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Summary

What inspires 750,000 children in the UK to read over 3 million books during the summer holidays for pleasure?

The Summer Reading Challenge is one of the largest creative reading opportunities available to children in the UK. It introduces children to one of the best free resources for their minds that they have on their doorsteps – the local library – and focuses on developing skills that are vital for their life chances and life skills – reading and a love of reading.

Alan Yentob, Creative Director of the BBC, speaking at the Summer Reading Challenge Conference 2009: Celebrating 10 Years and Looking Ahead

The Summer Reading Challenge is great fun for everyone. It's free, it's simple: read six books over the summer holidays, chosen from the library. There are stickers and incentives to collect along the way to keep children motivated, and at the end they have a real sense of achievement, marked by libraries and schools issuing Summer Reading Challenge certificates and medals, hosting celebration events in libraries, schools, theatres and other community venues.

The scheme benefits children in several ways. Not only are they rewarded for completing the Challenge, they are encouraged to swap ideas and recommendations. The idea is that they form closer relationships with their libraries, hopefully becoming ‘readers for life’. ‘The children have the freedom to choose their own books,’ says The Reading Agency's Lynne Taylor. ‘It gives them a real sense of personal achievement that they associate with the library.’

We also know that this simple idea makes a real difference to children's reading habits. Research has shown that children who take part are more enthusiastic about reading and that taking part can help prevent the ‘summer holiday reading dip’, when they lose their reading momentum and motivation (Kennedy and Bearne, 2010).

This chapter will look at how the Summer Reading Challenge works. We will trace its beginning, expansion and development over the last 13 years – working with schools and other partners, growing into a catalyst for volunteering in libraries and now running in countries overseas. We will examine the effects this has had on the provision of resources and opportunities for library staff, and the difference it makes to children and young people.

Summary

Introduction

The aim of this chapter is to set out the principal factors concerning authenticity and evidential weight that a judge might consider when dealing with digital evidence, a form of evidence that is now ubiquitous in the financial services sector. The intention is to provide a general, high-level outline for readers who are not legal specialists. The chapter is primarily based on English law, because it is not possible to provide a comparative survey, given that such a survey would in itself be an extraordinarily long text.

First, the types of evidence that can be introduced into court are considered, whether evidence can be admitted and how a judge assesses the truth of the evidence. Three definitions are also discussed, what is meant in a legal context by ‘document’, ‘writing’ and ‘record’, all of which are important when introducing evidence into legal proceedings. A general outline of electronic signatures follows, setting out the different forms they can take. This is important because different forms of electronic signature are used in the cyberworld in greater volumes than manuscript signatures in the physical world.

Two technical concepts are then brief ly discussed, ‘hearsay’ and ‘presumptions’. Hearsay is now virtually abolished in civil proceedings in England and Wales, and the concept of hearsay is not even relevant in some jurisdictions, such as Norway (Hjort and Willassen, 2008, 654–5).

It is possible that organizations wishing to adduce digital evidence in the future may have difficulties in proving its authenticity if this is challenged by the opposing party, and presumptions about a computer working properly may not be sufficient to enable the evidence to be included without first calling appropriate witnesses. Video tape and security camera evidence is considered before a brief introduction to the duties of each party to preserve and disclose evidence before trial, and the sanctions that might be applied if evidence is destroyed or falsified.

Types of evidence

Broadly (this is not the same for every jurisdiction in the world), evidence falls into various categories, as set out below.

Summary

Introduction

In the past decade, the financial services industry has been an aggressive pioneer of outsourcing. In 2007, the global estimated value of outsourcing contracts was US$23.6 billion (Plunkett Research, 2007). Outsourcing involves the transfer of the management and/or day-to-day execution of an entire business function to an external service provider. The client organization and the supplier enter into a contractual agreement that defines the transferred services. The client agrees to procure the services from the supplier for the term of the contract. Often the supplier acquires people, assets or other resources from the client in order to perform the outsourced function. Business functions typically outsourced include information technology, human resources, facilities, real estate management and accounting. Many organizations also outsource customer support and call centre functions.

