UoA LIM Structure and policy (RA5a analysis)

Index

• Brunel University_61 5 [29B]
• City University_61 5 [12.85A]
• De Montfort University_61 3a [6.4C]
• Leeds Metropolitan University_61 4 [9E]
• Loughborough University_61 5 [18.33B]
• Manchester Metropolitan University_61 4 [15C]
• Napier University_61 4 [6E]
• Queen Margaret University College Edinburgh_61 3b [5C]
• Robert Gordon University_61 3b [7.7D]
• South Bank University_61 3b [22D]
• Staffordshire University_61 3a [7A]
• Thames Valley University_61 1 [2D]
• University College London_61 4 [10.6A]
• University of Brighton_61 3b [17D]
• University of Central England in Birmingham_61 3a [20.83B]
• University of Glasgow_61 3a [7A]
• University of Northumbria at Newcastle_61 3b [15.38C]
• University of Paisley_61 3b [8B]
• University of Salford_61 5* [23A]
• University of Sheffield_61 5* [19A]
• University of Strathclyde_61 4 [16A]
• University of Wales, Aberystwyth_61 3a [15.5B]
• University of West of England, Bristol_61 3b [9.5E]

University of Brighton_61 3b [17D]

1. Overview

The University of Brighton's submission to UoA 61 covers a broad spectrum of work by a community of multidisciplinary researchers. Our submission to the 1996 RAE was made by the former Department of Library and Information Studies and represented our work in the "core business" of the discipline, i.e. the management and communication of information. However, the expansion of the Department in 1996 to include colleagues in Information Systems and Communications Studies has created opportunities to combine these well-established areas with exciting new interdisciplinary interests. In this way we are developing a multi-perspective view on information and communication, combining the distinctive disciplinary backgrounds and concerns of information users, analysts, planners, deployers and system designers. This has been a period of healthy growth for the subject area: sixteen externally funded projects have been carried out, compared with just three in the previous assessment period. Radical changes in staffing mean that a direct comparison of levels of research activity would have little significance, but in the current submission just over fifty per cent of staff working in the subject area are returned as research active, with all achieving outputs of national excellence, and several of international excellence.

Research in Library and Information Management is led by Enser, currently President of the Institute of Information Scientists. Research work is carried on in five groupings. Two of these, in Information Policy and Strategy and Visual Information Retrieval, continue work already well established in 1996. Information Society Studies is a strong area of newer growth, which has benefited from the fresh perspectives of our Communication Studies specialists. New collaborations with colleagues in Information Systems have led to the integration of groups in Interactive System Design Methods and Digital Learning Technologies. The five groupings are set out below:

Information Management and Communication	Information Systems
Information Policy and Strategy	Interactive System Design Methods
Information Society Studies	Digital Learning Technologies
Visual Information Retrieval

2. Information Management and Communication

2.1 Information Policy and Strategy

National

Work on national and organisational information strategy is concentrated in the Information Strategy Research Unit (ISRU), set up in 1999 under the leadership of Wallis. Professor Nick Moore has joined the Unit as Visiting Professor, continuing a long collaboration with Wallis in the field of information planning and policy. He has carried out approximately 70 research and consultancy projects for over 40 organisations including UNESCO, the United Nations Development Programme, the EC and several UK government departments.

The ISRU concentrates on three main areas. The first, strategic planning and evaluation of information services, is a key aspect of government policy and has been the focus of much of Moore’s work. Wallis was one of the team that carried out the Review of the Public Library Service on behalf of the Department of National Heritage and more recently has been selected as a member of the team appointed by the DCMS to assess the Public Library Annual Plans. The ISRU was commissioned in 2000 by the British Library/Higher Education Task Force to carry out a study of organisational mechanisms for co-ordinating the development of a distributed national collection of library research resources. Most recently Moore and Wallis have been commissioned to carry out, on behalf of re:source and the DCMS, an evaluation of the Reader Development Programme of the DCMS/Wolfson Public Libraries Challenge Fund. In conjunction with East Sussex Libraries Information and Arts Wallis developed a medium term strategy in 1999 for the development of their public library service.

The second strand of the Unit’s work deals with Health Informatics. This has been a key domain for several years. Moore is Chair of the Help for Health Trust, which has been instrumental in developing NHS Direct Online. He has recently managed two major research programmes on behalf of the Department for Health, one on the information needs of social services, the second on information provision for disabled people. In 1999 the Unit conducted a project for the RNIB on the information needs of visually impaired people. In 2000 Moore and Wallis advised re:source on strategic approaches to the provision of information for disabled people. In 1999, Smith was funded by the Health Education Authority to evaluate the Authority's information dissemination policy. In the same year Smith carried out an information audit for Lewisham University Hospital. Two current projects on Health Informatics are managed by Henwood. The first, funded by the Department of Health under their Research Initiative on ICT's, concerns the use of electronic patient records in the maternity services. The second project, entitled 'Presenting and Interpreting Health Risks and Benefits: The Role of the Internet', is funded by the ESRC. This work examines how patients manage information accessed via different media (including the Internet) to assess the health risks and benefits of specific pharmaceutical interventions and to negotiate with health care professionals regarding treatment.

The third strand of the Unit’s work is the study of cross-domain planning and development. Wallis and Fry have just completed a research study for re:source, analysing the potential economies of scale in the regional organisation of public libraries, museums and archive services. Most recently Moore has been working with re:source formulating a cross-domain stewardship strategy. This builds on a series of projects he has undertaken for the Library and Information Commission on the delivery of museums services in a digital age, culminating in the publication of ‘A netful of jewels’ in 1999 and the recent launch of the DCMS Culture Online initiative

Horner's work addresses moral and professional issues in information management. He is a contributor to the Ethicomp conference series, the premier international events on computer and information ethics, and has presented at a number of other international conferences on topics such as ethical decision making in professional practice and ethical aspects of the globalisation of the knowledge society. His current work investigates the extent to which new moral frameworks need to be constructed to encompass action in virtual communication spaces. Horner is working on a monograph on the philosophical foundations of information ethics. Arundale's focus is legal: he has investigated copyright issues in new media and other legal aspects of information management. He recently presented a paper at the 4^th British-Nordic Conference on Library & Information Science Education and Research, University College Dublin on the need for the inclusion of law in the LIS curriculum. This paper is intended to mark the start of a larger-scale project looking at the legal concerns and knowledge of working librarians. The Public Library Service continues to be an important focus for this group. Williamson has carried out extensive empirical studies on the provision of information resources in public libraries for job seekers, concentrating on issues of social inclusion. He is preparing a follow up project expanding the scope of the study. Smith is also concerned with the social role of the public library, concentrating on the role of local collections in public libraries as a source of community historical knowledge. In October 2001 she will address the Anglo-German Library History Conference, in Hanover, on "Local history in public libraries: philanthropy and paternalism?" Wallis, Gill and Horner are also supervising PhD research projects on information use and needs in guidance settings, decision strategies for organisational data capture and the application of knowledge management in UK government departments.

The depth of experience and expertise of our researchers in Information Policy and Strategy has established the University as a major force in work on national and institutional information policy.

International

The international dimension of information policy is the focus of the human-centred research centre (the SEAKE centre), managed by Gill, which hosts a European research network in Human Centred Systems, with a regular programme of international conferences also involving collaborators in India and Japan. Work in the group is supported by a number of European agencies and research programmes, such as DGXII, DGXIII, ERASMUS and EuroTecNet. The energies of the group are currently concentrated on the EU-India Cross-Cultural Innovation Network. This four-year project has attracted 510,000 Euros of funding from the European Commission. It is concerned with global information strategy, using action research methods to investigate the mechanisms of information transfer in technological innovation between European and Indian entrepreneurs and academics.

2.2. Visual Image Retrieval

Work by Enser on image indexing and retrieval is very well established at Brighton, and has expanded into the field of moving images. Following on from a two-year project (1994-6) on information need for image retrieval, funded by the then British Library R & D Department, three further externally funded projects with a total value in excess of £100,000 have been carried out to study:

q client demand for image material in conventional and Internet-based picture libraries (Corbis UK Ltd. 1997)
q design and implementation factors in visual image retrieval systems (LIC, 1998-2000)
q indexing and retrieval strategies for archival moving imagery (re:source, 1999-2001).

This body of work, undertaken with research officers Armitage, Tope and Sandom and in collaboration with a range of private- and public-sector archives and libraries, confirms Brighton as one of the leading international centres for the study of user needs in the visual knowledge domain.

2.3 Information Society Studies

Our work here concentrates on the social, linguistic and cultural impacts of information and communication, with three main areas of activity: Community Informatics, Computer-mediated Communication and Socio-cultural Contexts of ICT's.

Day has for some years been involved in pioneering action research in Community Informatics. This work pursues social and economic development through the provision of ICT-based initiatives in a range of geographic communities. Day has conducted case studies of several initiatives in Denmark and Sweden, resulting in the publication of research findings commissioned jointly by IBM (UK) and the Community Development Foundation. His work has been presented at several international conferences, including PDC98 & 2000, ECSCW '99, ICIS'99 and Community Informatics 2000.

Pemberton's work in Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) has a linguistic emphasis, involving fine-grained analysis of conversational phenomena such as politeness, turn taking, repair and negotiation of meaning in on-line communication. She has co-edited two collections of articles and a special edition of the journal Text Technology on linguistic aspects of CMC. She has recently developed a model of the socio-linguistic aspects of design discussions with the Université de Rouen, France, where Pemberton is a "chercheur adjoint". Pemberton and Boyne have both described the mechanisms of communication via electronic mail, concentrating on interaction structures and intend to expand work on this medium. Pemberton, Horner and Gill are also supervising two postgraduate projects in CMC in workplace settings.

A number of projects have been developed to investigate the socio-cultural contexts of ICT's. Karl's work examines gendered patterns of technological design, development and use. Her current project is a large ethnographic study of everyday use of ICT's in all-female households. Karl has previously carried out large-scale ethnographic studies of new media use, including mobile phone use and uptake of new technologies by children and teenagers. Henwood has also worked extensively on gender and ICT use, particularly in the field of education, and her work has been widely published. Guy has recently begun a study of informal email list communities. Her work on collaborative classification of documents in email archives of the lists was presented in CSCW 2000, Philadelphia. Future work will investigate how these informal groups are using the Web for the practical development of community knowledge and apply these findings to the design of systems for knowledge management in formal organisations. Horner and Pemberton are supervising PhD research projects on the interrelationships between off-line and on-line social groupings, computer-mediated representations of the body, use of the Internet by Islamic communities and digital information provision in the context of Israeli national identity.

