Alan Gilchrist

Barry Mahon

This timely book, introduced by Peter Morville, widely recognized as a founding father of information architecture, starts from the perception that information systems and sources need to be designed within a framework--an architecture." It then describes and analyzes the various components of this building process: the design environment; hardware, networks, and software; knowledge representation (including taxonomies, classifications, and thesauri); interoperability (including standards and markup languages); user interfaces; usability and findability; and prospects for the future. The roles of general management, computing personnel, and information professionals as joint owners of the information architecture are analyzed. Carefully selected synopses of how these techniques actually work underscore the importance of information architecture in the real world. This state-of-the-art guide will appeal to librarians, knowledge managers, and information studies students.

Designing Information Environments for Purpose

Information Architecture

Judi Vernau

The ISKO UK Biennial Conference, 4th - 5th July, 2011, London honoured the life and achievements of Brian C Vickery. This book celebrates his influence on the development of the information profession, with contributions from over 50 authors to address research and developments in knowledge organization.

Proceedings of the ISKO UK Second Biennial Conference, 4th - 5th July, 2011, London

Facets of Knowledge Organization

Reviews the history of the scientific development of lightness theory and outlines and critiques the theories of lightness, laying out the strengths and weaknesses of each. This work presents author's argument that previous models of lightness perception fail to capture the errors and illusions present in human perception.

Seeing Black and White

The author's father was the manager of a biscuit factory in an industrial area of north west London. He had served in the Great War, and after the war his first wife died in the 1919 flu pandemic, leaving him with a young daughter. He remarried and had another four children, Alan being the second. With scant formal education themselves, he and his wife were able to offer all the children a good education, and to Alan a medical one as well. It was during a biology class in his first year in the medical school that the author first heard about two streams of blood in the same chamber of the heart. In 1956, 'by a set of curious chances' (The Mikado), the author found himself in the setting he had dreamt about when he was a little boy: practising medicine in rural Africa. This was in Nyasaland, part of the former Central African Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. (Now Zambia, Zimbabwe and Malawi). In 1962 he was posted to Zomba as medical superintendent and met Pauline who had been born in the same hospital 21 years previously. The following year they were married, and immediately after the reception left for Fort Victoria in Rhodesia, where he had been offered the post of medical superintendent. Those were momentous times: bringing up a young family in a rapidly changing African environment and practising medicine in the midst of it. The story would make interesting reading, but the author has put it aside and only shown the details of his investigations of the foetal circulation in his little book.

6Th and Final Edition

The Foetal Circulation

Jean Aitchison

David Bawden

A practical guide to the construction of thesauri for use in information retrieval, written by leading experts in the field. Includes: planning and design; vocabulary control; specificity and compound terms; structure and relationships; auxiliary retrieval devices; multilingual thesauri; AAT Compound Term Rules. The US ANSI/NISO Z39.19 Thesaurus construction standard is also covered.

A Practical Manual

Thesaurus Construction and Use

Are we at a turning point in digital information? The expansion of the internet was unprecedented; search engines dealt with it in the only way possible - scan as much as they could and throw it all into an inverted index. But now search engines are beginning to experiment with deep web searching and attention to taxonomies, and the Semantic Web is demonstrating how much more can be done with a computer if you give it knowledge. What does this mean for the skills and focus of the information science (or sciences) community? Should information designers and information managers work more closely to create computer based information systems for more effective retrieval? Will information science become part of computer science and does the rise of the term informatics demonstrate the convergence of information science and information technology - a convergence that must surely develop in the years to come? Issues and questions such as these are reflected in this monograph, a collection of essays written by some of the most pre-eminent contributors to the discipline. These peer reviewed perspectives capture insights into advances in, and facets of, information science, a profession in transition. With an introduction from Jack Meadows the key papers are: Meeting the challenge, by Brian Vickery The developing foundations of information science, by David Bawden The last 50 years of knowledge organization, by Stella G Dextre Clarke On the history of evaluation in IR, by Stephen Robertson The information user, by Tom Wilson The sociological turn in information science, by Blaise Cronin From chemical documentation to chemoinformatics, by Peter Willett Health informatics, by Peter A Bath Social informatics and sociotechnical research, by Elisabeth Davenport The evolution of visual information retrieval, by Peter Enser Information policies, by Elizabeth Orna Disparity in professional qualifications and progress in information handling, by Barry Mahon Electronic scholarly publishing and open access, by Charles Oppenheim Social software: fun and games, or business tools?, by Wendy A Warr Bibliometrics to webometrics, by Mike Thelwall. This monograph previously appeared as a special issue of the Journal of Information Science, published by Sage. Readership: Reproduced here as a monograph, this important collection of perspectives on a skill in transition from a prestigious line-up of authors will now be available to information studies students worldwide and to all those working in the information science field.

Information Science in Transition

How the human visual system determines the lightness of a surface, that is, its whiteness, blackness, or grayness, remains--like vision in general--a mystery. In fact, we have not even been able to create a machine that can determine, through an artificial vision system, whether an object is white, black, or gray. Although the photoreceptors in the eye are driven by light, the light reflected by a surface does not reveal its shade of gray. Depending upon the level of illumination, a surface of any shade of gray can reflect any amount of light. In Seeing Black and White Alan Gilchrist ties together over 30 years of his own research on lightness, and presents the first comprehensive, historical review of empirical work on lightness, covering the past 150 years of research on images ranging from the simple to the complex. He also describes and analyzes the many theories of lightness--including his own--showing what each can and cannot explain. Gilchrist highlights the forgotten-yet-exciting work done in the first third of the twentieth century, describing several crucial experiments and examining the brilliant but nearly unknown work of the Hungarian gestalt theorist, Lajos Kardos. Gilchrists review also includes a survey of the pattern of lightness errors made by humans, many of which result in delightful illusions. He argues that because these errors are not random, but systematic, they are the signature of our visual software, and so provide a powerful tool that can reveal how lightness is computed. Based on this argument and the concepts of anchoring, grouping, and frames of reference, Gilchrist presents a new theoretical framework that explains an unprecedented array of lightness errors. As both the first comprehensive overview of research on lightness and the first unified presentation of Gilchrists new theoretical framework Seeing Black and White will be an invaluable resource for vision scientists, cognitive psychologists, and cognitive neuroscientists.

The advent of the computer has facilitated an exponential growth in the tools and techniques for manipulating information. Much of the development has been ad-hoc, driven by general management practises of gaining productivity and efficiency through the greater use of computers. Little attention has been paid to the broader issues of coherence and co-ordination of the information increasingly used to drive modern organizations. This book addresses these broader issues. It starts from the perception that information systems and sources need to be designed within a framework, an architecture, which requires a detailed understanding of the roles of the information and the tools to manipulate it, within the organization. The different elements of the architecture are described and analysed and the necessity to undertake detailed and continuous research into developments in computer hardware, software and in information management is emphasised. In addition, the roles of the various parties, general management, computing personnel and information professionals as joint owners of the information architecture are analysed. Chapters include: overview of information architecture; hardware, networks and software; the need to plan IT environments; working with IT personnel; the software environment; knowledge representation: taxonomies; classification; thesauri; interoperability: the semantic web; role of Markup; ontologies; the user interface; designing for users. Readership: The primary audience is senior and middle managers in the information profession: this will include all professionals in the corporate information sector, including knowledge managers. The book will also be of great interest to all students of information and knowledge management and also on business and IT-related courses.

Alan Gilchrist

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