Although it is increasingly common for financial institutions to outsource records storage, tape storage and the performance of traditional records management functions, the focus of this chapter is the risks to an institution's records when undertaking a large strategic outsourcing initiative involving a single business function or multiple functions previously performed in-house. In a strategic outsourcing initiative the supplier provides specialized capabilities that supplement existing capabilities in a financial institution's value chain. Such an arrangement produces value within supply chains beyond those benefits achieved through cost economies.

A strategic outsourcing may involve some degree of offshoring. ‘Offshoring’ is the transfer of a business function to another country, regardless of whether the work is outsourced or stays within the original financial institution. With increasing globalization of outsourcing suppliers, the distinction between outsourcing and offshoring will become less clear over time. The globalization of outsourcing operating models has resulted in new terms such as ‘nearshoring’, ‘noshoring’ and ‘rightshoring’ that ref lect a changing mix of business locations.

A scan of daily newspapers would provide ample illustration of the risks to a financial institution's records that can materialize if insufficient attention is paid to the issue of records and information management as part of an outsourcing arrangement. In 2008, for example, the Bangalore Cyber Crime Police arrested an employee of an outsourced electronic data-processing unit of one global bank in a case of data theft and misuse of confidential information. The total loss in this particular case was estimated at UK£2,333,000.

Summary

Introduction

A book awards programme that is devised and run in their immediate locality offers young people a unique opportunity to respond to texts, to encounter the past, to imagine different ways of leading their lives and to come into contact with new ideas and thinking. Rigorous discussion and debate arise as a consequence of appraising the books, and awards present an ideal way to break down some of the stereotypes that perpetuate notions about boys not reading and young people's apathy.

The longest-running local book award in the UK is the Lancashire Book of the Year. It was first awarded in 1987 to a relatively unknown Philip Pullman for the first of his Sally Lockhart novels, The Ruby in the Smoke. The award was the first local one where young people were solely responsible for the judging, selecting their own short list in addition to choosing the overall winner. This chapter will focus on the Lancashire Book of the Year, exploring some of the challenges and opportunities that arise from running local book awards. It will include practical methodologies for helping to embed awards by maximizing their impact and ensuring sustainability.

A brief history

The 1980s were a rich era not only for the creation of children's books, but also for celebrating core excellence within the field. A host of awards gave opportunities for authors, illustrators and individual books to gain recognition. The Library Association-administered Carnegie and Greenaway Medals were flourishing, respectively recognizing excellence in fiction for children and in illustrated books for children. The Guardian Award for Children's Fiction was similarly an established part of the landscape of children's literature. Newcomers during the decade included the Kurt Maschler Award, presented in recognition of a synergy between text and illustration, and the Mother Goose Award, which gave the chance to reward new talent in the field of children's book illustration. The winners of all of these awards, however, were determined by adult commentators on the world of children's books.

Summary

Introduction

This chapter considers the extent to which the fact that different countries have different requirements for the retention or disposal of records creates issues for a financial institution that operates internationally.

The chapter also considers the effect upon international financial institutions of rules requiring the disclosure of records in the context of litigation or regulatory supervision and enforcement. The expressions ‘discovery’ and ‘disclosure’ are used throughout this chapter. Discovery is the term applied in the USA and disclosure is the term applied in England and Wales following changes to the Civil Procedure Rules in 1999.

Financial institutions conducting business internationally will frequently find themselves subject to obligations concerning the production and/or retention of records in which the laws or regulatory requirements of more than one jurisdiction may be relevant. For instance, an obligation on a financial institution situated in jurisdiction A to produce records, where those records are held (whether physically or electronically) in jurisdiction B, potentially engages the legal or regulatory rules of both jurisdictions. Where (as is commonly the case) the relevant rules in the two jurisdictions conflict, a financial institution will find itself obliged to find a way of reconciling these opposing obligations, which may involve obtaining the requisite protection from appropriate courts or regulators.

This chapter will look at the discovery/disclosure rules of certain major jurisdictions in Europe, North America and Asia and how they operate extraterritorially. In this context it will consider the ‘blocking’ statutes of certain jurisdictions, whereby (often supported by criminal law sanctions) the potential extraterritorial effect of other countries’ discovery/disclosure rules are countered by ‘local’ prohibitions on provision of such records. The effect of bank/customer confidentiality will also be considered in the international context.