3. Information Systems

3.1 Interactive System Design Methods

Work in this area concentrates on applying the principles of general design theory and practice to the design of interactive systems, particularly as they concern concept generation, transfer of expertise, design representation and collaborative working. The group’s main current activity is the development of the use of Design Patterns for interaction design. Design Patterns, developed for architecture, have been widely adopted in software engineering but only recently has their application in interaction design been developed. Pemberton and Griffiths published one of the first proposals for Design Patterns in interaction in their 1998 paper at the CoBuild ‘98 Conference in Darmstadt. Since then, with close collaborators in the UK, USA, Austria, Sweden and the Netherlands, they have helped to create the fledgling Interaction Design pattern community via two high profile workshops at Interact ‘99 and CHI 2000. Griffiths was invited to join an international panel on Design Patterns at CHI 2001 in Seattle. He is also deputy co-ordinator of the IFIP Group 13.3 Task Force on Design Patterns for HCI. Brighton is now regarded as one of the leading institutions internationally in the development of this approach to capturing design knowledge in interaction design.

A second set of projects uses empirical observation to analyse design practice. Guy has carried out a long-term ethnographic study of an IT department in a well-known NGO, concentrating on the learning culture of the developer community within the organisation. This work has been presented at COOP 98, ECSCW 98 and ICSE 2000. Seedcorn funding from the EPSRC was awarded to the Faculty for a project to investigate collaborative design processes in SME's. This work uses observational studies of design practices in local new media companies. We are currently planning an expanded follow-up project. Pemberton is also involved (with colleagues in Occupational Therapy) in investigating issues of design representation and negotiation in the specification of building adaptations by occupational therapists and their clients, based on observations of client-therapist interviews. We are particularly interested here in the potential, but also the limitations, of 3D and virtual reality models in design discussions with lay people and have a funding proposal to the EPSRC in preparation with researchers at the University of Edinburgh.

Hughes has established a body of work on software project management, particularly software measurement, with a focus on effort estimation, in collaboration with Ericsson. He has also explored potential uses of software effort estimation in fault prediction. Hughes has explored case-based reasoning as an approach to software effort estimation and as a consequence was invited to contribute the entry for "expert judgement and analogy" for the latest edition of Wiley's Encyclopaedia of Software Engineering. Measurement is a powerful tool in software development research but has to be interpreted in the light of qualitative evidence. Hughes plans to pursue the relationship between relatively objective measurements of system characteristics and user perception via field studies in a local finance sector organisation. His work has been reported in several high profile publications including IEEE Software.

3.2 Digital Learning Technologies

The Digital Learning Technologies group concentrates on developing applications for teaching and learning via the Internet, particularly in Higher Education. Dron, with Boyne, has developed "evolutionary" techniques for evolving high quality collections of web-based material via reader recommendations and rankings. With co-authors Siviter and Mitchell (ex-members of the University, now in industry), they were given a Top Paper Award by the Program Committee of the WebNet99 World Conference for a paper entitled "CoFIND-an experiment in n-dimensional collaborative filtering'. The work has been presented at several other international conferences, including WebNet 1998 and 2000 and ISKO, 2000 in Toronto. The EU-funded Fabula project, which involved the Universities of Reading (co-ordinator) and Brighton, with partners across Europe, designed a multimedia authoring package for children in bilingual regions of Europe. Software developed by the project is being used by an on-line community of European teachers. This work has been described by Pemberton at two European conferences and a journal article will appear shortly. Guy and Pemberton are developing the use of interactive, multimedia Web-based „Rich Cases" in computer supported collaborative learning in design disciplines, particularly Information Systems Design. This work was presented at the ICL 2000 Conference in Villach, Austria, and an article published in the International Journal of Distance Education. A later version of the work will also be presented at this year's UKAIS meeting in Portsmouth. The recent appointment of Masthoff, from Philips Research Laboratories, strengthens our work in this group. Her research investigates how automatic adaptation to the needs of individual learners can be achieved and has been presented at several European conferences on intelligent tutoring and adaptive systems. It also involved the registration of five patents on interaction mechanisms. Masthoff was recently awarded a £5,000 personal grant under the Nuffield Foundation’s awards scheme for new lecturers with which to pursue this work.

4. Environment

Research in Library and Information Management is carried out in the School of Information Management, with input from colleagues in the School of Computing and Mathematical Sciences, both part of the Faculty of Information Technology .The School’s research activity is managed by the Head of School, Enser, and the Research Co-ordinator, Pemberton, supported by University, Faculty and School Research Strategy groups. Day to day management of research activities is at a group level, with groups adopting a range of mechanisms for co-ordinating their research activities as appropriate, from formal management meetings to action learning sets. The research groups are responsible for integrating new members, encouraging inter-group projects and collaborations, identifying publication opportunities and applying for external funding. The main regular focus for sharing research, the Information Management Research Seminar Series, is well established and operates weekly, with a mix of internal and external speakers. The forum is particularly used by research students presenting their PhD projects. The annual School Research Day gives an opportunity for knowledge sharing and planning across the School and related units.

The University offers a Certificate in Research Methods, a mixture of action learning, project work and taught courses, which all research students are required to attend. Students are encouraged to give presentations and are funded by the School to attend conferences, summer schools and doctoral colloquia in order to make contact with other researchers. Recent PhD student presentations have been at CSCW 98 in Seattle, ECSCW 1999, Copenhagen, CSCW 2000 Philadelphia and the 2000 Association of Internet Researchers’ conference in Kansas. The subject group's research students form part of the Informatics Student Division, managed by a senior staff member who is responsible for ensuring they enjoy adequate facilities and for formally reviewing their general progress. The University’s processes for research student supervision are well defined, with regular workshops for new and experienced supervisors.

5. Staffing Policy

Research achievement or clear research potential in our core areas is a key criterion in recruitment. The recent appointments of Karl, Henwood, Guy and Masthoff are a result of this policy. The School encourages staff to undertake research degrees, and has a policy of giving staff registered for research degrees two days per week free of scheduled classes. Generous University provision means that we are able to provide financial support for researchers - including research officers and postgraduate students - presenting work at conferences in the UK, Europe and the USA.

University of Central England in Birmingham_61 3a [20.83B]

RA5b
Staffing policy
The policy is to support existing staff in the development of their research qualifications and
expertise and to attract new academic staff, eg Mynott and Krasniewicz, who already have or are registered for a PhD. More recently, the policy has been to support actively the development of promising new researchers, by their working alongside experienced academics and researchers and taking ownership for independent research at an early stage. This has paid dividends in terms of establishing research active staff quickly and effectively and in achieving a blend of new and experienced researchers. Established academics such as Chivers, Denham, Elkin, Hart and Winfield, have been encouraged and supported to study for higher degrees, as have new academics, such as Barford. Matthews, appointed Head of School in 1998, was attracted to UCE from a high rated research department at Loughborough University. He arrived with a proven track record in research and was speedily promoted to a post of Faculty Director of Research. Other new researchers have qualifications in an appropriate discipline and experience (eg Dalton, Thebridge, Train). In 1998, the Faculty introduced the appointment of Readers in recognition of contribution to research. Cresswell, who moved on to undertake consultancy in the IT industry was the first Reader and Dingley has recently been awarded a Readership. Increasing staff involvement in research degree supervision is encouraged through University training courses and integration into experienced supervisory teams. Researchers receive internal training and are encouraged to attend external training where appropriate. The university-wide Individual Performance Review (IPR) is used to discuss, inter alia, research aspirations and plans of academics and researchers.

Leeds Metropolitan University_61 4 [9E]

Manchester Metropolitan University_61 4 [15C]

De Montfort University_61 3a [6.4C]

Dr Fairweather was the lead researcher for „RSI Prevention in HE: theory and practice“. This was a case study funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee through the national clearing house for Disability and Information Systems in Higher Education.

Dr McBride has been conducting collaborative research with Dr R Hackney of Manchester Metropolitan University in IS strategy over a long period. This has resulted in several conference papers and journal papers (for example, Out of tune out of time: hermeneutics of strategic information systems planning, Information Systems Research, Teaching and Practice, Chapter 20, McGrawHill, 2000, 00 175-183). He has collaborated with Professor T. Wood-Harper in the area of End-User Computing resulting in a paper entitled „Towards user-oriented control of end user computing in large organisations“ being accepted for the Journal of End User Computing (2001).

Perry has recently completed some research into workflow management systems . This has culminated in the acceptance of a paper in Services Industries Journal (Vol 25 no 4, October 2001)

IS at De Montfort University considers that the dissemination of research output is paramount. Dissemination is not restricted to only the research community. For example CCSR has published several business reports covering various social responsibility issues (for example, Ethical Aspects of Information Technology: Issues for Senior Executives). Professor Rogerson writes a regular column (ETHIcol) for the professional journal of the IMIS aimed at alerting practitioners to relevant research grounded issues that will affect the manner in which they deliver information systems. CCSR’s web site (www.ccsr.cse.dmu.ac.uk), which was launched in 1997, is now recognised as the world’s leading reference site on the subject of ethics and ICT and each month is visited by many thousands of people from around the world. The number of monthly visits has risen to around 250,000. Dr McBride was a speaker at the recent IT service management forum (itSMF) conference in Birmingham and his presentation will appear in Government IT magazine.

University of Northumbria at Newcastle_61 3b [15.38C]

Information Management research group. Research has focused in three broad areas:
· To inform on managing change in a range of contexts: to monitor and understand the holistic picture in order to develop, evaluate and benchmark improvement
· To investigate information behaviour to inform better information service and system design: to determine the information needs of particular user groups and the nature of information flow within organisations; to determine the impact of electronic information on people’s lives and learning
· Cross-cutting, methodological investigation, refining mostly qualitative techniques for monitoring, evaluating and benchmarking

The four sub-groups within the wider Information Management research group are:
Higher and Further Education sub-group (Day, Walton, Edwards, Banwell, Gannon-Leary, Winkworth, Heine, one Research Assistant). Northumbria is well known for the IMPEL projects which have had a major impact on research in the subject area over the review period. IMPEL is the umbrella name for a group of projects which began in 1993 and ended in 1999. They took an holistic and evaluative approach to monitoring the impact of change in the sector as seen by library staff, students and HE managers. The team was also invited by the JISC to evaluate other eLib projects. Northumbria’s involvement in the JISC hybrid library project. HyLiFe, has been a successor to IMPEL. It has developed, implemented and evaluated web-based interfaces giving access to hybrid information resources. The current three year JUBILEE project continues Northumbria’s JISC funded research and has a strong methodological component. It is seeking to predict, monitor and characterise information behaviour in relation to electronic information services (EIS). It takes a discipline-based approach to the longitudinal, user-based investigation which will produce best practice guidelines for evaluating the development of EIS. This builds on the earlier JISC, via UKOLN, funded work on Managing Organisational Change in the Hybrid Library, which had produced a model and toolkit benchmarking development towards the successful hybrid library.

