Advances in Library Administration and Organization: Volume 25

Over the years, we the editors of ALAO have worked to internationalize the annual volume. In addition to work done in the United States, we have featured articles from Taiwan, Thailand, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Germany, South Africa, and Great Britain, among others. It has never been our interest to simply report on events elsewhere in the world, but rather to recognize and promote the quality of the LIS literature colleagues produce who have been trained and work throughout the world. Several years ago, James M. Nyce approached us with the idea of producing a volume that would showcase Finnish research in library and information science. We jumped at the opportunity and have worked with the volume editors to develop a concept for this book. The result is the volume you have in hand.

Mäkinen.

It is clear that a lot of information acquisition happens through networks and therefore the focus in this article will lie in the relationships that bind a network together. The attempt is to map the motives as well as the group identity factors as means of exploring the reasons for sharing. The theoretical framework is brought from the social capital and group identity literature combined with the theories on information sharing in context. The aim is to see how information-sharing practices are developed in two different organisations and these theories are mirrored in the information sharing practices in an insurance company and in a biotechnology firm. The analysis of the cases shows how the group identity and the local context affect information sharing practices. The human and social processes underpin the formal structures enabling information interactions.

There is an increasing interest in incorporating information literacy (IL) instruction into undergraduate curricula in higher education (HE) as a stand alone specialism, "a soft applied discipline" on its own. However, diverse and conflicting views exist about whether information use and evaluation can be taught as discrete activities in isolation from disciplinary content and context, and who, faculty or librarians, should be teaching information literacy. This article seeks to shed additional light on these issues by empirically exploring how literature evaluation and use is taught by faculty in four fields: physics, medicine, social politics and social work, and literature. Using Becher's (1989) characterizations of academic fields along the dimensions hard-soft and pure-applied, convergent and divergent, rural and urban, we explore the relationships between the nature of knowledge production within the fields studied and their practices of teaching literature use and evaluation. The findings indicate that IL is best conceived as something that can not be meaningfully approached or taught as separate from disciplinary contents and contexts. Information skills must be taught in ways that are wholly integrated with the ways literature is searched, used, and evaluated within disciplines.

Drawing mainly on the ideas of Manuel Castells, this article discusses how globalization and informatization condition the development of public libraries. To explore this issue, recent public library strategies developed in Britain and Finland are analyzed. The analysis demonstrates how public libraries stand for structures that support and consolidate life forms in local communities that need to adjust to contextual changes. In this way, public libraries serve as mediating and filtering mechanisms in local-global interaction. To do this they may utilize the tools derived from the following four strategic options: institutional resource strategy; networking strategy; commercialization strategy; and civil society strategy. Whatever is the strategic choice or their mix at the national or local level, it seems essential that libraries utilize the potential of a hybrid library, which as a new library paradigm combines traditional local dimension with networked and ubiquitous library services.

The article is concerned with the university library's intellectual capital (IC) as a part of the university's IC. The concept of IC is analyzed as consisting of the three main components: human capital, structural capital, and relational capital. These components are described in the context of the university library. It is suggested that certain kind of professional understanding and knowledge could be used to integrate the library's IC with the university's IC. It is claimed that this integration could enhance the library's contribution to the overall performance on the university. It is seen as a very important issue to demonstrate the role the university library can play in the growth of the university's intellectual capital, performance, and outcomes at a time when public funding for the universities is diminishing.

Quality management was introduced to the European higher education with the decision made by European Union Ministers of Education in Bologna, year 1999. This paper describes its effect on the Kuopio University Library, Finland. Quality management has been used in the library as a tool for reorganizing the management, as well as, a tool for marketing and improving customer oriented library and information services.

Open access to scientific publications is in this study looked at from the perspective of Finnish biomedical research. In the study we outline the development of open access in Finland and the different channels for open access publishing as well as the recommendations from officials. We argue that the discipline-specific patterns of communicating research should be taken into account when studying open access adoption, and when planning for initiatives and recommendations. We have in the case study on the prevalence of open access articles on the Internet, in the field of biomedical research, found that incentives to publish in open access channels could be developed and that the impact of open access in research publishing is growing and therefore future research is needed.

The article examines how social scientific information is discursively utilized as an argumentative and rhetorical resource at debates held during plenary sessions at the Finnish parliament. The authors analyze the speeches given by members of parliament by using the methodological perspective of constructionist discourse analysis. It is found out that the objectivity and authority of social scientific information in parliamentary discussion can be undermined by using at least four types of arguments stressing (1) contradictions, (2) politicization of information, (3) uncertainty of information and (4) the inability of scientific knowledge to solve value conflicts. The speakers utilize social scientific information instrumentally to solve a certain social problem defined in advance, to provide statistical evidence, to show a causal relationship, or to justify an individual argument. However, social scientific information can also be used conceptually to bring larger perspectives to conversation or to reveal unnoticed aspects of the problem under discussion. Social scientific information often penetrates the symbolic definition struggles under way, and in this respect it alters social reality. In conclusions, the serious difficulties built into the professional position of librarians as providers of neutral facts are considered.

