David Ellis

Aberystwyth University | AU · Department of Information Studies

This paper presents research approaches for investigating the development of university libraries into learning organisations, using Thailand as a case study. Whilst the concept of the learning organisation has been in existence since 1970s, it remains problematic. Current debate centres on the lack of an agreed definition of the concept coupled w...

The aim of this study is to understand and explain different dimensions of absorptive capacity and the strategies used in practice to realise it. The theoretical and conceptual contribution of the study lies in the adoption of a dual process and structure approach, aiming at identifying, respectively, how learning takes place and what learning take...

Purpose The purpose of this study is to offer a theoretical and practical explanation for the nature and reasons for inter-organizational knowledge sharing across an informal clique of competing five-star hotels in the Saudi Arabian religious tourism and hospitality industry. Design/methodology/approach The methodology is an adapted form of the...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to report the findings of a study to investigate the changes in scholarly communication practices among a group of scholars in the UK and build upon the results that were published in a previous paper. Design/methodology/approach The study deployed a naturalistic inquiry approach using semi-structured intervi...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate scholars’ attitudes toward informal publishing and dissemination to provide a view of the challenges and advantages of using such channels. Although considerable research has been carried out in relation to peer-reviewed scholarly publishing, relatively few studies have investigated the adoption...

Purpose – This study aims to accomplish three objectives: first, to investigate the role and impact of information and communication technologies on the practice of science in the UK; second, to examine and characterise changes in scholarly communication activities such as information seeking, publishing and collaboration; and third, to investigate...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe one of the preliminary results from interviews conducted as part of a PhD study into examining the role of peer and family influences on information-seeking behaviour. Design/methodology/approach – The principal method of data collection was 38 semi-structured critical incident interviews, based o...

Purpose – This paper aims to look at two well-respected cardiothoracic journals and one general medical journal over the period of a decade to find out any major differences in content and referencing to warrant the fact that the general journal should be ranked far higher than the specialist journals. Design/methodology/approach – The paper condu...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to review the literature on organisational cultural change and problems in its implementation, focussing on the case of building a learning organisation (LO) within university library context. Design/methodology/approach – Key literature published within Library and Information Science, Business and Managemen...

Research into information failure has often focussed on deficiencies in information systems and research into information behaviour has often placed emphasis on the individual and his/her interactions, with some work focusing on organisational information behaviours and their contribution to information failures. Using the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the concept of serendipity and approaches to its study particularly in relation to information studies. Design/methodology/approach – The origins of the term serendipity are described and its elaboration as an exploratory and explanatory concept in science and the social sciences are outlined. The...

Reprinted from Library and Information Research, 36, 112 120-146, 2012.

This paper explores elaborations of Grounded Theory in relation to Arenas/Social Worlds Theory. The notions of arenas and social worlds were present in early applications of Grounded Theory but have not been as much used or recognised as the general Grounded Theory approach, particularly in the information studies field. The studies discussed here...

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 U...

This chapter explores how early theorising about information behaviour and the emergence of conceptual modelling in information behaviour research had its beginnings in thinking that was taking place in the very late 1970s and early 1980s in Europe and the USA. Some of these ideas were presented in papers that are very familiar and much cited, but...

This paper explores the effects of introducing rewards within a virtual community of practice: the software vendor SAP (Systems Applications and Products) online global community. The study of postings to the SAP community discussion forums shows that rewards have had a damaging effect on the exchange of knowledge and generalised trust among member...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of research in the Department of Information Studies at the University of Wales Aberystwyth and an introduction to the papers in the special issue. Design/methodology/approach – A narrative review of the previous research activities and contemporary research environment of the Departmen...

Ellis, D.; Oldridge, R. and Vasconcelos, A. (2004). A Community and virtual community. In B. Cronin (Ed.), Annual Review of Information and Science and Technology, Vol. 38 (pp.145- 186). Medford: Information Today. RAE2008

This study explores the extent to which the information seeking behaviour of researchers active in the field of English Literature in the universities of the UK and the wider world has changed as a result of the developing electronic information revolution. It deals with the researchers’ attitudes towards the Internet and examines their position wi...