Public sector sub-group, covering public libraries, schools, and the new cross-domain agenda which includes museums, archives and galleries (Parker, Banwell, Dixon, Pickard, Macnaught, three PGR students [Hayter, Robson and Shenton], four Research Assistants). Parker has won two of the first of Resource’s cross-domain projects, both current. The effects of the new local authority Bidding Culture on the development of public libraries, museums and archives is being investigated to identify successful bidding strategies and good practice, contextualised in the Government’s broader political and social agenda. The Neighbourhood Renewal project is examining how the work of libraries and museums is perceived by other organisations working in the area. Two PGR students are also in the team: Hayter’s research is focusing on the information worlds of the disadvantaged, and Robson’s on electronic information behaviour in relation to the visual arts. The earlier project, LOGOPLUS, laid the foundation for current work: it looked at the impact on public library users and staff of local government re-organisation by monitoring change and looking at gaps between user expectations of service and the reality they experienced. Work in schools has also centred on information behaviour, using longitudinal monitoring and user-centred techniques. School governors have been the focus of two projects, and children are the focus of two PGR studies, Pickard, now near completion, and Shenton.

Performance measurement and evaluation sub-group (Parker, Winkworth, Dixon, Banwell, Gannon-Leary, McTavish), which provides a focus for the more domain specific work which has increased in scale and importance over the review period with work such as the IMPEL and JUBILEE projects, the internationally acclaimed Performance Measures conference series (see RA6) and some health work. McTavish focuses on the information behaviour of lawyers and the impact of electronic information in law libraries. Two PGR students are also members of the team: Duggan is evaluating dissemination strategies in a health information crisis, and Hayter is evaluating information delivery mechanisms for the disadvantaged.

Strategic management of LIS, and information market sub-group (Collier, Banwell, one Research Assistant). Collier has been the focus for the recent and rapid development of externally funded activity at strategic level, which has led to the current Resource funded review of UKOLN, and involvement, as a sub-contractor to the British Library in the new EU project, TEL (The European Library), where Northumbria is involved in the market research, business planning, evaluation and benchmarking of the new digital library for Europe; and is also producing a current awareness service for British Council staff. In addition, private sector consultancy/research is Reviewing Information Management Practices in Top UK Companies.

2. Health information management research group (Walton, Banwell, Childs, Maguire, two PGR students [Duggan and Hall] ). The review period has seen a succession of projects, well regarded in the sector, for the LINC Health Panel, NHS Executive (Northern &Yorkshire), Newcastle and North Tyneside Health Authority, Sunderland Health Authority and the JISC, which have addressed information needs and service provision design and information flow in varying professional groups in the health sector. The Lewis project provided a multidisciplinary evaluation of the Early Onset Dementia Care project in Newcastle, which included reviewing the flow and provision of information to clients of the service. The recently completed British Library funded Partnerships in Health project has built on earlier work to develop a model of good practice for partnership working in the health library sector, which will be the subject of further development in 2001 by the Department of Health and the NHS Regional Library service.

3. Records management research group (Hare and McLeod, Jones, one PGR student [Jahore],one Research Assistant). The establishment of a baseline in records management research has involved the team in initially defining a research agenda for the domain, and then moving on, with internal funding, to carry out some ground clearing research by reviewing practice, and becoming involved in several European funded projects.

4. Image data research group (Eakins and Graham, eight Research Assistants).
The initial VISOR project (part funded by Resource), has collected qualitative data on information-seeking behaviour among professional image users in a variety of domains. The two ARTISAN projects (funded by Resource, and UK Patent Office), have led to improved techniques for the retrieval of abstract geometric shapes. The SPIRIT project (funded by Resource) has led to new insights into human shape perception, opening up the possibility of more effective shape retrieval techniques in the future. A follow on to the VISOR project is designing a user-oriented evaluation framework for the development of image retrieval systems funded by Resource, another Resource-funded evaluation of the effect of providing CBIR to users of conventional image retrieval systems, and three AHRB-funded projects. The first aims to study the process of visual query formulation, pointing the way towards better image matching and user interface design. The second is an in-depth study of the impact of digital image technology on art history research. The third aims to develop and evaluate a content-addressable archive of historical watermarks.

Interdisciplinary and collaborative research
Information studies is an interdisciplinary field of study, which draws together groups of individuals with differing viewpoints and affiliations. Projects are often jointly funded, using IMRI core funding to work in partnership with organisations such as Learndirect, the former Colleges of Health, and local education and public library authorities. Project teams include staff in the University from Health, Social Work and Education, Business, Humanities, the Sustainable Cities Research Institute, IIDR and Learning Resources. Collaboration outside the University has also been central to most projects, in the provision of fieldwork sites and in participation in project advisory groups.

STRUCTURE AND MECHANISMS FOR PROMOTING RESEARCH AND SUSTAINING RESEARCH CULTURE
Developing the research infrastructure
IMRI and IIDR ensure a businesslike approach to research and permit a planned and strategic view to be taken of research management. They provide a supportive environment for researchers and promote a research culture.
IMRI is based in re-furbished accommodation within the School of Information Studies. It underpins the bidding process and management of contracts in co-operation with academic staff both within and outside the School, and provides the administrative links with funding bodies, collaborating institutions and university central departments. It hosts seminars by academic staff, researchers and invited external speakers. Researchers also participate in teaching and student dissertation supervision. Quality assurance processes have been introduced with the establishment of the IMRI Advisory Group which meets twice a year; project Advisory Groups; the IMRI Annual Report which is presented to the School Board; and the Researcher Group.
IMRI directly employs a full-time Director (Banwell), a part-time (0.2) Assistant Director (Walton), a Research Professor (Collier), a Senior Administrator and a part-time (0.5) Clerical Assistant and four contract researchers. An additional five contract researchers are supported by external funds. The IMRI Executive Group, which includes the Head of School meets fortnightly. The IMRI Advisory Group includes representatives from industry, practitioners and academics from outside the School. IMRI is funded in part by additional central funding from the University and in part from income generation.
IIDR is an autonomous, inter-faculty, research centre, which brings together researchers from psychology, computing, art history, and information and library management. It occupies re-furbished accommodation in the Ellison Building, and employs a Director (Eakins), an R&D Manager (Graham), eight contract research staff, a senior administrator and an O.S. administrator. IIDR provides similar management functions to IMRI and also has an Advisory Group with members from industry and academia.

Staffing policy: Staff Development
All academic staff recruited now will have higher degrees by research, preferably at doctoral level, or substantial productive research activity of equivalent standard. Existing academic staff, who do not yet have higher degrees by research, are enabled to pursue doctorates through staff development. There is a planned but informal mentoring system for inexperienced researchers to assist them in planning, conducting and writing up research. Experienced research staff review their own development needs in annual appraisal discussions. A bi-monthly Researcher Group has been established. Its meetings are minuted and reported in the IMRI Annual Report.
Income generation via consultancy and contract research is pursued in order to maintain and develop the research culture as well as to improve the infrastructure of the School. As at Jan 2001, four current PGR students are funded from such income, partly or wholly, through internal studentships.

Comments on outputs not cited in RA2
Additionally, 104 conference papers have been given, including sixteen international, and 68 journal articles and twelve reports have been published. Evidence is provided in RA6.

South Bank University_61 3b [22D]

Dr. E. Banissi (information visualisation, computer graphics)
Ms. S. Barikzai (hypermedia-based courseware, courseware libraries)
Mr. P. Chalk (software engineering education)
Dr. F. Culwin (software engineering education)
Dr. M. Dastbaz (multimedia-based training, especially marketing training)
Dr. D. Devai (information visualisation, computer graphics)
Ms. C. Faulkner (usability education)
Mr D. Inman (natural language processing)
Dr. S Jennings (error correcting codes and data compression)
Dr. K. Lu (performance analysis of databses, especially web databases)
Dr. D. Siviter (hypermedia-based courseware, courseware libraries)
Mr R Yeates (advanced library informatics)

Research in HCI has a long history at South Bank University. In 1996 this group was submitted to the RAE under the Computer Science Unit of Assessment and helped to gain our 3b grade. Since then our new research strategy has provided more of a focus on aspects of HCI in education. For example, after Prof. Preece went to the US in 1997, a new arrival Dr Dastbaz, an expert in hypermedia-based training, took over as Director of the Centre for Multimedia. This move has had the benefit of giving us a critical mass in the area, combining as it does with the work of Dr Siviter’s and Dr Culwin’s teams (described below). This is reflected in the relationship between the school and the British HCI Group, which meets regularly at South Bank University with Christine Faulkner sitting on its committee as Education Representative.
Again it is worth distinguishing the different (but overlapping) themes which emerge in this research:

Web-based Software Engineering Education
The work of Chalk, Culwin and Faulkner concentrates on web-based software engineering education. Culwin has been a leading proponent of ‘object-first’ methods for teaching object-oriented programming and in making these methods available in web form [Culwin, 1,2]. His work has evolved from concentrating on Ada [Culwin, 3] to being mainly Java-focused and this reflects the main teaching languages in the School, Indeed, Culwin’s work has a very practical orientation and his publications almost always reflect methods which have been implemented within the School. This also applies to [Culwin, 4] which describes web-based assessment - our students are routinely tested through multiple choice tests on the web, with automated marking, timekeeping, retesting etc. Chalk has worked on the same issues [Chalk,1,2] while Faulkner, who works closely with Culwin, has focussed on usability and educational issues in training ‘usability engineers’.

