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This paper seeks to address the question: do university web sites publish the same kind of information and use the same kind of hyperlinks year on year or do these change over time?

A link classification exercise is used to identify temporal changes in the distribution of different types of academic web links changes, using the academic web spaces of the UK, Australia and New Zealand in the years 2000 and 2006.

Significant increases in “research oriented”, “social/leisure” and “superficial” links were identified as well as notable decreases in “technical” and “personal” links. Some of these changes identified may be explained by general changes in the management of university web sites and some by more wide‐spread internet trends, e.g. dynamic pages, blogs and social networking. The increase in the proportion of research‐oriented links is particularly hopeful for future link analysis research.

This is an important issue from the perspective of interpreting the results of academic web analyses, because changes in link types over time would also force interpretations of link analyses to change over time.

A growing amount of information available on the web can be classified as contextual information, putting already existing information into a new context rather than creating isolated new information resources. Blogs are a typical and popular example of this category. By looking at blogs from a more context‐oriented view, it is possible to deconstruct them into structures which are more contextual than just focused on the content, facilitating flexible reuse of these structures: that is the aim of this paper.

The paper looks at the underlying structures of blogs and blog posts, representing them as multi‐ended links. This alternative representation of blogs and blog posts allows us to represent them as reusable information structures. This paper presents blogs as a popular content type, but the approach of restructuring Web 2.0 content can be extended to other classes of information, as long as they can be regarded as being mainly contextual.

By deconstructing blogs and blog posts into their essential properties, it can be shown how there is a simple and universal representation for blogs. This representation allows the reuse of blog information across specific blog or blogging platforms, and can even go beyond blogs by representing other web content which provides context.

This paper presents a novel approach for mapping a popular web content type to a simple and universal representation. The value of such a unified representation lies in exposing the structural similarities among blogs and blog posts, and making them available for reuse.

Web sites are typically designed attending to a variety of criteria. However, web site structure determines browsing behavior and way‐finding results. The aim of this study is to identify the main profiles of web sites' organizational structure by modeling them as graphs and considering several social network analysis features.

A case study based on 80 institutional Spanish universities' web sites has been used for this purpose. For each root domain, two different networks have been considered: the first is the domain network, and the second is the page network. In both cases, several indicators related to social network analysis have been evaluated to characterize the web site structure. Factor analysis provides the statistical methodology to adequately extract the main web site profiles in terms of their internal structure.

This paper allows the categorization of web site design styles and provides general guidelines to assist designers to better identify areas for creating and improving institutional web sites. The findings of this study offer practical implications to web site designers for creating and maintaining an effective web presence, and for improving usability.

The research is limited to 80 institutional Spanish universities' web sites. Other institutional university web sites from different countries can be analyzed, and the conclusions could be compared or enlarged.

This paper highlights the importance of the internal web sites structure, and their implications on usability and way‐finding results. As a difference to previous research, the paper is focused on the comparison of internal structure of institutional web sites, rather than analyzing the web as a whole or the interrelations among web sites.

The purpose of this paper is to probe the external visibility of the web sites of all seven ALA‐accredited Canadian library and information science (LIS) schools. The number of inlinks to the schools' web sites is used as an indicator of the visibility of all or some portions of the LIS web sites.

Inlinks pointing to the LIS school web sites were collected using the AlltheWeb search engine. The LIS school web pages pointed to by inlinks were manually analysed to discover visible topics and contents.

Four content clusters were identified by which to group the content of all the inlinked LIS school web pages. These clusters were LIS, research, home page and resources. The most visible cluster was the LIS cluster and the least visible was the research cluster. The most visible topics were student projects/activities, LIS‐related resources and course‐related information, in that order. The home page of each LIS school's web site was shown to be the single web page with the most visibility.

This was a comparative webometric study, which collected and analysed inlinks for seven Canadian LIS school web sites at two different times, 3 years apart (2003 and 2006). In the study, the ranking of visible clusters, topics and web pages from the LIS web sites were identified.

One of the relevance feedback techniques used in search engines is providing a link to similar documents for each retrieved document in a results page. The purpose of this paper is to assess whether the “similar pages” relevance feedback feature of Google is truly effective in retrieving documents relevant to the information needs of users.