This item is freely available online at http://www.dlib.org/dlib/june03/urquhart/06urquhart.html This article examines disciplinary differences in the use of electronic journals by academic staff and students and considers whether library services need to differentiate between staff and students when planning support services for electronic journal...

This article is the fifth in a series of articles from our study examining information-seeking behavior in relation to information-retrieval (IR) interaction. This article focuses on the examination of the interaction variables within Saracevic's ([1989]) triadic IR model. The analysis involved an examination of the information-searching behavior o...

This article explores the relationship between the concept of uncertainty in information seeking, within a model of the problem-solving process proposed by Wilson (1999a) and variables derived from other models and from the work of Ellis and Kuhlthau. The research has involved longitudinal data collection in the United States and United Kingdom emp...

Our project has investigated the processes of mediated information retrieval (IR) searching during human information-seeking processes to characterize aspects of this process, including information seekers' changing situational contexts; information problems; uncertainty reduction; successive searching, cognitive styles; and cognitive and affective...

This is the fourth in a series resulting from a joint research project directed by Professor Tom Wilson in the United Kingdom and Dr. Amanda Spink in the United States. The analysis reported here sought to test a number of hypotheses linking global/analytic cognitive styles and aspects of researchers' problem-solving and related information-seeking...

Our project has investigated the processes of mediated information retrieval (IR) searching during human information-seeking processes to characterize aspects of this process, including information seekers' changing situational contexts; information problems; uncertainty reduction; successive searching, cognitive styles; and cognitive and affective...

This is the fourth in a series resulting from a joint research project directed by Professor Tom Wilson in the United Kingdom and Dr. Amanda Spink in the United States. The analysis reported here sought to test a number of hypotheses linking global/analytic cognitive styles and aspects of researchers' problem-solving and related information-seeking...

This article is the fifth in a series of articles from our study examining information-seeking behavior in relation to information-retrieval (IR) interaction. This article focuses on the examination of the interaction variables within Saracevic's ([1989]) triadic IR model. The analysis involved an examination of the information-searching behavior o...

Our project has investigated the processes of mediated information retrieval (IR) searching during human information-seeking processes to characterize aspects of this process, including information seekers' changing situational contexts; information problems; uncertainty reduction; successive searching, cognitive styles; and cognitive and affective...

This article explores the relationship between the concept of uncertainty in information seeking, within a model of the problem-solving process proposed by Wilson (1999a) and variables derived from other models and from the work of Ellis and Kuhlthau. The research has involved longitudinal data collection in the United States and United Kingdom emp...

Different forms of indexing and search facilities available on the Web are described. Use of facet analysis to structure hypertext concept structures is outlined in relation to work on (1.) development of hypertext knowledge bases for designers of learning materials and (2) construction of knowledge based hypertext interfaces. The problem of lack o...

This paper provides preliminary results from a major study of human interaction with information retrieval (IR) systems. Our study was funded jointly by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the British Library Research and Innovation Centre (BLRIC) (Spink, Wilson, Ellis & Ford, 1998). The goal of the research was to explore the nature of media...

The creation of hypertext links by manual means is difficult and costly, but is often preferred to automatic methods in attempts to optimize hypertext ‘quality’. Experiments show, however, that levels of consistency amongst human link-creators—in common with those historically observed amongst human indexers—are generally low and variable, and that...

This paper documents the continuing relevance of facet analysis as a technique for searching and organising World Wide Web based materials. The two approaches underlying WWW searching and indexing – word and concept based indexing – are outlined. It is argued that facet analysis as an a posteori approach to classification using words from the subje...

The relationship between information science and information systems (IS) research is examined through analysis of the subject literature of each field and by citation and co-citation analysis of highly cited researchers in each field. The subfields of user studies (US) and information retrieval (IR) research were selected to represent information...

As digital libraries become a major source of information for many people, we need to know more about how people seek and retrieve information in digital environments. Quite commonly, users with a problem-at-hand and associated question-in-mind repeatedly search a literature for answers, and seek information in stages over extended periods from a v...

For the purposes of this article, the indexing of information is interpreted as the pre-processing of information in order to enable its retrieval. This definition thus spans a dimension extending from classification-based approaches (pre-co-ordinate) to keyword searching (post-co-ordinate). In the first section we clarify our use of terminology, b...