Hypermedia-based Training
The work of Barikzai, Dastbaz, Inman and Siviter is in hypermedia and multimedia-based learning and teaching. Siviter has a long-standing relationship with the national initiative "Assisting Collaborative Education“ (ACE – see http://ace.ac.uk) which undertakes projects that involve exploiting collaborative technology to support education. In particular ACE is expanding its use of Lotus Domino to provide a variety of on-line facilities. Other projects in the area of e-learning involve practical investigation and exploitation of emerging standards for educational metadata and resource gateways. Siviter collaborates internationally through ACE and is involved in international standards committees for courseware library development [Siviter, 3]. South Bank University has a strong record of attracting funding in this area and Siviter and Yeates have between them attracted over £1/2 million in funds from HEFCE under the JISC and TLTP programmes. Barikzai works closely with Siviter and has been working particularly on the integration of existing courseware into on-line environments [Barikzai, 2].
Inman has been the UK link in a partnership funded by the Japanese Education Ministry (Monbusho) involving Prof. I. Saita of Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan and R. Harrison formerly of Melbourne University, Australia now at Nagoya University, Japan. The aim of this research is to enable students outside Japan to have rich, contextual access to teachers in Japan using the internet [Inman, 1]. The hypothesis being tested is that multimedia access can help to provide some of the context a language learner would gain by learning in Japan. Inman has also worked on classification of data on the web [Inman, 4] and this work links with the work of staff in information visualisation (see below).
Dastbaz joined the School in 1999 from Kingston University Business School. Over the past four years he has been involved in researching and developing multimedia based training and decision support systems, particularly in the area of marketing [Dastbaz, 2, 4]. In this he has been involved in the DTI's UFI programme and has been working closely with AZTEC - The Training and Enterprise Council and Professors S.P. Kalafatis and C.Edwards from Kingston Business School. Dastbaz designed and developed a multimedia training CD-ROM on Business Research Methods. The CD was part of research project to see if traditional means of in-house company training could be replaced with the new technology based training. 123 small to medium size companies tested the CD and the evaluation is being used to develop the design models further. He is also currently leading the IDM's (Institute of Direct Marketing) E-Marketing certificate programmed being held at Imperial College. This is currently hosting speakers such as Stuart Archibald, Director of e-commerce (UK) for Virgin.net, Hilary Douglas, e-marketing Director of RS Components and Nick Richardson, Head of e-commerce at egg.com. Other interesting projects include design and development of a Multimedia Expert engine called SPEECH for Cochlear PLC. Cochlear is the world leader in providing hearing aids.
It is important to mention that the Head of School, Prof. Abdullah Hashim, has played an important motivational role in this area of the School’s research. During the last five years he has held a Framework grant of approx. £2 million (the TALENT project) to develop a multimedia training network. Although, Prof. Hashim has been submitted to the Computer Science Unit of Assessment because of his work in signal processing, his multimedia research has obviously been very important to staff in this submission.

Information Visualisation and Processing
Banissi and Devai work in computer graphics [Banissi, 1,2,4], [Devai,2,3,4] but they have been focusing increasingly on information visualisation [Banissi,3],[Devai,1]. Banissi initiated the IEEE conference series Information Visualisation, which has been held in London since 1997. As well, as being a thriving aspect of the School’s research in its own right, this is also important as underpinning the work of those using the web and multimedia in education and has involved other staff as well (e.g. [Patel, 3]).
Jennings works in error correcting codes and data compression. She has worked with Prof. Hashim, the Head of School [Jennings, 4] but she provides support to staff in this area of research in terms of advice on issues such as web data transmission and encryption.
Lu joined the School in 1998 from Herriot Watt University where he was working on the project of "Performance Management of Commercial Parallel Database Systems“, supported by the EPSRC and the EU IV Framework Mercury programme [Lu-4]. This work has formed the basis for his work at South Bank on performance measurement of databases. Lu is currently writing a book "Web-based Data and Performance Management“ (under contact with Balgrave Publishers). Lu’s work focuses on aspects of Web–based Data Management Systems (WDMSs) such as the performance of a web application, its performance metrics, how to benchmark it, and how to improve its performance. He has had four papers published in this area (two in last year’s DEXA). Lu is currently working on using a is to use multiple processors to resolve the performance problem of the systems. A lot of new questions need to be answered, for example, if you have a large file, how should it be fragmented and distributed to different processors. Lu has had a paper (accepted) discussing these issues in this year’s BNCOD.

Future Research Strategy

The strategy formulated following the last RAE has had a tangible effect - focusing and motivating the staff in this submission. This period has seen the promotion of two staff in the area (Patel and Culwin) to senior research posts as well as senior research appointments in our sister area of Computer Science. In the last year this has prompted us to rethink the nature of our Research Committee. Following the last RAE we implemented a small streamlined committee whose remit was to take care of the ‘nuts and bolts’ of research (conference attendance, seminar organisation, PhD registrations, etc). It is now apparent that, in both RAE submissions, a critical mass of research active staff has developed who contributr regularly to their fields of expertise.
The Research Committee, which now includes all professors and readers, has new terms of reference to arrange for day-to-day issues of research to be devolved to the individual research groupings (the two described above in this submission, and two in Computer Science). In return, the role of directing research policy has been handed down from the academic directorate. Our working plan for the future is the following, but will be finalised when the results of the current RAE are known:
1. To ensure that each research grouping has its own internal seminar, meeting regularly
2. To facilitate interaction between the research groupings, both within individual RAE submissions and across the boundaries of these submissions
3. To devolve such day-to-day matters as support for conference attendance to the research groupings
4. To continue and strengthen the staff development policies (timetable relief, support for conference attendance etc) which have helped us to reach our current level of research activity (approaching 60% of staff submitted), with a view to submitting 80% of our staff to the next RAE.
5. To take steps to improve the rate of completion of PhD students in this area.

Summary and Self-assessment

There is a real feeling within the School that, since the arrival of Prof. Hashim as new Head of School, and the coincident arrival of HEFCE QR funding following the 1996 RAE, we have acquired a lasting research culture that impacts upon all staff and students. Both the research groups being returned have a number of new personnel, all of whom have undertaken research of international interest. In addition we have taken steps (e.g. timetable relief) to ensure that staff not submitted in 1996 have had a chance to become research active, almost a third of the staff we are now submitting fall into this category. We are proud of the fact that, through this and through our stragegy of focusing our research, we have been able to build our first submission to the Library and Information Management Unit of Assessment. We hope that this submission conveys the vitality of our research work and the contribution that it makes to the international research community.

Staffordshire University_61 3a [7A]

The group has contributed significantly to the development of the theory of Organisational Semiotics (Liu 2). Uniting norms and signs is fundamental to the theory (Liu 1). The integration of Organisational Semiotics with systems engineering approaches to enable the transition from organisational need to technical expression as IT is an important sub-theme. The integration of organisational semiotics and software engineering approaches for forward requirements engineering was addressed in (Alderson 3). Reverse engineering, represented in understanding legacy systems by deriving their plausible requirements, has been the subject of the three year EPSRC AMBOLS project (GR/L43473) supporting a research assistant. This has enabled IT/IS and requirements engineering researchers in the School to explore inter-disciplinary issues in the context of legacy systems, addressing the recovery of requirements through observation of the system in action and elicitation of the meaning of the system from its stakeholders. Organisational semiotics and requirements engineering techniques were integrated to enable this (Alderson 2, Liu 4, Sharp 1). Understanding of the term ‘legacy system’ in differing social contexts was analysed by Alderson and Shah (Shah 1). The integration of norms into a method for describing business processes was also addressed (Sun 3).

An important generalisation of Organisational Semiotics separating responsibility from authority has been developed within a successful doctoral programme (Sharp 2, Sharp 3) so encompassing machine agents rather than just people. Postgraduate research topics have addressed the linking of Organisational Semiotics with computer science in the description of enterprises, dealing with technical and organisational issues and deriving information systems solutions to business problems.

The group will continue its interest in the further development of Organisational Semiotics. A wide-ranging programme for the development of Organisational Semiotics is the subject of a proposal to EPSRC (GR/R31324/01). This programme will unite the elements of Organisational Semiotics, developed and validated individually over 20 years, and integrate them into a single method validated against significant industrial cases.

Dr. Cecila Baranauskas will join the group on sabbatical from August 2001 to January 2002 from the Institute of Computing, UNICAMP, Campinas SP, Brasil. She will be investigating theories and practices of Organizational Semiotics for the design and evaluation of human-computer interfaces

Other socially informed approaches, such as Activity Theory, are applied to address issues beyond the current scope of Organisational Semiotics, such as historical context, division of labour and conflict. Dr. Uden of the School of Computing (returned in UoA 68 Education) has applied this theory to software development processes (see Uden and McGrath, ‘Modelling Softer Aspects of the Software Development Process: An Activity Theory based approach’, HICSS-33, IEEE Computer Society Press, January 2000). A postgraduate student of Alderson has explored the creation of a process for applying the theory to requirements elicitation. Sun investigates the determination of information requirements for e-business systems development applying Activity Theory to analyse e-business processes and model business requirements, including stakeholders and their responsibilities, business norms, constraints, and resources. The application of social approaches to the use of software agents in support of electronic business is emerging as a theme. A proposal has been formulated on modelling human normative behaviour of different actors in work processes, and specifying human responsibilities and the patterns of actions for the design of software agents. The investigation of Activity Theory as an aid to eliciting requirements for IT and IS systems will be progressed. Dr. Scott Brandt, Associate Professor of Library Science of the Libraries Faculty, Purdue University, who has begun a collaboration with Uden on this topic, will join the group as a visiting research fellow in April 2001.

Systems development

In keeping with the theme of integrating enterprise and engineering, Alderson collaborating with the DERA and QSS Ltd. (Alderson 4), contributed to the development of a reference model for systems engineering which relates organisational, managerial and technical viewpoints and activities, encompasses the supply chain, and gives insights into requirements engineering and the points at which stakeholders should contribute (Alderson 1). This work is informing ISO 15288 through the DERA. Funding paid for some of Alderson’s time.

The application of Internet technology to support IS and its impact upon organisations is important. One research direction is the exploration of delegation by responsible human agents to authorised machine agents, complementing the work on social aspects of software agents (Sharp 2, Sharp 3). An agent-based architecture for autonomous share dealing is also under investigation. Software agents for computer collaborative work is the subject of an ongoing joint British/Hong Kong Research Scheme project between Staffordshire University and City University of Hong Kong (British Council/HK Research Grants Council Project 9050101 valued at £7,000). The development of a requirements engineering approach to business objects using norm-based descriptions is the focus of collaborative work with City University, Hong Kong (British Council/HK Research Grants Council Project 9050145 valued at £6,000) and Setubal Institute of Technology, Portugal (British Council LIS/992/2 valued at £1,000). The funds support collaboration visits.

