Volume 24, Issue 1

This is the inaugural issue of LIBRES e-journal under “new management” at the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. The first 23 volumes of LIBRES were published by the Department of Information Studies, Curtin University. It was then felt that a change in environment and management would be beneficial for the journal, especially as long-time editor-in-chief Kerry Smith was retiring from academe. A 23-year run is impressive for any journal. However, the world has changed a lot in a quarter of a century, and it was time to take a fresh look at the journal, try new ways of doing things, and perhaps pick a new direction to catch a fresh wind …

The contents of a popular film and television video collection at a mid-sized university totaling 2,242 items were examined for availability and total number of checkouts on three major streaming services: Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime. A total of 1026 titles were coded for availability on Netflix and Hulu. Then, 454 items were coded for availability on Amazon Instant. It was found that total circulation counts changed depending on the streaming services used. Specifically only Hulu was found to correlate negatively. Library titles available on Netflix Streaming had more charges on average then titles not available on Netflix streaming. Titles available on Amazon Instant were twice as likely to circulate then items not available on Amazon Instant. This leads to the possibility that Amazon Instant might be used as collection development tool in order to gauge how often certain DVD title could circulate. In addition it can be concluded that availability over subscription streaming services, such as Netflix and Amazon Instant, actually points to items that may circulate more frequently.

Introduction. This study sought to identify common factors of library use, knowledge and perceptions, and clusters of library users with similar profiles on these factors, reflecting different patterns of library use behaviour.
Method. A questionnaire was designed to collect data relating to five aspects of library use, knowledge and perceptions: 1. Library search skills/confidence, 2. Familiarity with and use of library resources, 3. Familiarity with and use of library services, 4. Familiarity with the library organization system, 5. Perceptions of library searching experience. A survey was conducted on a group of undergraduate students in Japan.
Analysis. Principal components analysis was applied to identify the principal components of library use/knowledge/perception, while cluster analysis found different user groups with different profiles of library use/knowledge/perception.
Results. Four clusters of undergraduate library users were identified as ineffective library users, effective library users, ineffective but positive users, and self-sufficient users.

Thailand suffers from frequent flooding during the monsoon season and droughts in summer. In some places, severe cases of both may even occur. Managing water resources effectively requires a good information system for decision-making. There is currently a lack in knowledge sharing between organizations and researchers responsible. These are the experts in monitoring and controlling the water supply and its conditions. The knowledge owned by these experts are not captured, classified and integrated into an information system for decision-making. Ontologies are formal knowledge representation models. Knowledge management and artificial intelligence technology is a basic requirement for developing ontology-based semantic search on the Web. In this paper, we present ontology modeling approach that is based on the experiences of the researchers. The ontology for drought management consists of River Basin Ontology, Statistics Ontology and Task Ontology to facilitate semantic match during search. The hybrid ontology architecture can also be used for drought management.

Stories are becoming an increasingly important knowledge management and knowledge sharing tool to communicate ideas, values and experiences both to internal organizational members and to external stakeholders. This paper reports an initial effort to develop a framework for the analysis of organizational stories. The framework has two major parts: the story framework comprising six elements, and the interaction/communication framework. A story analysis instrument was constructed based on the framework, comprising a series of questions to answer or a set of categories to select. The instrument was applied to twenty organizational stories, and was found to be easy to use and achieve good agreement across the coders. Relations between story type, knowledge embodied and story purpose were explored, and recommendations for crafting organizational stories are made.

This study aimed to investigate the relationship between the different learning styles of Thai youths and their information behavior at a time where rapidly developing information and communication technology has affected the informational environment. This was a qualitative research study which used theoretical sampling to select study areas and involved thirty participants in their fourth, fifth and sixth year in a large secondary school. The Grasha-Riechmann Student Learning Style Scale was used to determine the students’ learning styles. The results indicated that learning styles affected information behavior only slightly because the collaborative style of Thai youths was to divide the task and work individually. Information behavior was best examined at a personal level.