Information need is an important factor in question retrieval. This paper proposes a method to diversify the results of question retrieval in term of types of information needs. CogQTaxo, a question hierarchy is leveraged to represent users’ information needs cognitively from three linguistic levels. Based on a prediction model of question types, three factors, i.e., scores of IR model, questio...

Biomedical health services and health systems research require timely, complete, accurate and accessible data relating to geographical populations in order to facilitate needs assessment and planning of medical care, new medicines and technology. The international trend towards competition and privatisation has largely proceeded as if data generation were immune to market fragmentation and loss...

The authors report on two projects in which the role of documents as temporal boundary objects mediating information practices across multiple timelines was explored. It has been suggested that studying workplace documents will uncover the information practices of professionals beyond traditional information needs and uses studies. Two workplaces were studied: a professional theatre production ...

Initial stage of a disaster is managed with existing resources. The following stages of disaster response often involve assistance from outside of the disaster zone. This may consist of mutual aid from neighboring communities for small-scale incidents but in major disasters, the response is from federal or international agencies or often both. Rapid needs assessment after an incident is a colla...

This paper reports on preliminary findings from the research phase and progress-to-date on the educational module-building phase of a three-year project, “Investigating Library and Information Services During Community-Based Disasters: Preparing Information Professionals to Plan for the Worst” supported by a National Leadership Grant from the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS). Th...

Kenrick et al. (2010, this issue) make an important contribution by presenting a theory of human needs within an evolutionary framework. In our opinion, however, this framework bypasses the human uniqueness that Maslow intended to capture in his theory. We comment on the unique power of culture in shaping human motivation at the phylogenetic, ontogenetic, and proximate levels. We note that cult...

On an abstract level, one is often confronted with some type of classification problem where we have one example instance or a textual query and we are looking for the class most appropriate for this instance or query. More concretely, we consider journals as classes and the papers published in certain journals as constituting and describing the respective class. In this scenario two informatio...