Aligning IT with organisational strategy

The research question addressed is the relationship between the creation and promulgation of a business strategy, and the development of strategic information systems and information technology (IS/IT) applications. The research has explored use of business frameworks: for assessing the strategic potential of IS/IT, for providing strategic flexibility in IS/IT developments, and for ensuring that strategic IS/IT applications are capable of capturing the ‘business vision’ that underlies a typical business strategy. The research is focussed on a method for linking business strategy and strategic IS/IT developments. Strategic positioning (Eardley 4), strategic flexibility (Eardley 3) and strategic vision (Eardley 1, Eardley 2) are components of this approach developed as Eardley’s Ph.D. topic with Prof. Avison, his principal supervisor at the University of Southampton. An essential element of future research is understanding the impact of e-business. One thread will examine the potential for applying Eardley’s approaches to identify opportunities for developing effective electronic commerce applications that have a sound basis in business strategy.

A sub-theme is the provision of IT for strategic decision support. A method for defining the boundaries or parameters within which management decisions, including strategic management decisions, may be made, has been developed. The components required of such a method were investigated (Sun 1), the method developed (Sun 2) and applied in a case study (Sun 4) as Sun’s Ph.D. topic. The group will study further the relationships between requirements, norms and decision making in management, combining socially oriented theories, such as organisational semiotics for norms and activity theory for motivation, constraint, conflict and historical context, with frameworks and theories of decision making. The group will address empirical validation in a wider context and the refinement of the method into a practical methodology. Alderson and Prof. Sommerville and. Prof. Dix of Lancaster University have been awarded a joint EPSRC grant commencing in April 2001 (GR/R12183/01) to investigate how managing decisions can reduce the amount of rework undertaken during IT systems development. Under the policy of encouraging younger researchers' participation, Sun has been invited to join the project as an investigator.

Shah’s time spent in industry led to an interest in the difficulties caused in information systems development by technological innovation (Shah 1) and communication difficulties between users and developers (Shah 4). Another approach to these communication problems considers the effectiveness of End User Computing (EUC) – providing the facility for users to develop personal IT. Modelling approaches are investigated which enable prediction of the impact of changes to identified success factors on the effectiveness of end user developed applications. This research addresses how an organisation might best approach the task of optimising the effectiveness of end user developed applications, and of maximising the contribution that can be made by IT specialists (Shah 2). Shah has supervised to completion a Ph.D. on this topic at Aston University, awarded 1998.

Research has been undertaken to facilitate the alignment of business and IS/IT strategies and the development of information systems. This has enabled the identification and specification of the information systems required by the organisation to achieve its business objectives and the IT infrastructure necessary for their support (Shah 3). Dr Shah has supervised a Ph.D. on this topic at Aston University which was awarded in 1996. This work is in collaboration with Dr. Dingley of University of Central England and Britvic plc., and with Dr. Golder of Aston University. The work addresses how the organisation understands the role of its information base in the development of information systems in the context of e-business. This is an ongoing project, which has so far run for 3 years. The work emphasises the strategic context of information systems development and its IT infrastructure. A book and papers on this work are in progress.

Automatic Abstracting

Through Sharp, the unit has a continuing interest in automatic abstracting - processing electronically available texts to select those meeting the user’s information needs - particularly by systems that do not use predefined templates. Such a system must exhibit some form of understanding, and so Sharp applies cognitive theories and linguistic findings. The developing computational model rests on three underlying principles: that the meaning is relative; that artificial linguistic structures are to be avoided; and that understanding constructs a representation of the text in the mind (Sharp 4).

Current research is investigating texts other than English and domains other than computing to test the robustness of the approach through master’s projects and Ph.D. work. The extracts produced currently are informative but can lack cohesion and coherence because the current system does not exhibit any form of understanding. A computational memory model of text is being developed based on the theory that, when selecting relevant information from a text, one constructs a mental representation of the linguistic surface structure of the text and builds a propositional representation of the semantics.

Information and Decision Support Systems

Walley commenced work on the application of artificial intelligence to the biological monitoring of river quality in 1989 with the aim of developing a truly expert decision support system for river managers capable of diagnosing the state of health of a river and identifying the type and likely source of pollutants present. He concluded from knowledge elicitation that experts use both pattern recognition and plausible reasoning when performing diagnoses. Consequently, his research has followed two parallel streams: pattern recognition, initially based upon neural networks, but now based upon a novel information theoretic system which his group has developed (MIR-max, see O'Connor M. A. and Walley W. J. (2000) ‘An information theoretic self-organising map with disaggregation of output classes’, 2nd Int. Conf. on Enterprise Information Systems, Stafford, UK. 108-115.), and plausible reasoning based upon Bayesian belief networks (Walley 3).

Since demonstrating the potential of this new approach to biomonitoring and the weaknesses of the traditional methods (Walley 2 and 4), he has been supported by three Environment Agency R&D contracts (total value £192,000) supporting research assistants and partially supporting a PhD student. He has published four Environment Agency Technical Reports. In 2000, an information system (River Biology Monitoring System) and a decision support system (River Pollution Diagnostic System based on pattern recognition) were delivered to the Agency. These systems are accessible to Agency staff on their intranet. Three papers on these systems have been accepted for publication in 2001. A second decision support system, based upon plausible reasoning, will be delivered in 2001. Two web based information systems (see www.soc.staffs.ac.uk/research/groups/cies) were delivered in 2001. In addition, Walley carried out a feasibility study for the British Environment (1998/99) into the use of pattern recognition to detect the sources of oil spills on rivers. A continuation project to develop a decision support sytsem for Agency pollution officers and legal teams will commence in April 2001 (value £90,000). Dr. Day will join the group to lead this work in association with Walley and supported by a Research Associate and a Ph.D. student. A further Evnironment Agency funded project addressing classification in the context of an environmental stress survey will commence in April led by Martin (value £13,000).

Walley spent five weeks as a Visiting Scientist at the National Institute of Water and Atmosphere (NIWA), New Zealand in November 2000, where he initiated three projects (Fish Prediction, Forest Management and River Quality Monitoring) based upon his methods. A researcher from NIWA will visit Stafford in July 2001 to continue this collaboration. New Zealand’s Department for the Environment is currently considering using Walley’s approach for its ‘State of the Environment’ monitoring. Since 1993, Walley has also been collaborating with the Department of Intelligent Systems at the Jozef Stefan Institute, Slovenia. He has visited three times to give seminars and has published six jointly authored papers (four since 1996). In 1997, he was invited to present a paper (Walley 1) at the prestigious RIVPACS International Workshop, open to invited delegates only. Walley was awarded £7,000 of QR-derived funding to support the international promotion of his work through collaboration visits and lectures overseas.

Walley, Sharp and Alderson have collaborated, supported by £11,000 of QR-derived funding, to extend the application of Bayesian Belief Networks (BBN) to decision support systems in other fields, such as loan risk assessment (with a ‘top four’ bank), medical diagnosis (using headache symptoms with Stafford General Hospital,) and forestry management (with NIWA, New Zealand). Technical Reports written by Alderson and Walley on loan risk assessment were very well received by the bank and led to it adopting BBN techniques. (The bank made a gift of £4,000 to licence BBN development software for the University.) Sharp has continued the medical diagnosis work through a series of research student projects. Walley was awarded £8,000 of QR-derived funding to support a Research Associate then partially support a PhD student in applying BBN to the study of acidic streams in Wales.

Acknowledgment of knowledge as the core competence has increased the interest of two water utilities in decision support leading to two projects led by Sharp. That with Severn Trent Water, is developing a decision based system to assist engineers in rehabilitation strategy; that with South West Water, is developing a strategic information system assisting the management in planning rehabilitation investment. This will make use of the data mining facilities of Oracle 9.0 Server. The School has been selected as a beta-test site for Oracle 9i server; one of only 3 in the UK. This will provide the opportunity to explore its facilities for decision support.

Additional Observations

Since mid-1996 the group has emerged as a distinct entity within the School of Computing. The recruitment of Shah and Alderson and the subsequent collaboration with Liu, Sharp and Walley created the core around which the group could develop. This core group committed themselves to bring together and build on existing personal research and to develop proposals and papers. Given the difficulties of recruiting into information and computing based disciplines the group choose to develop new members by supervising staff undertaking postgraduate research. Five current group members are undertaking or have recently completed Ph.Ds. The commitment to the M.Res. programme has increased the quality of candidates for Ph.D. study and junior research posts. The dedicated research area has helped engender a research community. The postgraduate population is growing markedly and the increased emphasis on supervision (and training of supervisors) will improve the completion rate further. One further student was awarded a Ph.D. in March 2001, and at least 3 more are expected to complete within the year.

The decision support methodology developed by Walley is having a significant influence on thinking about environmental monitoring world-wide, as its advantages over previous approaches become appreciated. The extension of the fusion of plausible reasoning and pattern matching will find application in many other decision support applications. Organisational Semiotics, with the presence of both Stamper and Liu in the School, holds the promise of a revolution in the way information systems are developed, with just-in-time delivery appearing feasible. In both fields the group’s collaboration has an international dimension. The group can consolidate its leading role in both of these fields.

The successful proposal in 1997 to the EPSRC SEBPC programme for the novel AMBOLS project applying organisational semiotics to understanding legacy systems both vindicated and consolidated the collaboration. Funding from the School of Computing in allocating protected research time for researchers and in providing scholarships for postgraduate students allowed momentum to be maintained. External income over the assessment period has risen from about £30,000 to over £100,000 per annum. Increasing income is guaranteed for the foreseeable future by the successful proposal to the EPSRC System Integration programme (GR/R12183/01) with Lancaster University (valued at £314,000 to Staffordshire University), coupled with the continuing funding stream developed by Walley and the £86,564 TCS project being led by Sun. This has laid a firm financial footing for continuing development, expansion and increasing independence from institutional funding.

The group has continuing involvement in co-organising an international conference series and co-editing related books and proceedings (ICEIS 1999, 2000, 2001), and an international workshop series (Organisational Semiotics 1998, 1999, 2000), an IFIP WG8.1 working conference (2001) and a related book series, as well as assisting on a variety of other conference committees.
The group has a relatively short history and is growing strongly. It displays spirit and synergy in collaboration while nurturing individual interests. There is clearly the opportunity to increase the quality and quantity of its output in the next assessment period. A research programme of many opportunities has been laid out in Organisational Semiotics (proposed as EPSRC GR/R31324/01), in the alignment of IT with organisational strategy, and in the application of plausible reasoning in knowledge systems. The decision support systems delivered to the Environment Agency by Walley will increase interest and acceptance of his approach, and bring further opportunities such as the new oil spill project. Expanded collaboration with external researchers, such as Sommerville, Dix, Stamper and Brandt, is seen as a key way to assimilate the further expertise required to capitalize on these opportunities.