The study explores the role of information and information seeking in the Research and Development Department of an international oil and gas company. The information seeking patterns of engineers and research scientists at Statoil's Research Centre, in Trondheim, Norway were studied in relation to their research activities in different phases and...

An important stage in the process of retrieval of objects from a hypertext database is the creation of a set of internodal links that are intended to represent the relationships existing between objects; this operation is often undertaken manually, just as index terms are often manually assigned to documents in a conventional retrieval system. In a...

The problem of measurement in information retrieval research is traced to its source in the first retrieval tests. The problem is seen as presenting a chronic dilemma for the field. This dilemma has taken three forms as the discipline has evolved: (1) The dilemma of measurement in the archetypal approach: Stated relevance versus user relevance; (2)...

The subject of this book is the hypertext retrieval system, which assists the user in the retrieval of information from collections of documents stored in the form of hypertext. Chapter 2 includes an overview of the structural and functional components of such a system, introducing the terms ‘node’ and ‘link’ in reference, respectively, to the repr...

An important stage in the process of retrieval of objects from a hypertext database is the creation of a set of inter-nodal links that are intended to represent the relationships existing between objects; this operation is often undertaken manually, just as index terms are often manually assigned to documents in a conventional retrieval system. Stu...

An important stage in the process of retrieval of objects from a hypertext database is the creation of a set of inter-nodal links that are intended to represent the relationships existing between objects; this operation is often undertaken manually, just as index terms are often manually assigned to documents in a conventional retrieval system. In...

The project was designed to provide a framework for a comprehensive user evaluation of both software packages and hypertext environments. User evaluation constituted an integral part of the design and development process. The learning packages and hypertext systems were evaluated in terms of the extent to which they provide flexibility for learners...

The focus of this article is the employment of the grounded theory approach to derive models of the information-seeking patterns of academic researchers. The background to the development of interest in qualitative approaches to information studies in the United Kingdom is described, and the results of four studies, carried out at the University of...

The information seeking patterns of a group of research physicists and research chemists were analysed and the key features of those patterns identified. The aim was to use a similar methodology to that employed in a previous study of the information seeking activities of a group of social scientists and to effect a comparison between the informati...

This paper explores the role of paradigms in information retrieval research. The nature of a paradigm is outlined and the fundamental sense of a paradigm as an exemplar is identified. The applicability of the paradigm concept to a multi-disciplinary field such as information science is discussed and it is concluded that paradigms can be a legitimat...

This paper is intended to provide a brief introduction to the concept of hypertext illustrated with examples from experimental and operational systems. The origins of the hypertext concept are described and different generic types of hypertext systems outlined. The potential and problems of hypertext are discussed with particular reference to infor...

A behavioural approach to information retrieval system design is outlined based on the derivation of a behavioural model of the information seeking patterns of academic social scientists. The information seeking patterns of a variety of academic social scientists were broken down into six characteristics: starting, chaining, browsing, differentiati...

A behavioural model derived from analysis of the information-seeking patterns of academic social scientists is employed to provide recommendations for information retrieval system design. The six major characteristics identified in the information-seeking patterns - starting, chaining, browsing, differentiating, monitoring and extracting - are desc...

En sciences sociales, la recherche peut concerner: soit une communaute particuliere ― chercheurs, praticiens ou decideurs et par consequent un domaine precis ― soit des problemes d'information ― generation, communication, utilisation ― examines avec des methodes et dans des perspectives propres aux sciences sociales. Les recherches faites en Europe...

There is a critical lacuna in information retrieval research between the theoretical framework employed in laboratory tests to explain the performance of information retrieval systems, and the sorts of factors which bear on their operational effectiveness. The influence of assumptions as to which factors it is important to take into account in eval...

The relationship between theory and explanation in informa tion retrieval research is analysed. Problems in the development of a generalisable information retrieval theory from informa tion retrieval experiment and the associated mathematical mod elling is examined. The source of these problems is traced back to assumptions underlying information r...

An important stage in the process of retrieval of objects from a hypertext database is the creation of a set of inter-nodal links that are intended to represent the relationships existing between objects; this operation is often undertaken manually, just as index terms are often manually assigned to documents in a conventional retrieval system. In...