The chapter will also brief ly review the operation of the Hague Convention, a mechanism by which parties can seek, in civil proceedings in one jurisdiction, records in another jurisdiction relevant to those proceedings. There will then follow a brief consideration of issues arising from the operation of the European Data Protection Directive and, in particular, its effect upon the transfer of personal data out of the European Union (EU) in the context of discovery/disclosure requests.

Summary

[T]he first step, as you know, is always what matters most, particularly when we are dealing with those who are young and tender. That is the time when they are taking shape and when any impression we choose to make leaves a permanent mark.

(Plato, 428–348 BC)

Introduction

We all know, almost by instinct, that reading is a good thing, and we know that it is good to read to young children, but it took the Bookstart project, piloted in 1992, to support this belief with research evidence. This chapter is, in a way, a celebration of reading and a celebration of the joy that parents, carers and children experience when they share stories, pictures and rhymes as a regular and important part of their lives. This is not about teaching children to read – others are dealing with that – but about the practicalities and the benefits of reading to children from the very start of their lives.

Reading is still a good thing and, even as technological advances offer different ways of delivering text and pictures, reading continues to be central in life, and certainly in the process of education. Feeling good about books will make children keen to get to school and to learn to read, and the more they read the better readers they will become. Fast, fluent readers who have developed reading stamina will deal well with the whole curriculum and its reading demands and will grow into adults who have reading as a resource for the whole of their lives. They will be able to use books for pleasure, information, experience, solace, escape and so much more, and their lives will be enriched by their ability to access, by whatever means, the mass of fiction and non-fiction now available.

Pleasurable early reading experiences give babies and young children positive feelings about books. When a baby touches a small bath-book in the water and listens to someone who is known and loved talk about the duck and the story and is lifted from the bath, wrapped in a warm, fluffy towel, and cuddled on a knee and invited to look and listen as a beautiful picture book is read and talked about, they begin to know that books are good things.

Summary

‘Read to Live’ – all of the contributors to this book would very much agree with Gustav Flaubert's (1857) motto and, in all their different voices and with all their very different experiences and knowledge, they share with me the absolute and fundamental belief that it is essential for the life chances of every child, everywhere, that they can read.

In this introduction I will highlight some of the UK policy framework and international research evidence that underpins this belief. Although most of the contributors are from the UK and reflect UK experience, the issues faced and strategies developed are more universal. Every country will have its own political agenda, but readers will be able to recognize how campaigners for libraries and reading have used the current context to best advantage, and will gain insight from this. Thus the subsequent chapters will take us from the very youngest potential readers to young people on the fringes of society in some of the most deprived socio-economic neighbourhoods in the UK, covering some of the most innovative and yet long-standing and successful reading promotion strategies in the world. We have envisaged our readers as those who are trying to find out the background and context to child reader development in libraries and schools and to equip themselves to take this development forward. They may be a student librarian, a teacher or consultant concerned with reading and literacy, a practitioner in either field with new responsibilities or an established practitioner or manager looking for ideas and inspiration.

As former Children's Laureate, Michael Morpurgo, put it so beautifully in an article in The Times in 2009:

Without the sunlight of literature children cannot grow as they should. We know that from books come knowledge and understanding, that they are a source of infinite joy and fun, that they stimulate imagination and creativity, that they open eyes and minds and hearts. It is through the power and music and magic of stories and poems that children can expand their own intellectual curiosity, develop the empathy and awareness that they will need to tackle the complexities of their own emotions, of the human condition in which they find themselves. And it's through books that we can learn the mastery of words, the essential skill that will enable us to express ourselves well enough to achieve our potential in the classroom and beyond.

(Morpurgo, 2009)

Summary

Introduction

This chapter considers the continuing relevance of the ideas of browsing, serendipity, information encountering and literature discovery in the context of the information retrieval (IR) environment of 2010, though its scope extends to the ideas in the broader contexts of information seeking and informationrelated behaviour. It is based around a selective review of the literature since 1990 and reflection and speculation on the results. The central focus is on questions of how the concept of browsing, serendipity and related ideas have changed in the new IR environment of the web and whether, indeed, they are still meaningful concepts.

