCs, and applies a social network analysis method to identify these relationships. Time series information on web search traffic is used because it can track these two product groups from the early stages to the present. This step is completed to verify the changes in the status of each brand and in their relationships that occurred in consumers’ minds over time.

Results show that consumers’ web search behaviors reveal the brand positioning and brand-attribute associations in their minds. Specifically, using consumers’ simultaneous search data, the authors derived relationships among brands (brand-brand network) from consumers’ behaviors of searching simultaneously for two brands and the relationships between brands and attributes (brand-product attributes network) from consumers’ behavior of searching simultaneously for a specific brand and certain product attributes.

Theoretically, this study verifies that consumers’ web search traffic information can be used to microscopically identify the positions of individual brands and their relationships in the minds of consumers. Regarding practical applications, this study proposes a method that can be used by companies to track how consumers perceive their brands by performing a simple and cost-effective analysis using the free search traffic information provided by Google.

This paper is part of a doctoral research which aimed at proposing a national information system for educational administrators in Pakistan. However, this paper only aims at identifying what an information system is composed of and does; defining the information infrastructure (i.e. libraries/information centers and networks) needed for the development of a national educational information system; identifying the nature and design of the information infrastructure in Pakistan; and ascertaining the problems and gaps existing in the information infrastructure of Pakistan and why they exist.

The study is based on review of the available literature. For the literature search, valid sources of published and unpublished information were consulted (i.e. books, journal articles, reports, conference/workshop proceedings, theses and dissertations).

Many library/information centers and information networks are working in the educational domain of Pakistan. The position of academic, national and special libraries is also presented in this review. The basic weakness traced in this review is in the infrastructure of library/information centers and information networks and disintegration of available information sources. The information does exist within libraries/information centers and information networks but the educational administrators have problems in tracing this information. As a result, available information is not being utilized properly in educational planning and development in Pakistan. There is a need to pool the existing information sources, services and networks in one place to form a well‐integrated information system that may provide a holistic and complete overview of education enterprise for realistic planning and resource allocation.

This paper is the first to present the current position of the available libraries/information centers and information networks within the educational domain of Pakistan. Such a review may help the designers of educational information systems.