The article analyzes the development of the Finnish research in library and information science into its present position of high qualitative and quantitative level (in relation to the size of the research community). A number of aspects that may explain the success of the Finnish research are presented: 1) the early academic context, i.e., the establishment of the chair in LIS at the University of Tampere in 1971, 2) the new conception of LIS that emerged in Finland in the early 1980s shifting the attention from institutions into users and actions, 3) internationalization of research including publishing in peer reviewed journals, participating in international conferences, inviting foreign top-researchers into Finland, and organizing international conferences that have become institutionalized (CoLIS and ISIC), and 4) the selection of priority areas for the research effort combined with the concentration of research and doctoral education in research groups.

This article focuses on humanities scholars’ information searching. David Ellis’ model of scholars’ information seeking is taking as a starting point for this study. For understanding the information needs and information seeking habits of humanities scholars, it is crucial to know about the nature of research processes within diverse humanities fields. The study at hand, therefore, starts from the premise that the information searching of humanistic researchers needs to be understood within the framework of the research process, and not as a phenomenon outside of it.

Based on 24 in-depth interviews in archaeology, art history, philosophy, and languages and linguistics, the article examines humanities scholars’ research processes. The purpose of this study is to analyse the research processes, their course and different stages, and to classify these into types. The purpose is also to examine the relationships between the types of research processes and the disciplines studied. Seven types of research processes were identified among scholars working in the fields studied. The types were named the Fly, the Sphinx Moth, the Mole, the Mockingbird, and the Spider.

The findings show that the representatives of a specific humanities discipline did not always proceed in their research in similar ways. There were distinct differences according to discipline, but important differences between scholars belonging to the same discipline could also be observed. The findings indicate that information seeking behaviour cannot be explained by factors that lie outside the researcher and the researcher's subject matter. Another important finding is that humanistic research often does not proceed in linear stages. There is more variability within the research and searching processes within humanities and among representatives of specific disciplines than is often presumed.

This paper reports on part of a dissertation project on the relationships between learning methods and students’ information behavior in Finland. In this qualitative study, information behavior is studied in the contexts of a problem-based learning curriculum and a traditional curriculum. In 1998, 16 theme interviews were conducted at the Tampere University Medical School, which applied the problem-based learning curriculum and 15 interviews at the Turku University Medical School, in which the traditional curriculum with an early patient contact program was implemented. The focus of this paper is on the concept of information literacy as a part of the students’ information behavior and its relationships with students’ conceptions of learning. The findings indicate that students’ information literacy is developed, on the one hand, through active use of information and sources in connection with real information needs, and, on the other hand, through an educational context which offers opportunities to get different viewpoints on issues. Following the same tendency, the more developed conceptions of learning were mostly held by the students belonging to the problem-based group with simple or developed skills in information literacy, although there were exceptions from this pattern.

Ways of sharing information as part of the development and implementation of new evaluation methods were studied in a project involving thirteen public libraries, one polytechnic library, and one university library. The purpose of the project was to initiate collaboration in evaluation and to develop qualitative evaluation tools that would be easy to use. Communities of practice, comprising of representatives of the different libraries, had a focal role in the development work, in which sharing of information was elemental. Qualitative tools consisted of portfolios and various forms for collecting information. In addition, informal consortium benchmarking was applied to evaluate different library tasks. Although small units have rarely been studied with regard to the sharing of knowledge or information or benchmarking, they should be. Moreover, small units may even be able to contribute to development. The study is based on information gathered from participants using interviews and questionnaires as well as project documentation, the contents of which have been analyzed qualitatively.

Based on in-depth interviews of forty-four scholars across four specialist fields, this article explores the role of formal and informal learning in scholars' adoption of computing expertise. In the light of the findings, formal courses had a minor role in the development of scholars' computing expertise. Patterns of collaborative work and information sharing at the workplace, professional role and identity, available time resources, the nature of work tasks, place(s) of work, and existing social ties and networks, were the most important factors at play. It is argued that considerations such as interconnectedness of professional identities and ICT, the mutually shaping relationships between ICT and the sociocultural context in which working and learning takes place, and the importance of social networks for development ICT expertise, are rarely foregrounded in information society initiatives. The findings may thus inform efforts to support professional development not only in academia but other workplaces as well.

Ari-Veikko Anttiroiko is a docent and acting professor in the Department of Regional Studies, University of Tampere, Finland. He has conducted and directed several research projects, including The Future of Electronic Services in Local Government and the Local Governance in the Information Society financed by the Academy of Finland. He has worked as an expert in several national and international e-government projects. His academic contributions include in a nutshell nearly 30 monographs, about 40 articles, and some 20 conference papers. He has memberships in several scientific organizations and editorial boards.