Thames Valley University_61 1 [2D]

Staff publications additional to output in RA2 include:
- Olden, Anthony, "University Libraries in Africa: Book Review Article", Journal of Documentation, 54 (1998): 489-98
- Olden, Anthony, "The Intra-African Book Support Scheme and Publishing and Library Supply in Kenya and Tanzania" (with Alli A.S. Mcharazo). New Review of Information and Library Research, 2 (1996): 179-194

University of West of England, Bristol_61 3b [9.5E]

A frequent theme in the Centre’s research is to work with local communities in finding effective ways of using ICTs. Examples of projects conducted by members of the Centre and their associates, include:
· The Connections project (Plant, working with Bristol City Council, funded by the Single Regeneration Budget) which studies the use of web technologies to connect voluntary communities.
· The True Stories project (Beeson) which explored the use of hypermedia technologies for telling community stories.
· A formative evaluation project for Women Connect (Moggridge), to assist planning decisions in a project aimed at encouraging more women and women’s groups to get on-line.
· A community arts project planning methodology (developed by Kamm, with Vizability and staff of the Faculty of Art, Media and Design, with funding from Axa Sun Life).
· Evaluation of the use and potential of IT in rural regeneration, especially through collaborative working (Plant, with Smart South West and CRISP).
· Reports on community computing projects and resources in Bristol, charting the spread and modes of use of IT in the voluntary sector, providing an essential base for the group's research agenda (Plant).
· Researching the community organisation Living Easton and its use of web technology (Stephens).
· An evaluation of student computer consultancy in voluntary organisations in Bristol (Plant).

Many of these projects have been written up in a series of publications intended to disseminate knowledge and good practice among community organisations. The Centre holds regular academic and practitioner seminars, maintains a website, and runs external workshops for umbrella organisations such as the Voluntary Organisations Standing Conference on Urban Regeneration (VOSCUR) and the Bristol Black Development Unit (BDU), in conjunction with Progress Southwest, a regional focus for training and capacity development for voluntary organisations.

The Centre has a strong regional focus while at the same time is involved in national and international initiatives. In 2000, staff presented papers at the National Council for Voluntary Organisations Research Conference (in Birmingham) and at the Conference in Dublin of the International Society for Third Sector Research. Plant has been active in establishing links with the Community Development Foundation and other national bodies working in the area of community computing and social inclusion. During 2000 Moggridge (with Williams) was commissioned by the Community Development Foundation to evaluate the on-line consultation process for the Government's National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal.

Members of the Community Information Systems Centre are active in transferring models of reflective practice and communities of learning from research and consultancy work to teaching, and vice-versa. This has led to innovation in curriculum design and delivery, and in turn to related research outputs. Published output draws on work in this area through Moggridge’s continued collaboration with Peter Reason at the Centre for Action Research in Professional Practice at Bath University. Long-standing research into educational innovation in the area of information systems practice has been recognised by external bodies such as the FDTL- funded PROF@T project, the Partnership Trust (commended in their ‘learning through service’ award), and the DfEE (through an invitation to contribute a good practice manual on student community service learning).

The Centre has collaborated on the FACE project, a two-year initiative funded by BT under their University Development Award Scheme that looked at opportunities for disabled students to become independent learners by providing remote access to services via videotelephones. A one year follow-up project is looking at improving deaf people’s access to education, employment, library and council services through ICT via videotelephony using British Sign Language.

The thrust of the work of the CIS group is to extend information systems analysis and method beyond the boundaries of formal organisations into the more fluid contexts of communities and society at large. They are developing methods of working based on dialogue and co-operation and looking to discover applications of ICTs which will broaden access, strengthen communities, and empower people

4. Organisational and Interactive Computing (Beeson, Davis, Kamm, Stephens, Thomas, Yazdani)

This research area includes work at the conceptual foundations of information systems, information systems evaluation in organisational contexts, interactive computing and personal information management (including the Centre for Personal Information Management).

A growing reputation in the philosophy of information systems is evidenced by the organisation of the Philosophical and Logical Aspects of Information Systems Conference (‘PAIS I’) held at UWE in 1994. A selection of the papers was subsequently published under the title Philosophical Aspects of Information Systems in 1997, edited by Beeson, Russel Winder (University of London) and Steve Probert (originally at UWE, then at Birkbeck). A second conference in this area, held in 1998, was organised by Stephens, Beeson and Probert and attracted a wider range of contributions, including from overseas. The proceedings were published in a special edition of the journal Systemist (Vol 20) in December 1998. The organisers of PAIS II were also invited to join the Programme Committee for the ‘IS Challenges’ track of the European Conference on Information Systems held in Vienna in July 2000. This work at the foundations of IS seeks to develop a critical stance on systems theory and organisation theory (Beeson, Davis) and to explore ethics and authenticity in IS practice (Stephens, Kamm).

Indicative of the organic evolution of IS research at UWE has been a string of projects deriving from one of the key components of the 1996 submission, the Integrated Clinical Work Station Project. Led by Professor Sam Waters, who sadly died in Sept 2000, the project provided a foundation for a series of papers (with Davis, Bakehouse, and Doyle) comparing information usage in the clinical domain with usage in other sectors, such as banking and transport. The observational method adopted in this work has influenced subsequent research, such as the work by Davis and Beeson (see below) and Davis and Doyle who are currently exploring with the Ministry of Defence a research study into uses of information and knowledge management in procurement project teams.

Beeson and Davis have collaborated on a commissioned evaluation of the impact of the National Automated Fingerprint Identification System (NAFIS) on work practices within a local police force. The NAFIS User Board and the Police Information Technology Organisation subsequently funded a comparative study across eight forces in England and Wales. From this work, Davis has developed a new line of research into information systems evaluation.

The Centre for Personal Information Management was established in 1994. It has an ambitious programme of research around human factors of computing and communications technologies, spanning such areas as intelligent image systems, personal information management, support for knowledge work, digital publishing, mobile multi-media, educational technology, human-computer interaction and computer-supported cooperative work. It has operated as a self-sufficient research unit with a small permanent staff, recruiting research students and securing external funding and industrial collaboration in support of its work. Since its establishment, the Centre has
· completed joint research and consultancy projects with BT, HP Research Laboratories, The Financial Times, Cognito, Glaxo, Interface Technology Research, Springer Verlag, Serco, Orange Communications and Appliance Studio;
· undertaken joint research with Brunel University, the University of Bristol, MIT Media Lab, University of Queensland, University of Karlsruhe, University of Washington and University of Western Australia;
· originated the journal Personal Technologies (Springer Verlag), now in its fourth volume;
· organised and hosted the international conferences HCI’97 and Handheld and Ubiquitous Computing 2000
· become engaged in the EPSRC-funded ICoS project for scalable image delivery, jointly with the University of Bristol.

In addition to the PhDs already completed in the Centre, two further theses have been submitted for examination. Current students are investigating scalable image delivery across networks, cultural factors in personal information management and use of the web, electronic publishing and the ‘mobile multimedia university’. The Centre’s work is broad in scope and seeks to build research alliances with external partners. A particularly important direction in its activity has been to contribute to the opening of research in HCI/CSCW towards the use and potential of personal, portable, and mobile information technology devices

Also under the umbrella of Organisational and Interactive Computing, Yazdani has been conducting research in art, media and design. One his current major projects, Iconic Communication, offers a critical framework within which iconic communication systems could be developed to bridge linguistic and cultural gaps and provide effective computer-based systems for conveying information on a global scale.

Both Yazdani and Beeson supervise projects emerging from a major collaboration instigated in 1996 that brought together UWE’s faculties of Computer Studies & Maths, and Art, Media & Design, Hewlett-Packard and the media industry (later subsumed by the Foresight-funded National Creative Technologies Initiative). Beeson’s work looks at the uses of hypermedia technology for community storytelling (True Stories) while Yazdani’s Virtual Stories looks at emerging narrative form in the virtual reality domain. This common interest in uses of hypermedia, especially for storytelling and related creative purposes, is a key growth point for the researchers in this submission.

5. Computer-assisted learning (Dugdale, Ruhlmann, Yazdani)

A research programme in computer-assisted learning has been developed through a series of projects; ResIDe (a project to establish an Electronic Reserve for UK Universities); FACE (Facilitating Access to Learning resources for Disabled Students) and NLSF (Networked Learning Support Framework). Dugdale is project manager for ResIDe and (with Chelin) has overseen the BT-funded FACE project (see above).

The ResIDe project began in 1996 with funding from the JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) Electronic Library (eLib) Programme (£80k). Initial funding was supplemented by an additional £10k for dissemination of research findings. Now adopted as a permanent part of UWE’s Library Services, ResIDe has attracted much attention as a model for electronic holdings of teaching and learning materials and as a test site for HERON (Higher Education Resources On Demand), a national service and research body (funded by JISC) looking at electronic copyright and digitisation.

Building on the success of ResIDe, nearly £250k was obtained from the HEFCE Good Management Practice programme for establishing a Networked Learning Support Framework (NLSF). The creation of a NLSF offers the opportunity to deliver modular learning and teaching to a large number of students. Like ResIDe, the NLSF has provided a valuable research opportunity to look at how IT is taken up and what impact it has on teaching, learning, and access.

Rühlmann's work on computer-assisted learning, and in particular computer-assisted language learning, has led to a number of significant grants:
· An EC grant (100,000 euro) to manage and develop a project entitled: „PEC Interactive Tutorials: Procedures and Practices in European Construction“, with partners in Germany, Denmark and Sweden.
· A research project (£28,542) to study methods of converting traditional university degree modules to multimedia distance learning modules on CD-ROM and World Wide Web.
· An EC grant (186,665 euro) with partners in UK, Germany and Austria, researching methods of adapting software templates developed in previous projects to the requirements of businesses.

One of Yazdani’s current major projects concerns the construction of a Multimedia Database of Learning Materials. He and his co-workers have developed an innovative mechanism for publishing video and audio testimonies by practitioners who would normally find it difficult to articulate their knowledge of a domain in written form. Their first prototype as part of the project has dealt with craftspeople in the area of ceramics. This work is not only a contribution in the area of computer-assisted learning, but produces practical and theoretical advances in knowledge elicitation and nonlinear narrative creation. Yazdani is also currently leading a UWE-wide initiative in learning technology and globalisation development, working closely with the Library.