By the early 1990s, computerized retrieval was well established in practice and much investigated academically, but the internet was not widely used and the web was not developed. Browsing was a ubiquitous way of finding information, regarded as reasonably well understood. The literature on browsing, serendipity, creative use of information and associated topics up to that point has been thoroughly reviewed (Bawden, 1993a; Chang and Rice, 1993) and this older material will not be systematically covered in this chapter. More recent reviews and literature summaries are provided by Rice, McCreadie and Chang (2001), Foster and Ford (2003), Bates (2007), McBirnie (2008), Anderson (2010), Makri and Warwick (2010), Nutefall and Ryder (2010) and Case (2007), who analyses the concept of browsing and gives numerous examples of studies where its importance as a behaviour has been shown.

Browsing, as a concept, did not necessarily have a positive image among information specialists. I can recall being introduced, while studying for my master's degree, to the views of some senior practitioners who held that if users of a library were found to be browsing to any great extent, then this was a reflection on the library and its staff.

Summary

This is a book about research fronts in information retrieval and information organizations. As teachers of information retrieval and researchers in the field, we felt that a book specifically intended to inform and inspire Master's-level students who might be looking to develop their dissertation topics, or indeed to develop PhD proposals, would be useful and interesting We thought that this should be an edited and peer-reviewed book in which academics in information retrieval would be invited to write about the issues and topics that they think are of current interest and that they find engaging. This book, then, is intended to complement the information retrieval textbooks that are already in the market. The focus of this book is to introduce students to the broader information retrieval debates, theories and issues. To this end, contributors have been encouraged to highlight the ‘hot’ research ideas in their specialist area.

For many years the theory and practice of knowledge organization remained the preserve of information scientists and library professionals. The ubiquity and accessibility of the internet has changed this: no longer the sole concern of the library and information science (LIS) community, knowledge organization has caught the interest of computer scientists, semantic web developers and know - ledge managers working in a wide range of organizations involved in the creation, storage, retrieval and dissemination of information, in particular, digital information. While traditional subject-oriented knowledge organization tools have been created and developed from within scholarly domains, so that the underlying concern has been to map ‘knowledge’ for academic purposes (e.g. DDC, LC, A&AT, Iconclass), contemporary subject-oriented knowledge organiz - ation tools are often driven by commercial, process and product-driven purposes.

The advent of new information retrieval technologies and approaches to storage and retrieval provides communities with previously unheard-of opportunities for mass documentation, digitization and the recording of cultural artefacts. A number of the contributors to this book focus in a variety of ways on issues relating to mass information retrieval in a digital age. In generating information retrieval for the public to contribute, describe and share, particular issues arise as to how shared meanings, quality of interpretation, indexing and tagging are accomplished. Related topics, such as generic categorization, semantic interoperability, dialogic semiotic interaction, once perhaps considered the preserve of other disciplines (linguistics, psychology, computer science), are increasingly of interest to the retrieval theorist and practitioner.

Summary

In a dynamic and information-rich world information retrieval (IR) research and developments are the order of the day, as can be seen from numerous books and articles that are appearing. Scholars and practitioners may note some of these in passing. Serious scholars and researchers may take a closer look. When one is overwhelmed with information and other responsibilities it is, however, often difficult to note the finer nuances and shifts in a field – apart from carrying out systematic literature reviews. It is also difficult to find time to reflect and to notice gaps in research and practice in the field.

