Access To Reliable Information Research Articles

Diverse Roles and Challenges for Teacher Librarians

Central to creating lifelong learners, supporting curriculum, and implementing reliable information access, the library media centre is the umbrella for the school’s core subjects and the library media specialist is the connection between information and diffusion of that information to students. This paper examines school library media specialist roles in the United States and international schools, using the Quality Schools International (QSI) K-12 international school in Tirana, Albania, as a case study. Particular emphasis is placed on technology challenges, education requirements, and the impact of these elements on students, in particular the third culture students found in many international schools.

The fake news infodemic vs information literacy

PurposeWith growing dependency on social media for reportage, coupled with rising media errors with potential to threatening the boundaries of knowledge and reliable information, attention is now being drawn to credibility of using social media and other media outlet. This increasing attention is because of the apparent disorderliness in the information milieu as a result of powerlessness to regulate activities on social media coupled with the dilemma of tampering with fundamental right of individual to free speech. Unlike the traditional media houses with specific address and location, identifying the whereabouts of promoters of fake news is challenging as information can be manufactured at the remote locality and the consequence will be felt in all the four compass points of the world. Tracking down individuals peddling fake news for charges of slander, defamation or libel is difficult, as a result of the intercontinental nature of the social network.Design/methodology/approachThis study used a qualitative research design, which is guided by the interpretive paradigm because it relies comprehensively on practical methods of content analysis in which concepts are discussed to convey an in-depth understanding of the topic being investigated and bringing new knowledge.FindingsEnsuring that the citizenry is adequately information literate is sine qua non for reducing the threats posed by fake news access and use to the barest minimum. Ibenne (2016) notes that becoming information literate is a process that leads to empowerment of the individual to take rationally elevated decisions in information use and knowledge application. The authors may therefore conclude that falling prey to fake news plays majorly on ignorance among the citizenry, and on the other hand, irrational use of information. When citizens possess functional information literacy, they are able to subject the information they receive to critical evaluation to eliminate the undesirable, which fake news squarely fall under.Originality/valueThis paper sheds light on assessing the fake news infodemic as information disorder and a threat to reliable information access and use; therefore, information acquired from this study is imaginative and valuable to better understand how information professionals react to official and personal engagement.

Interpretive structural modeling for technology-related barriers to energy efficiency improvement in Indonesia steel industry

This paper investigates the existence of the barriers in Indonesia steel industry, namely: existing technologies were still considered efficient, new technologies not available, new technology not adequate or inappropriate at the site, the energy efficient technology not compatible with other elements of the plant, the uncertainty about future technology standards, lack of technical skills, technology installation period was too long, and poor information quality regarding access to new energy efficient technology. Five practitioners from the national steel industry were retrieved to identify and analyze critical elements and the causal interrelationships among the technology-related barriers. Finally, using the approach of interpretive structural modelling, the barriers were clustered in accordance with their driving power and dependence power. Lack of reliable information access about new technologies is the only barriers at the bottom level of the hierarchy, implying higher driving power. It is also observed that the availability of new technologies, existing technology still efficient, and the uncertainty about future technology standardization have a weak dependent on the other constructs but strongly driver. The four remaining constructs are identified as dependent obstacles. It means that these barriers are the automatic followers of other impediments. The result of this model will assist managers to understand the relative importance and the interdependencies among the barriers. It can guide them to resolve these barriers.

МЕТОД ОБЕСПЕЧЕНИЯ ДОСТУПА К ИНФОРМАЦИОННО-ТЕХНОЛОГИЧЕСКИМ РЕСУРСАМ АВТОМАТИЗИРОВАННОЙ СИСТЕМЫ УПРАВЛЕНИЯ ПРЕДПРИЯТИЯМИ ВОДОСНАБЖЕНИЯ

The problems of access control to information and technological resources of automatic control systems for water supply companies are considered. The formalized model of the process of reliable access to information and technological resources is shown. The model takes into account the existence of a multitude of communication channels and a possibility of the organization of the operative cross access. A method to ensure a reliable access to information and technical resources of automatic control systems by water supply companies on the basis of the access policy combination, a scheme of deposit and a preliminary distribution of access authenticators. As a base example there was adopted Blom’s scheme. The method allows ensuring an operative cross access in case of emergency. To ensure an operative access in the method mentioned there was used a scheme of a complete division of a secret in the combination with authenticator evolution. As a basic example the evolution of authenticators based on Lamport’s protocol is considered.