There is a convergence of interest between the Computer-Assisted Learning and Community Information Systems Centre around issues of access, inclusion, and self-directed learning. A fruitful dialogue is emerging about the role of computer-based information systems in learning.

6. Dissemination policy

A key element of the research strategy since the 1996 RAE has been the dissemination of research results through national and international refereed conferences. This reflects both the nature of rapidly developing discipline and practice in IS, and the motivation to establish the group firmly within the IS community, and contribute to its growth. Major systems conferences have been targeted, especially those of the UK Systems Society and the International Society for Systems Sciences. More recently, contributions have been made to the annual conferences of the UK Academy for Information Systems, the UK Operational Research Conferences, the European Conference of Information Systems and the International Conference of Information Systems. Stephens, for example, has presented twice at conferences of the (American) Association of Information Systems. Beeson has twice given papers at the biennial Participatory Design Conference, organised by Computing Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR), and has also presented at a CPSR conferences on the Directions and Implications of Advanced Computing. CPSR conferences attract significant European (especially Scandinavian), as well as American participation, and give us an important international platform for our work.

7. Promoting research and sustaining and developing the research culture

Responsibility for overseeing research and research training lies with the Faculty Research Committee and Research Degrees Committee. Research staff and students enjoy dedicated research administrative support and facilities, including a local computer network incorporating specialist support for researchers, and high-speed external connections. IS staff have been involved in developing multimedia laboratories to support work in human-computer interaction and with multimedia/hypermedia tools. The Centre for Research, Innovation and Industry provides an institutional focus for the development of research activity and for collaboration with industry, including support for research bidding. Information and funding opportunities relating to research are disseminated locally through email bulletins and meetings.

8. Support for, and encouragement of, new researchers

There is a clear policy within the University on the importance of new staff being research active; this is reflected in recruitment practice. Existing staff new to research are also given time to develop their interests and are supported if they wish to register for a PhD. Staff moving into research will work with a more experienced mentor to develop a line of interest. A range of activities is supported to encourage new researchers including numerous seminar programmes, many with an emphasis on facilitating cross-disciplinary work. Working papers are published in local research series (eg the series of pamphlets from the Community Information Systems Centre): these both prepare authors for more substantial publication and advertise their work internally and externally. The annual staff appraisal process provides an opportunity for reviewing progress and planning development in research. Related to this, there is an annual process of bidding for additional research time.

9. Integration and contribution of students and research assistants.

Research students and assistants are integrated into project teams and accommodated alongside other staff. They are encouraged to play a full part within the seminar programmes and are taken into the publication process as co-authors as a matter of course. Research training is provided within the project teams, by a university-wide programme and through taught research methods modules. Student progress is monitored continuously through supervision and through a formal annual monitoring process. Administration of research degrees has been devolved to Faculties under regulations which encourage rapid registration and install a formal progress examination at an early stage in the degree.

The foundations have been laid since 1996 for producing a stream of PhD completions in the IS area. In addition to those completed within the period, two further PhD dissertations were submitted before the end of the reporting period (of which one has now been successfully examined), and three more are either completed or very close to completion and should lead to awards in the current year. Strategic development of our research programme to include greater involvement and support for research students will ensure that this trend continues.

10. Links to other UoAs

Attention is drawn to the submission to UoA 25, Computer Science, which includes several collaborators of the groups submitted to UoA 61. Areas of common interest include business process modelling (Beeson, with Sa) and medical informatics (Davis and Doyle, with Solomonides). One research active member of the Community Information Systems Centre (Petheram) has been submitted under Unit 11 (Subjects Allied to Medicine), because his research, while very much information systems work, is in the specific medical application area of aphasiology.

Queen Margaret University College Edinburgh_61 3b [5C]

Robert Gordon University_61 3b [7.7D]

University of Paisley_61 3b [8B]

Napier University_61 4 [6E]

Research in Social Informatics
Activities in this area are described on the website: http://www.esis.napier.ac.uk/
The work submitted reflects two main themes. The first is knowledge management. Within this domain, Davenport has explored the formalisation of tacit knowledge in a number of contexts; evidence-based healthcare [ED1]; business documentation [ED4]; library reference work [ED3]. Recently she has explored the formalisation of trust (as convener, for example, of panels on the topic in INTERACT 99 and CHI 2000) and has worked for over two years with European colleagues on a conceptual model for representations of trust in partnerships that has led to a 5th Framework proposal(valued at around 280000 Euros) (IST-2000-28295) currently in the final stages of negotiation. She has published a number of papers over the past three years that develop the concept of ‘information ethology’, or the behaviour of others as a source of information in a range of contexts.

The second theme, managing „democratic“ information and knowledge, is focusing on the use of technology for knowledge sharing and the development of, and access to, organisational memories using adaptive workflow techniques. Macintosh, while in her previous post in AIAI (Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute) at the University of Edinburgh, developed tools for representing ‘reservoirs’ of knowledge assets by means of ontologies that map skills and archival knowledge to tasks [AM1], [AM2]. She was a co-investigator on TBPM - Task-Based Process Management funded under EPSRC (Project Number GR/L42179). The project focused on adaptive workflow for knowledge intensive tasks [AM3], [AM4].

Internally, colleagues working in the social informatics area will work with their ITC colleagues and others in the School of Computing (in the HCI group and the Database group) to develop projects on social navigation and information architecture, building on existing collaboration on ‘social browsing’ architectures and visualisation. Members of the Social Computing group are working with colleagues to convert ‘weak ties’ into ‘strong ties’ or ‘network’ relationships into partnerships on funded projects. This group, for example, has a number of existing strong ties with fellow researchers at UK universities (Heriot-Watt, Sheffield Hallam, St. Andrews, Edinburgh) and is developing relationships with colleagues elsewhere, which have recently led to a SHEFC Regional Development Grant bid in association with colleagues at Stirling, Abertay, and Glasgow Caledonian.

At international level, the group has links with IDG in Germany (project work; proposal writing in the domain of knowledge management); strong links with Indiana University (co-authorships; joint proposals; academic exchanges), links with the Universite de Monreal (exchange of visits; proposal writing) and the National Research Council in Canada (exchange of visits; proposal writing); and links (proposal writing and panel submissions) have recently been established with colleagues in Rutgers University in the USA and in the University of Technology in Sydney and Curtin University in Australia. In addition, members of the group will continue to be involved in the planning of relevant conference events (e.g. local IIS sponsored workshops in Edinburgh; CHI, INTERACT and ECSCW; the International Conference on Information Systems, Technology & Management, Jan. 2002 in Brisbane). The group intends to achieve ‘managed growth’ by bidding for at least one ‘internal’ studentship a year, and for two research assistants per year attached to external funding proposals prepared jointly with internal, national and international partners.

Research into Computer Supported Information Cummunities will be consolidated in a number of initiatives involving regional and national partners. A collaboration with the Western General Hospital Trust has led to the joint preparation of bids to investigate the effectiveness of new technologies and ways of working. An existing Teaching Company Scheme with Orbital Software has raised the issue of trust in knowledge sharing software, which the group hope to pursue in a funded proposal. An additional project has been initiated with the ITC to explore the threats and opportunities teledemocracy initiatives pose for non-mainstream communities such as Travellers. At international level, the group expects to work with Kognita AS (based in Trondheim, Norway) on the redesign and commercialisation of a virtual reality training system to begin third quarter 2001. In addition members of the group will continue to be involved in the planning and presentation work at conferences, such as the recent OIKOS workshop (March 2001) on usability issues in the home organised with Bødker and other colleagues in Aarhus, the outcome of the earlier ESPRIT project which employed Macaulay as a Research Fellow.

ITC will focus on managed growth by means of appropriate national and international alliances. Within a three-year planning horizon ITC has set itself a growth target of seven research staff by achieving funding that reflects an increasingly effective relationship with government at local, regional and national level. It will continue to focus on technology and it role in the political process, and add to its range of ICT-based demonstrator projects.

Internally, the Centre will develop its work with colleagues involved in social informatics and computer supported information communities, by extending its perspective from the citizen as consumer of policy (the focus of much of ITC’s initial work on demonstrator systems for e-voting and e-consultancy) to the citizen as producer of policy (the theme of recent work by Malina within the centre). Nationally, it has a number of existing strong ties with fellow researchers at UK universities. These have led to a recent EPSRC bid in association with colleagues in Aberdeen concerning the development of a global geo-referenced knowledge infrastructure, a government bid in association with colleagues at Loughborough concerning collaborative writing and collaborative argumentation techniques and a draft EU Framework V bid with colleagues from Salford concerning virtual environments. These links with other UK universities will be extended. Outside the UK, strong links with the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia, University of Missouri in Columbia, the University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands and the Umeå University in Sweden have been established. Collaborative projects with these universities relating to electronic governance are being drafted.

The Centre has working links with both the Scottish Parliament and the Scottish Executive and has been cited in the Official Report of the Parliament a number of times as a research centre conducting innovative e-democracy work. It continues to develop links with various departmental groups within the Executive and has recently been commissioned to undertake an innovative e-consultation on sustainability in Scotland as input for the Rio +10 conference in 2002. ITC has received a number of invitations to participate in joint bids for funding, a measure of its success in achieving research visibility, as are the growing number of invitations for the Director to speak at international conferences in the US And Europe.

