This special report on the electronic content industry covers three interrelated areas: technology, rights/legal issues, and pricing/business models. Articles include: "Content Anywhere, Anytime"; "Content Management Technology: A Booming Market"; "Entering the Content Space: Carry Your Lawyer at All Times"; Content Unchained: The New Value Web";…

Coordinated by the U.S. Geological Survey, the National Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII) is a Web-based system that provides increased access to data and information on the nation's biological resources. This article-an individual case study-addresses the structure of the NBII related to thematic, infrastructure and place-based…

Discusses information ecology and changes in information management and provision. Concentrates on trends towards evidence-based practice in health care, challenges posed and opportunities offered by information technology, resource limitations and users' and management's perceptions and expectations, roles librarians can play, and core…

Great increases in the availability of full-text publications on the Internet has posed many problems for librarians who must secure licenses to provide the online versions of these journals to their clients. Discussion includes steps taken to minimize the impact of these problems and maximize availability of online resources, as well as the…

Suggests that a faceted thesaurus should be used as the basis for organizing a small-scale institutional Web site. Contends that a faceted approach to knowledge organization can make the process of organization less random and more manageable. Reports on an informal survey of three Web sites, underscoring the problems of organization that can…

Suggests that a solution to the inadequacy and passivity problems with push and pull technologies could be in a combination of both, with an active component, adding more intelligence to the whole process of information and knowledge dissemination and supply. Describes basic principles of activity components in intelligent systems, and some…

Introduces Information Management Assistants (IMAs). Presents work on an architecture for this class of system, and progress in implementing Watson, a prototype of such a system. Watson observes users in word processing and Web browsing applications and uses a simple model of the user's tasks, knowledge of term importance, and an understanding of…

Describes a model for the standardization of names in bibliographic databases. Discusses a prototype that was developed to demonstrate feasibility of the model, and investigates the impact of implementing the model. Findings suggested that the new model will revolutionize name authority control and that the prototype verifies the technical…

Describes the strategic significance of information and intelligence management to socioeconomic growth. Considers implications in terms of human and structural intellectual capital development. Provides demand- and supply-side analyses of the knowledge and skills required of information professionals in the digital age. (Author)

Education systems are of great importance in the evolving economic and social world order. Certain policies will improve British educational outcomes and practices considerably. Advances are needed in many areas: global knowledge management, extended international networks, public/private collaboration, applied brain research, and education…

In this article, the author discusses the importance of knowledge management (KM) in the era of the knowledge organization, a place where generating, sharing and storing knowledge is a valued part of the organizational culture. The author enumerates the benefits and barriers of KM, explains the basic approaches to KM and describes what has been…

At first sight, the "big deal" seems an excellent value for academic libraries. A more thorough-going evaluation, however, exposes dangers. This paper examines the roles and strengths of the players in the information supply chain: creators, publishers, intermediaries, libraries. Traditional hard-copy procurement is analysed in terms of these…

Since the inception of the No Child Left Behind legislation, school districts have been faced with a growing need to gather, analyze and monitor more data than ever before in the management of school performance. Accountability mandates also have placed a greater emphasis on gleaning the most granular types of information from these large sources…

This work presents a novel method for modeling collaborative learning as multi-issue agent negotiation using fuzzy constraints. Agent negotiation is an iterative process, through which, the proposed method aggregates student marks to reduce personal bias. In the framework, students define individual fuzzy membership functions based on their…

Recently, many national and international initiatives show an increasing interest in promoting distance education interventions by Universities. These directives aim at supporting students during their studies providing them with personalized solutions to their problems related not only to the fruition of on-line courses but also to orientation…