Innovations in Information Retrieval: perspectives for theory and practice is thus a very timely reminder of the importance of the field and the impact of IR research and theory on information users and their productivity, creativity, innovation, learning and communication. It also serves as an alert to both scholars and practitioners on the issues that might easily slip by without being noticed. The contributing authors bring many issues of importance for theory and practice to the fore. My thoughts when reading the chapter manuscripts were: I need to read this a few more times to make sure I pick up all the interesting ideas for further research; I wonder what my postgraduate students doing a course on IR, information seeking and information organization would note; and I really hope that decision-makers in libraries and information services will carefully study the text to spot challenges for practice. Before elaborating on these, a few words on some of the more obvious contributions of Innovations in Information Retrieval:

Summary

Introduction

Services in Web 2.0 generate a large quantity of information, distributed over a range of resources (e.g. photos, URLs, videos) and integrated into different platforms (e.g. social bookmarking systems, sharing platforms (Peters, 2009). To adequately use this mass of information and to extract it from the platforms, users must be equipped with suitable tools and knowledge. After all, the best information is useless if users cannot find it: ‘The model of information consumption relies on the information being found’ (Vander Wal, 2004). In Web 2.0, the retrieval component has been established through so-called folksonomies (Vander Wal, 2005a), which are considered as several combinations of an information resource, one or more freely chosen keywords (‘tags’) and a user. Web 2.0 services that use folksonomies as an indexing and retrieval tool are defined as ‘collaborative information services’ because they allow for the collaborative creation of a public database that is accessible to all users (registered, where necessary) via the tags of the folksonomy (Ding et al., 2009; Heymann, Paepcke and Garcia-Molina, 2010).

Folksonomies in information retrieval serve mainly to provide access to information resources for all users – where the initial motivation for tagging is often of a personal nature:

In my mind, at least initially, it really has do with retaining information that you, I, or anyone else has found and organizing it in a way so that people can re-find that information at some later date. Tagging bookmarks is really another way of trying to keep source […] once found on the Internet permanently found.

(Gordon-Murnane, 2006, 28)

Metadata in the form of tags, titles or descriptions are especially invaluable for the retrieval of non-textual information resources such as images or videos because the state of the art of search engine technology allows only for textual research, meaning that these resources would otherwise be irretrievable (Dye, 2006). In these instances, it is also important for the retrievability of resources to be guaranteed by a broad-access vocabulary, and this is where folksonomy can provide excellent service (Goodrum and Spink, 2001, 296). Because of their strong user-orientedness and broad-access vocabulary, folksonomies can also facilitate the retrieval of relevant information in company intranets or in ‘enterprise search’ (Schillerwein, 2008).

Summary

Introduction

This chapter considers fiction retrieval research and initiatives, providing an overview of some of the approaches that have been developed. In particular, it describes two recent approaches to fiction retrieval that have made use of theoretical concepts drawn from literary theory.

Fiction is an interesting information domain because it includes documents that serve two purposes, which are reading for pleasure and scholarly study (Beghtol, 1994, 3), but fiction retrieval has not always focused on both aspects. In the 19th century, the approach was to treat fiction from a knowledge perspective within general classification schemes. The Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC), the Library of Congress Classification (LCC) and the Universal Decimal Classification (UDC) contain classes for literature, with the main subdivision in each case being the language in which it is written. Further subdivision is possible based on literary form, historical period or the works of an individual author (Riesthuis, 1997).

It may be that there is a relationship between the development of literary studies as academic scholarship and approaches to fiction retrieval in libraries. In the UK, for example, Literary Studies as an academic discipline developed in the 19th century, institutionalized in the Mechanics’ Institutes, workingmen's colleges and extension lecturing circuits before its acceptance in the universities (Eagleton, 1996, 23). In its early days in the academy, English Studies was considered to be ‘an upstart, amateurish affair as academic subjects went, hardly able to compete on equal terms with the rigours of Greats or philology’ (Eagleton, 1996, 25). It is a relatively new academic discipline, although its research methods and interpretative approaches have a much longer history, at least since Aristotle's Poetics. We know that during the late 19th and early 20th centuries public libraries in England were still capping the number of novels that patrons were able to borrow, which suggests some nervousness about the role of the library and the librarian. There seemed to be concern, evidenced in the letters pages of the Library Association journal of the time, about whether libraries should be encouraging the reading of novels and the consumption of fiction for pleasure alone or whether they should be concerned with the intellectual ‘improvement’ of their patrons by encouraging the reading of serious, knowledge-based literature (Barr and Sturges, 1992).

