The purpose of this paper is to consider the appropriate ways of personnel development for teachers of Information Studies in high schools by means of questionnaires for teacher training institutes. The result of this survey was analyzed from the four points of (1) the training institutes' core activities, (2) coordination among the teacher training institutes, high schools and school boards, (3) the significance of Information Studies as a subject, and (4) the contents of Information Studies in three stages of planning, implementation, and evaluation/feedback of the teacher training. In conclusion, we found that the measures to grasp the effectiveness of teacher training were insufficient, that the coordination and feedback by the institutions were still insufficient, that the results of the training were evaluated insufficiently, and that the contents of teacher training did not appropriately respond to the degree of necessity of lessons of Information Studies.

View full abstract

This study considers the mechanism of the haiku innovation in the Meiji era. In the innovation, haiku was positioned as modern literature. This analysis is based on neocybernetics, i.e., constructivist systems theory; more concretely, fundamental informatics is employed as a theoretical framework. Haiku poets, haiku-societies, haiku mass media and other systems are regarded as hierarchical autonomous communication systems or HACS. As a result of analyses, the haiku innovation is understood as processes of various systems' co-evolution and birth, against a backdrop of the social change in the late 19^th century Japan. In the analysis, relationships between systems are also considered in detail.

View full abstract

This study proposed the present status of Web-OPAC for children in public library in U.S.A., based on evaluation standard FRED, from the viewpoints of search functions and response and explanation to users. Moreover, we compared the present study with the previous one of school library Web-OPAC in U.S.A. Also, we considered the difference between each status in public and school libraries. As the results of consideration, it was evident that Web-OPAC for children in public library was superior to school library Web-OPAC concerning ‘Response’ (response from retrieval system to children). On the other hands, it was obvious that Web-OPAC for children in public library was inferior to school library Web-OPAC in ‘Diversity’ (diversity of functions in retrieval system). That is to say, it was made clear that diverse retrieval functions were not provided sufficiently with the Web-OPAC for children in public library, according to the developmental stage of children. Furthermore, concerning keyword search and subject search of Web-OPAC, both the Web-OPAC for children in public library and the school library Web-OPAC did not prepare adequate functions in order to support inexperienced children in Web-OPAC. In the near future, the improvement in search functions of Web-OPAC will be required, from the viewpoint of information literacy instruction for children.

View full abstract

The aim of this paper is to examine the future direction of informatics by investigating its philosophical assumptions. First, the problem concerning the philosophical assumptions of informatics is described by focusing on the change of approach in information retrieval research. Second, some meta-theories of informatics which take into account the philosophical problem are investigated, and it becomes clear that the discussions about the philosophical assumptions of informatics and the problem of views of life are intertwined. On the other hand, a similar philosophical problem underlies life sciences, and the problem of views of information can be seen in the center of the issue. As they refer to each other in terms of these underlying structures, informatics as a meta-theory and life sciences can be considered as two sides of the same coin. Anthropomorphizing is one of their common problems, which we need to work on in order to develop and deepen the theory of informatics.

View full abstract

The Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS), released as a W3C recommendation, is a common data model and language for sharing and linking knowledge organization systems via the Web. However, studies on its application to classification schemes are limited compared to those on its application to terminologies, such as a thesaurus, and the utility of SKOS for the classification schemes is not validated. In this paper, we focused on the lexical labels of SKOS and investigated an appropriate method of expressing the classification schemes using the Dewey Decimal Classification as an example. The results showed that there is no difference between the terminologies and classification schemes in the expression of SKOS concept and lexical labels. We showed that SKOS is available for the expression of the basic elements of the classification schemes and has the potential to be applied to any existing knowledge organization systems.

View full abstract

The purpose of this study is to clarify the historical development of e-books in terms of their “Publication, Circulation, and Use”, along with related e-library trends. The study methodology begins with the examination of past studies of e-books and e-library, followed by incorporation of recent developments. E-books were analyzed from four points of view; the trends of e-book terminals, the formats of e-books, the publication of e-books, and the issue of copyright of e-books. E-library was analyzed by the kind of library; the National Diet Library, the university library, and the public library. The results reveal two important points. The creation of an e-library platform has resulted in a clear need to investigate: (1) The management of copyright issues for e-library content, and (2) The method of organization of such library material.

View full abstract