Why current IR engines fail

Observations from a unique investigation of failure analysis of Information Retrieval research engines held in 2003 are presented. The Reliable Information Access Workshop invited seven leading IR research groups to supply both their systems and their experts to an effort to analyze why their systems fail on some topics and whether the failures are due to system flaws, approach flaws, or the topic itself. There were surprising results from this cross-system failure analysis. One is that despite systems retrieving very different documents, the major cause of failure for any particular topic was almost always the same across all systems. Another is that relationships between aspects of a topic are not especially important for state-of-the-art systems; the systems are failing at a much more basic level where the top-retrieved documents are not reflecting some aspect at all. The investigatory framework and the lessons learned can serve as a model for needed future research in this area.

On the number of terms used in automatic query expansion

This paper investigates the number of expansion terms to use in automatic query expansion by examining the behavior of eight retrieval systems participating in the NRRC Reliable Information Access Workshop. The results demonstrate that current systems are able to obtain nearly all of the benefit of using a fixed number of expansion terms per topic, but significant additional improvement is possible if systems were able to accurately select the best number of expansion terms on a per topic basis. When optimizing average effectiveness as measured by mean average precision, using a fixed number of terms increases the score a large amount for a small number of topics but has little effect for most topics. The analysis further suggests that when a topic is helped by automatic feedback, the increase is from a set of terms that reinforce each other rather than from the system finding a single excellent term.

Overview of the Reliable Information Access Workshop

The Reliable Information Access (RIA) Workshop was held in the summer of 2003, with a goal of improved understanding of information retrieval systems, in particular with regard to the variability of retrieval performance across topics. The workshop ran massive cross-system failure analysis on 45 of the TREC topics and also performed cross-system experiments on pseudo-relevance feedback. This paper presents an overview of that workshop, along with some preliminary conclusions from these experiments. Even if this workshop was held 6 years ago, the issues of improving system performance across all topics is still critical to the field and this paper, along with the others in this issue, are the first widely published full papers for the workshop.

A guide to the RIA workshop data archive

During the course of the Reliable Information Access (RIA) workshop, a data archive was created to hold the outputs of the many experiments being done. This archive was designed to serve both as an organizational structure to support the researchers at the workshop itself and as a public archive of experimental retrieval results. This article describes the structure of the data in the archive and the ways in which the data may be accessed.

Maine’s Approach to Data Warehousing for State Departments of Transportation

Most transportation agencies are faced with changing needs, challenges, and limited resources. State departments of transportation need tools to address these issues. One such solution combines data warehouse and geographic information systems (GIS) technology to allow easy access to reliable information for systemwide query, analysis, and reporting. To meet these challenges, to be more responsive, and to provide staff and managers with a better platform with which to deliver integrated transportation information to both internal and external customers, the Maine Department of Transportation (MeDOT) has turned to integrating data warehousing and GIS technologies. A detailed overview of MeDOT’s Transportation Information for Decision Enhancement (TIDE), a robust GIS-linked data warehouse, is given. A range of inherent technical issues involved in a project of this nature is discussed. The role that TIDE has played in breaking down the functional boundaries that have existed on both informational and technical fronts and how this robust tool facilitates the growth of agency integration also are discussed.

The Applicability of MMS in the Future Manufacturing Systems

The ever increasing role of information management in manufacturing systems has been realised and accepted by key scientists and industry specialist, and also accepted by key speakers of the IMS Conference last December in Vienna. The means of achieving efficient and reliable information access has also been investigated for a long period of time. Where the reliability, and long term investment justifications are dominating the requirements for new manufacturing enterprises, design and integration engineers are considering the application of standardised, stable communication means. Global manufacturing, Customer Orientation, Virtual Enterprises, Standards and Cooperation all require the Open Communication mechanisms. All these are readily available when applying MMS, the object-oriented tool for implementing factory floor communication systems that can easily be ported and reused in CAM environment.