Summary

Introduction

In this chapter we focus on the research area of digital information interaction, which emphasizes searchers’ direct engagement with and manipulation of information objects as they search and browse through digital information environments. This is an area of active research that has opened up in recent years as information retrieval (IR) research has expanded its focus from the mechanics of retrieval (i.e. indexing, data structures and retrieval algorithms) to include a broader ‘retrieval in context’ perspective that takes into account the whole system, the affective, cognitive and physical attributes of users and the environment in which searching takes place (Ingwersen and Jarvelin, 2005). A number of meetings and workshops have focused on this area, including the Information Retrieval in Context (IRiX) workshops at the ACM SIGIR (Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group Information Retrieval) conference (2004–5), the Information Interaction in Context (IIiX) Conference (2006–ongoing) and the Human Computer Information Retrieval (HCIR) Workshops (2007–ongoing).

Immersive information systems, in which users are placed in content-rich environments with tools and technologies designed to help them search, filter and navigate through the information landscape, are now commonplace. In these types of environments, IR can no longer best be modelled as a transaction, but is more akin to an ‘experience’, in which searchers are influenced by the information objects they encounter and also shape and create their information environment by selecting, linking, tagging and commenting (Marchionini, 2008; Toms, 2002). For many people, these kinds of interactions with digital information are the primary means by which they read and learn, whether at work, at school or at leisure.

However, numerous studies that utilize server logs of bibliographic and web based information systems have shown that digital information behaviour is markedly different from that in traditional print information environments. Digital information use tends to be non-linear, shallow and piecemeal. Readers jump frequently from one document to the next, ‘skimming and bopping’ through networked information spaces (JISC, 2008; Nicholas et al., 2007). Concerns have been raised that this type of information behaviour represents the ‘intellectual equivalent of empty calories’ (Rich, 2008) and inhibits deep, critical engagement with informational content (Marshall, 2005).

Summary

Introduction

Information Retrieval (IR) research typically evaluates search systems in terms of the standard precision, recall and F-measures to weight the relative importance of precision and recall (e.g. van Rijsbergen, 1979). All of these assess the extent to which the system returns good matches for a query. In contrast, webometric measures are designed specifically for web search engines and are designed to monitor changes in results over time and various aspects of the internal logic of the way in which search engine select the results to be returned. This chapter introduces a range of webometric measurements and illustrates them with case studies of Google, Bing and Yahoo! This is a very fertile area for simple and complex new investigations into search engine results.

The modern commercial web search engine is a highly complex system (Arasu et al., 2001) with vast social and commercial significance (Van Couvering, 2004, 2007). Although they can be evaluated to some extent with traditional IR measures like precision and recall, web search engines behave differently from traditional IR systems in many respects. Three key differences are the importance of rank order in the results; the limitation to 1,000 matches per query; and the goal of delivering relevant and useful results rather than technically accurate matches (in the sense of: Bar-Ilan and Peritz, 2008). In response, evaluation metrics have been developed to measure new characteristics of web search engines, such as the effectiveness of the rank order of the results (Zaragoza, Cambazoglu and Baeza-Yates, 2010), mean average precision (Turpin and Scholer, 2006) and discounted cumulative gain (Jarvelin and Kekalainen, 2002). A broad common goal is to assess the extent to which any web search engine delivers good and relevant results to users. For some information scientists, however, IR goals are not sufficient with regard to web search engines, for two reasons.

First, search engines like Google are so important in academia and daily life that it is important for information professionals to understand something of how they work and what their limitations are.

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5 - The Summer Reading Challenge in libraries: a continuing success

Summary

Miscellaneous Endmatter

11 - Authenticity and evidential weight of digital evidence in legal proceedings

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Part 2 - Balancing risk and return

10 - Records management considerations in global strategic outsourcing

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9 - Choice and motivation: local book awards

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2 - Conflicts of laws in multiple jurisdictions

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1 - It's never too soon to start

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Introduction

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Miscellaneous Endmatter

1 - Encountering on the road to Serendip? Browsing in new information environments

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Introduction

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Foreword

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5 - Folksonomies, social tagging and information retrieval

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3 - Approaches to fiction retrieval research: from theory to practice?

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Index

Frontmatter

Figures and tables

6 - Digital information interaction as semantic navigation

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7 - Assessing web search engines: a webometric approach

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