The effectiveness of the “similar pages” feature of Google was investigated using 30 paired searches conducted by 30 users with real information needs. The precision ratio of the results of the initial searches and of the searches conducted by clicking the “similar pages” links of the four most relevant results of each initial search were compared. The time spent and the overlapped results of the two kinds of searches were also compared.

The mean values for precision of and time spent on the “similar pages” searches were significantly less than those for the initial searches. Although, the number of overlapping documents in the “similar pages” searches was higher than that for the initial searches, the difference was not statistically significant.

The findings of this research would be useful for search engine designers as well as the numerous users of common search engines, especially Google, to decide if “similar pages” features truly enhance the quality of information retrieval on the web.

The experimental evidence provided in this paper relates to system design of information retrieval systems on the web.

The aim of this paper is to scrutinize the accessibility and decay of web references (URLs) cited in five open access social sciences journals indexed by ISI.

After acquiring all the papers published by these journals during 2002‐2007, their web citations were extracted and analyzed from an accessibility point of view. Moreover, for initially missed citations complementary pathways such as using Internet Explorer and the Google search engine were employed.

The study revealed that at first check 73 per cent of URLs are accessible, while 27 per cent have disappeared. It is notable that the rate of accessibility increased to 89 per cent and the rate of decay decreased to 11 per cent after using complementary pathways. The “.net” domain, with an availability of 96 per cent (a decay of 4 per cent) has the greatest stability and persistence among all domains, while the most stable file format is PDF, with an availability of 93 per cent (a decay of 7 per cent).

Given the inevitable, destructive and progressing decay phenomenon in web citations, after estimating the extent of this decay for five journals using innovative and standard methods, this paper suggests recommendations for preventing it. The paper carries research value for web content providers, publishers, editors, authors and researchers.

This paper seeks to describe and discuss a tagging experiment involving images related to Israeli and Jewish cultural heritage. The aim of this experiment was to compare freely assigned tags with values (free text) assigned to predefined metadata elements.

Two groups of participants were asked to provide tags for 12 images. The first group of participants was asked to assign descriptive tags to the images without guidance (unstructured tagging), while the second group was asked to provide free‐text values to predefined metadata elements (structured tagging).

The results show that on the one hand structured tagging provides guidance to the users, but on the other hand different interpretations of the meaning of the elements may worsen the tagging quality instead of improving it. In addition, unstructured tagging allows for a wider range of tags.

The recommendation is to experiment with a system where the users provide both the tags and the context of these tags.

Unstructured tagging has become highly popular on the web, thus it is important to evaluate its merits and shortcomings compared to more conventional methods.

This tutorial will cover the relationship between operating systems, inter‐computer communications, and file transfers.

Supply‐chain management, at least in the largest multi‐national corporations, is a global endeavor. It is undergoing a transformation caused by the worldwide spread of digital communications, and e‐commerce in particular. Hence, it is necessary to understand the development of e‐commerce and its future trends. This development is based on what is at times rather rapid advances generated or supported by the external environment with factors like institutions and electronic infrastructures. E‐commerce is rapidly spreading internationally, but by no means uniformly, across boundaries, or for that matter within countries. The great relevance of examining the international spread of e‐commerce is that most corporations actually source globally. The stages of e‐commerce evolution, from rather primitive incipiency to highly advanced B2B forms, are conditioned by factors which range from the availability of complementary assets to institutional considerations.

Moi University must successfully manage change in order to improve institutional performance, ease of communication and the management of knowledge and information. To this end, information technology (IT) can be of great use, particularly regarding access to, and facilitation of the transfer of, knowledge and information. Clearly, Moi University must use IT to its full potential as it has invested heavily in IT for its strategic objectives. Evidence of this can be seen in the areas of library services, faculty activities, central services and administration and management operations. This paper focuses on improving information management and communication based on the new generation of multimedia computer packages within an academic institutional environment. It is therefore argued that a management information system designed for Moi University needs to reflect the organizational objectives and current multimedia technologies in order to remain strategically important. This paper then examines the potentiality or utility of integrated IT at the disposal of Moi University.