Purpose: To provide a broad overview of the history of the journal Program: electronic library and information systems and its contents over its first 40 years. Design/methodology/approach: Analysis of content from the original published material, as well as from abstracting and indexing publications and from minutes of Editorial Board meetings.…

With all the recent headlines about security breaches and information loss at financial and educational institutions, the higher education community needs to address the issue of using social security numbers as ID numbers. The University of Oregon undertook a change process to assign generated ID numbers to all records in their information…

The use of geographic information systems (GIS) has seen a steady increase since the first PC-based GIS software was developed in the latter half of the 1980s. Prior to that, GIS was run on mainframe computers and was a relatively crude and arcane technology by today's standards. This chapter introduces key concepts, tools, data sources, and types…

In this article, the author discusses the benefits offered by integrated library systems (ILS) for making more informed decisions. Library software vendors, realizing ILS products can reveal business intelligence, have begun to offer tools like Director's Station to help library managers get more out of their data, and librarians are taking…

Across the United States, today's farm operators face continuing challenges from global competition, increasing production costs, changing technology, increased regulations, scarce resources, and lower profit margins. To face these challenges, farm operators need to gather and utilize information allowing them to make informed decisions. Several…

Relative to other fields, social work has been slow to adopt geographic information systems (GIS) as a tool for research and practice. This paper argues that GIS can benefit social work by: (1) continuing and strengthening the social survey tradition; (2) providing a framework for understanding human behavior; (3) identifying community needs and…

This paper arises from presentations given at a colloquium involving members of the Association of University Administrators (AUA) and staff from the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) of the UK Funding Councils held in November 2005. It discusses the increasing reliance on IT in modern higher education administration, and the role of the…

Purpose: We describe an approach to identifying knowledge gaps, research questions, and methodological issues for assisted living (AL) research. Design and Methods: We undertook an inventory of AL literature and research in progress and commissioned background papers critiquing knowledge on selected subtopics. With an advisory committee, we…

In this study a business game is used as a vehicle for implementing decision support systems (DSS). Eighteen companies, consisting of ninety graduating M.B.A. students, participating in a business game were required to develop DSS and to report on the systems developed. Each of the eighteen companies developed a system of their own choosing,…

Service-learning has been identified as an extremely valuable educational tool and applied to different disciplines and areas, but literature review on service learning has indicated that service-learning is little used in Information Systems education. This paper presents our design and development of a service-learning capstone course for…

The continuing losses in Information Systems (IS) enrollments over the last few years have generated a widespread concern in the IS community. Despite many speculations about what led to the downturn and what should be done to reverse it, there has been surprisingly little research that systematically investigates this issue. This paper reports a…

In this laboratory experiment, students take environmental samples at various locations around the college campuses, take geospatial coordinates with a global position systems (GPS) unit, and map their results on a geo-referenced campus map with geographical information systems (GIS) software. Nitrogen dioxide air pollution sampling is used as an…

The relatively recent development of comprehensive human resource information systems (HRIS) software has led to a large demand for technologically literate human resource (HR) professionals. For the college student who is about to begin the search for that first postcollege job, the need to develop technology literacy is even more necessary. To…

Traditional library web products, whether online public access catalogs, library databases, or even library web sites, have long been rigidly controlled and difficult to use. Patrons regularly prefer Google's simple interface. Now social bookmarking and tagging tools help librarians bridge the gap between the library's need to offer authoritative,…

Six of California's largest urban school districts have joined together in the Partnership for Urban Education Research (PUER), to address the most pressing issues in urban education. The six PUER districts have agreed to work together to increase data availability, enhance internal research capacity, and promote collaboration and information…