Brunel University_61 5 [29B]

Evidence of Research Achievement

Strategic Information Systems Group

City University_61 5 [12.85A]

University College London_61 4 [10.6A]

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTATION. Miller specializes in logic-based methods for automated temporal and default reasoning. Recently he has collaborated with Imperial College and Cyprus University on the development of a specialized logic for representing causal and narrative information about actions and events (e.g. Kakas & Miller, "A Simple declarative language for describing narratives with actions", J. of logic programming, 1997, and "Reasoning about actions, narratives and ramifications", J. of electronic transactions on artificial intelligence, 1997), and its translation into a formal argumentation framework to facilitate various modes of automated reasoning (e.g. Kakas, Miller and Toni, "An argumentation framework for reasoning about actions and change", Proc. Int. Conf. on Logic Programming and Nonmonotonic Reasoning '99). Also in collaboration with Imperial College, he is applying action languages and automated reasoning techniques such as abduction to the development and analysis of event-based requirements specifications for software engineering (e.g. Russo, Miller et al., "An Abductive approach for handling inconsistencies in SCR specifications", Proc. Workshop on Intelligent Software Engineering 2000). Finally, he has an ongoing interest in integrating techniques from within reasoning about action with other work on modelling and simulating dynamic systems, such as differential calculus and qualitative reasoning (e.g. Miller & Shanahan, "Reasoning about discontinuities in the event calculus", Proc. 5th Int. Conf. on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning '96). During the period under review he has made some sixteen contributions to journals and conference proceedings. Miller’s work should be examined by the Information Systems subpanel.
DIGITAL LIBRARY TECHNOLOGIES FOR THE HUMANITIES. Hockey’s work falls into three broad areas: (1) computing in the humanities in which she has published a monograph Electronic texts in the humanities (OUP, 2000), and acted as series editor with N. Ide of Vassar College for four volumes of Research in humanities computing (OUP), co-editing three of them. She was also co-author of two papers on the Orlando Project in Computers and the humanities (1998) and DRH Conference Proceedings (1998) and sole author of an overview paper in Classical world (1998); papers on electronic editions in The literary text in the Digital Age (U Michigan Press, 1996) and (forthcoming) Voice, Text and hypertext (U Washington Press); (2) digital libraries for the humanities: including invited contributions in Technology and scholarly communication (ed. Ekman and Quandt, U California Press, 1999), and The Mirage of continuity (ed. Hawkins and Battin, CLIR and Assoc of American Universities, 1998), also papers on standards (Networking in the humanities: proceedings of the Second Conference on Scholarship and Technology in the Humanities, Bowker-Saur, 1995), and two papers in edited collections on computer networking and the humanities, both published in 1996. She was selected to write the paper on "Knowledge Representation" for the Getty Research Agenda for Networked Cultural Heritage (1996); (3) text and corpus analysis: author of the paper on "Textual Databases" in Using Computers in Linguistics: a Practical Guide (Routledge, 1998); she has updated her article on "Literary and Linguistic Computing" in the Oxford International Encyclopedia of Linguistics (OUP USA) and her "Concordance Programs for Corpus Linguistics" is also forthcoming in Corpus Linguistics in North America (U Michigan Press). She is now developing a research programme on the uses and users of digital libraries in the humanities focusing on XML-based markup, which brings her expertise in markup technologies and computing in the humanities into the library and archive environments. A project on XML and archival material has recently been awarded AHRB funding (see below).
SUMMARY OF RESEARCH ACTIVITY. The departmental activity may be summarized from the following contributions:
Monographs: include 10 monographs listed in RA2.
Articles in refereed journals, contributions to encyclopaedias &c : Archivum, The Book collector, Business archives, Cataloging and classification quarterly, Classical world, Computers and the humanities, Histoire d’archives, Historical journal, IFLA journal, Janus, J. of ecclesiastical history, J. of Internet cataloging, J. of logic programming, J. of the American Society of Information Scientists, J. of the Society of Archivists, Knowledge organization, LIBER quarterly, Library conservation news, Library trends, The new bookbinder, NPO journal, Paginas, Radiation physics chemistry, Records management journal; Dictionary of national biography (Foot, Sayers, Peters), International encyclopaedia of information and library science (Roper), International encyclopaedia of public policy and administration (J McIlwaine); Medieval England: an encyclopedia (Sayers).
Reviews: African research and documentation, Alexandria, American archivist, The Book collector, Business archives, Education for information, Information world review, International cataloguing and bibliographic control, Janus, J. of librarianship and information science, J. of the Society of Archivists, Libraries and culture, The Library, Library Association record, Library conservation news, Managing information, Printing Historical Society bulletin.
Research environment: Research is discussed at the regular meetings of the Departmental Research Cttee, by the IS/IT Cttee which is concerned specifically with IT related activities, both teaching and research, and individually through the biennial system of staff review. Where appropriate, a "team-approach" is encouraged, for example in the work on heritage preservation management, or on a classification scheme such as the UDC. For Knowledge Organization a group of 4 research students, 1 Research Assistant and 3 staff members hold regular fortnightly seminars to discuss the research of each in turn. This pattern is encouraged wherever there is a sufficient number interested in a subject area, for example Area Studies and Electronic Records. Additionally, all staff and research students participate in the research seminars described below.
Individual research: Research on an individual basis is also widely practised, as would be expected in a department within the Faculty of Arts & Humanities, and this is undertaken both by the full and part-time members of the School’s staff and by a number of honorary research fellows. The latter include former and retired staff members and other professional associates (e.g. Sayers, Thurston included above), some of whom are ineligible for return here because they are also associated with other institutions (e.g. G. Martin, C. Oppenheim).
Overseas research students: The School has since its inception attracted students from overseas, especially from the Commonwealth. Much of the work on Area Studies is undertaken by research students from overseas and is supervised by staff with extensive experience of practices in the Commonwealth, both in relation to Library and Information Studies and Archive Studies. Evidence of this may be deduced from information provided in Section 6 below.
Collaborative research: The School pursues a vigorous programme of collaborative research both with other departments in UCL and beyond. The situation in a large, multi-disciplinary institution provides scope both for material on which students can test their theories and for entering into partnerships. Research students have made use of both staff and students in other departments to provide data on matters such as methods of seeking information and use of terminology (Peter Gillman), for journal reading practices (Mark Janes), for use of medical databases for information on toxicology (Lynn Robinson), facilities and developments in technology for the handicapped (Youngsook Lee). Staff interdepartmental research is outlined above, and includes collaboration with the Bartlett School of Architecture (Foot), Economics (Foot), Greek and Latin (Hockey), HERDU (Shepherd), History (Danbury, Peters), Institute of Archaeology (Foot, Shepherd) and Library Services (Hockey). Within the University of London, collaborative projects include the Centre for Palaeography (Danbury, I McIlwaine), Imperial College (Miller), Institute of English Studies (Foot, Brown), Institute of Historical Research (Danbury), and the University of London Computer Centre (Shepherd, Danbury). Collaboration further afield embraces the activities at international level of Broughton, Danbury, Foot, Forde, Hockey, I McIlwaine, J McIlwaine, and Shepherd outlined below.
Staff development and support: There is a system of six months sabbatical leave for all staff after seven years in post; in practice, several people have had such leave before completing seven years. Staff who have benefited during the period under review are Bowman, Danbury, J McIlwaine, Sayers and Shepherd. The Faculty of Arts & Humanities provides limited funds to cover teaching responsibilities during the period of absence. It is Departmental and UCL policy to encourage all members of staff to participate in relevant international conferences and to report on their research at them. This activity is reflected in both Sections 2 and 6 of this return. The UCL Graduate School provides some funding support which is supplemented by the School, and all requests have been met in full either by the School or by joint support from both sources during the period under review. Additional funding has been provided by the Library Association (I & J McIlwaine), the UDC Consortium (I McIlwaine, Broughton) and the Mellon Foundation, Baylor University and the Universities of Michigan and Washington (Hockey).
Research students: Research students are allocated two supervisors, one principal and one subordinate, so as to ensure that there is always someone on hand when help or advice is needed. All research students and staff belong to the Research Students Group (RSG) which meets regularly, on average once a month in term-time. This was established in 1995 to provide an academic framework with a programme of seminars to be presented by individual research students; to act as a support group; to promote interaction between the research students themselves and between staff and students. The Group is co-ordinated by Jennifer Hogarth and all research assistants and research graduates registered for the degrees of MRes, MPhil or PhD automatically are members of the Group. Seminars are open to all and are normally attended by members of staff in addition to students. In line with the policy of the University of London, all students are initially accepted for the MPhil. For those who wish to proceed to PhD a substantial portion of written work is examined by a Sub-committee of the Research Committee prior to upgrading. They are normally also expected to have given at least one public presentation, as a rule by contributing to the Research Students’ series of seminars. The majority of the School’s home students taking research degrees do so on a part-time basis, often making a strong link between their professional working life and their research interests. Overseas students study full-time, again frequently incorporating a period of study back in their own country as part of their research experience to maintain the professional focus within their research programme. Completion rates are excellent and the School has one of the highest rates in the Faculty. 13 students were awarded doctorates and one MPhil during the period under review and of the 13, 7 are currently teaching in universities.
UCL Research Policy: An Inter-Departmental Research Committee was set up in 1997 to strengthen links with other parts of UCL and to ensure greater cross-fertilization of research. Membership of this Committee includes a Vice-Provost, a Pro-Provost and the Dean of the Faculty. The Institute of Archaeology, the Bartlett School of Architecture and the Departments of Greek and Latin and Geography are examples of other Departments with whom we have forged links. At the present time the School has four professors and a Director of Research all of whom sit on the Department’s Research Committee (chaired by the Director of Research) and oversee all research activities of both staff and students. In line with UCL’s College-wide policy, all proposals for research seeking outside funding are approved by the Vice-Provost (Teaching and Learning) before they can be submitted to a grant-awarding body. The Vice-Provost (Teaching and Learning) chairs the Inter-Faculty (Arts & Humanities, Historical & Social Sciences and Laws) Research Committee on which all Heads of Department and Deans are represented and this committee is responsible for directing and coordinating research across the three faculties. Thus, all research activity in UCL is subject to scrutiny at the highest level.

Loughborough University_61 5 [18.33B]

University of Salford_61 5* [23A]

University of Sheffield_61 5* [19A]

University of Glasgow_61 3a [7A]

University of Strathclyde_61 4 [16A]

The Department recognises the need to continue to build on its existing research strengths through recruitment, and academic appointments made since the last assessment exercise reflect University Policy to recruit staff who are, or have the potential to be, active in research at international level. Departmental policy is to achieve a balanced mix of research, teaching and administrative duties for academic staff. In line with Faculty policy probationers are provided with mentor facilities from a senior member of staff to provide advice on the preparation of papers and research proposals. Probationary posts are only confirmed where there is evidence of the development of clear research themes and the achievement of agreed publication targets. Research staff are also appraised and are expected to publish as part of the staff development process; most have published at least two papers in refereed journals or conferences. The success of the staff development process has been reflected in the recruitment of two research fellows to lecturing posts during the submission period.

The Department has continued to direct resources to individual staff development funds which are used to attend conferences, to acquire books and journals, and to acquire specialist software and hardware in support of research interests. Half of the overheads generated from funded research and monies derived from service teaching are used to resource staff development. Staff have freedom to use this money in line with their own research priorities but must identify the benefits they expect to obtain and report back on whether these objectives have been achieved. The remainder of these monies is placed in a strategic fund which is used to pump prime new research, to underwrite proposal writing and consortia development, and for investment in IT and other support facilities. This system has proved to be an effective way of incentivising and rewarding staff for being research active, as well as providing feedback on research progress.

University of Wales, Aberystwyth_61 3a [15.5B]

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