Search results

This note was evoked by the reference by Karen Sparck Jones to a paper by Zunde and Slamecka which has recently been reprinted in Introduction to Information Science, edited by Saracevic. Zunde and Slamecka purport to show that, for optimum performance of IR systems, the frequency distribution of descriptor terms should conform with a geometric progression. This result is at variance with the widely accepted result derived from the Shannon model which shows that optimum performance of an IR system occurs when the descriptor terms are equi‐probable, i.e. when their frequency distribution is uniform. The uncertainty arising from these two different solutions to the same problem clearly led Karen Sparck Jones to have some reservations about the theoretical justification for her interesting idea of weighting search terms to give them, in effect, the equal weights that the usual Shannon result demands for optimum performance. But Sparck Jones need have no such reservations. The result obtained by Zunde and Slamecka, though plausible because it has some fortuitous semblance to the distributions of terms found in real systems, is in fact erroneous.

This paper aims to explore the content of Safeguarding Adult Reviews (SARs) from older adult care homes to understand how safety is understood and might be measured in practice.

SARs relevant to older adult care homes from 2015 onwards were identified via the Social Care Institute of Excellence SARs library. Using thematic analysis, initial inductive coding was mapped to a health-derived safety framework, the Safety Measurement and Monitoring Framework (SMMF).

The content of the SARs reflected the dimensions of the SMMF but gaining a deeper understanding of safety in older adult care homes requires additional understanding of how this unique context interacts with these dimensions to create and prevent risks and harms. This review identified the importance of external factors in care home safety.

This study provides an insight into the scope of safety issues within care homes using the SARs content, and in doing so improves understanding of how it might be measured. The measurement of safety in care homes needs to acknowledge that there are factors external to care homes that a home may have little knowledge of and no ability to control.

The purpose of this paper is to think through the value of History as a way of interrogating ideas around environmental change as well as bridging the gap between definitions of natural and cultural heritage. In terms of the sustainability in higher education imperative, it argues that youth climate change movements and endeavours to diversify curriculum content make this a moment of critical mass to push forward with new historical programmes that embed environmental themes in a wider intellectual pedagogy.

This paper looks to combine an urgent need to engage with environmental sustainability with progressive endeavours at decolonising the curriculum to explore how humanities (and History, in particular) can be brought into the service of the ecological university.

Thereafter, it looks specifically at “green heritage” in the city as a useful example in which the greening agenda can be used to re-contextualise historical approaches, encourage useful conversations around the role of History as a conservation and heritage management tool and build active partnerships with local stakeholder groups.

The originality of this approach lies in thinking both of content and intellectual practice, pedagogy as content and behaviour and in reconstructing the terrain of a theme such as heritage to think through opportunities for sustainability in education.

Integrated care continues to be a central aim within health and social care policy in England. Personal budgets and personal health budgets aim to place service users at the centre of decision-making and are part of a wider long-term initiative working towards personalised and integrated care. Personal budgets began in social care with the national pilot programme of individual budgets, which aimed to incorporate several funding streams into one budget, but in practice local authorities limited these to social care expenditure. Personal budgets then moved into the health care sector with the introduction of a three-year personal health budgets pilot programme that started in 2009. The purpose of the paper is to explore the post-pilot implementation of personal health budgets and explore their role in facilitating service integration. We examine this through the RE-AIM framework.

During 2015 and 2016, eight organisational representatives, 23 personal health budget holders and three service providers were interviewed, 42 personal health budget support plans were collected and 14 service providers completed an online survey.

Overall, personal health budgets continued to be viewed positively but progress in implementation was slower than expected. Effective leadership, clear communication and longer-term implementation were seen as vital ingredients in ensuring personal health budgets are fully embedded and contribute to wider service integration.

The paper highlights the importance of policy implementation over the longer-term, while illustrating how the venture of personal health budgets in England could be a mechanism for implementing service integration. The findings can serve to guide future policy initiatives on person-centred care and service integration.

This article has been withdrawn as it was published elsewhere and accidentally duplicated. The original article can be seen here: 10.1108/eb026488. When citing the article, please cite: KAREN SPARCK JONES, (1970), “SOME THOUGHTS ON CLASSIFICATION FOR RETRIEVAL”, Journal of Documentation, Vol. 26 Iss: 2, pp. 89 - 101.

This article reviews the state of the art in automatic indexing, that is, automatic techniques for analysing and characterising documents, for manipulating their descriptions in searching, and for generating the index language used for these purposes. It concentrates on the literature from 1968 to 1973. Section I defines the topic and its context. Sections II and III consider work in syntax and semantics respectively in detail. Section IV comments on ‘indirect’ indexing. Section V briefly surveys operating mechanized systems. In Section VI major experiments in automatic indexing are reviewed, and Section VII attempts an overall conclusion on the current state of automatic indexing techniques.

Previous experiments demonstrated the value of relevance weighting for search terms, but relied on substantial relevance information for the terms. The present experiments were designed to study the effects of weights based on very limited relevance information, for example supplied by one or two relevant documents. The tests simulated iterative searching, as in an on‐line system, and show that even very little relevance information can be of considerable value.

This short note seeks to respond to Hjørland and Pederson's paper “A substantive theory of classification for information retrieval” which starts from Spärck Jones's, “Some thoughts on classification for retrieval”, originally published in 1970.

The note comments on the context in which the 1970 paper was written, and on Hjørland and Pedersen's views, emphasising the need for well‐grounded classification theory and application.

The note maintains that text‐based, a posteriori, classification, as increasingly found in applications, is likely to be more useful, in general, than a priori classification.

The note elaborates on points made in a well‐received earlier paper.