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The article aims to give an overview of the history and the achieved status of information science in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) with an emphasis on the organisation of information science and practice in the GDR and on the theoretical foundations of information science.

Primarily, this article is based upon critical literature studies, especially German-language books and journal articles, but the empirical basis also includes some unpublished sources (e.g. letters from information scientists from the GDR).

There are interesting results concerning the roots of information science in cybernetics, philosophy and the practical area of documentation. The naming of this knowledge field as “informatics”, “informatics of science” or “information and documentation science” is partly very distinct from Western conceptions. We found different theoretical foundations for information science including the approaches of Bonitz, Engelbert, Koblitz and Groß and Fuchs-Kittowski. In the GDR, information science and information practice were centralised, but through the information system science and technology, they were consistently accessible at all levels of professional work. With German reunification, information practice and its institutions, as well as GDR’s information science efforts, disappeared.

The article gives hints on the importance on and the survival of some GDR approaches in contemporary information science, but those developments should be analysed in much more detail.

This is the first overview article on the state and entire development of information science in the GDR.

Many Web 2.0 services (including Library 2.0 catalogs) make use of folksonomies. The purpose of this paper is to cut off all tags in the long tail of a document‐specific tag distribution. The remaining tags at the beginning of a tag distribution are considered power tags and form a new, additional search option in information retrieval systems.

In a theoretical approach the paper discusses document‐specific tag distributions (power law and inverse‐logistic shape), the development of such distributions (Yule‐Simon process and shuffling theory) and introduces search tags (besides the well‐known index tags) as a possibility for generating tag distributions.

Search tags are compatible with broad and narrow folksonomies and with all knowledge organization systems (e.g. classification systems and thesauri), while index tags are only applicable in broad folksonomies. Based on these findings, the paper presents a sketch of an algorithm for mining and processing power tags in information retrieval systems.

This conceptual approach is in need of empirical evaluation in a concrete retrieval system.

Power tags are a new search option for retrieval systems to limit the amount of hits.

The paper introduces power tags as a means for enhancing the precision of search results in information retrieval systems that apply folksonomies, e.g. catalogs in Library 2.0 environments.

Through a theoretical review of the literature, this chapter assesses the potential of different knowledge organisation systems (KOS) to support corporate knowledge management systems (KMS), namely digital libraries (DL) in companies and other institutions. Questions are framed through which the chapter discusses how classical KOS, such as nomenclatures, classification systems, thesauri and ontologies, are able to reflect explicit knowledge in sense of the Semantic Web and also introduces persons as documents along with folksonomies as a means for externalising implicit knowledge in sense of the Web 2.0.

The object of this empirical research study is emotion, as depicted and aroused in videos. This paper seeks to answer the questions: Are users able to index such emotions consistently? Are the users' votes usable for emotional video retrieval?

The authors worked with a controlled vocabulary for nine basic emotions (love, happiness, fun, surprise, desire, sadness, anger, disgust and fear), a slide control for adjusting the emotions' intensity, and the approach of broad folksonomies. Different users tagged the same videos. The test persons had the task of indexing the emotions of 20 videos (reprocessed clips from YouTube). The authors distinguished between emotions which were depicted in the video and those that were evoked in the user. Data were received from 776 participants and a total of 279,360 slide control values were analyzed.

The consistency of the users' votes is very high; the tag distributions for the particular videos' emotions are stable. The final shape of the distributions will be reached by the tagging activities of only very few users (less than 100). By applying the approach of power tags it is possible to separate the pivotal emotions of every document – if indeed there is any feeling at all.

This paper is one of the first steps in the new research area of emotional information retrieval (EmIR). To the authors' knowledge, it is the first research project into the collective indexing of emotions in videos.

The purpose of this paper is to show how the coverage of publications is represented in information services. Academic citation databases (Web of Science, Scopus, Google Scholar) and scientific social media (Mendeley, CiteULike, BibSonomy) were analyzed by applying a new method: the use of personal publication lists of scientists.

Personal publication lists of scientists of the field of information science were analyzed. All data were taken in collaboration with the scientists in order to guarantee complete publication lists.

The demonstrated calibration parameter shows the coverage of information services in the field of information science. None of the investigated databases reached a coverage of 100 percent. However Google Scholar covers a greater amount of publications than other academic citation databases and scientific social media.

Results were limited to the publications of scientists working at an information science department from 2003 to 2012 at German-speaking universities.

Scientists of the field of information science are encouraged to review their publication strategy in case of quality and quantity.

The paper confirms the usefulness of personal publication lists as a calibration parameter for measuring coverage of information services.

The aim of this paper is to explore the relationship between practitioners and academics in scholarly communication in library and information science (LIS) journals.

The research is based on a reader survey, a citation analysis and an editor survey. The reader survey identifies both differences in journal rankings between practitioners and academics and the contribution of practitioners to LIS journals. The editor survey provides the proportions of practitioners and academics for the journals. The citation analysis shows the disparities in information exchange between the journals mainly preferred by practitioners and those more favoured by academics. Furthermore, it is possible to explore if practitioner journals differ from academic journals in the citation indicators and in other data collected in the editor survey.

It is found that: practitioners play an active role both as readers and as authors of articles in LIS journals; there is only a low level of information exchange between practitioner and academic journals; the placement of advertisements, the size of the editorial board, requirements concerning an extensive bibliography, the number and the half‐life of the references show a clear distinction between practitioner and academic journals. Interestingly, the impact factor did not turn out to be a good indicator to differentiate a practitioner from an academic journal.

This research is only exploratory because it is based on separate studies previously conducted. Further research is also needed to explore the relationship between practitioners and academics more deeply.

The value of this paper lies in bringing together the findings from complementary studies (reader survey, editor survey and citation analysis) and identifying hypotheses for future research, especially with regards to the roles of and interactions between LIS practitioners and academics in scholarly communication.

The purpose of this paper is to identify governmental social media use in cities with enhanced information and communications technology infrastructures (i.e. Informational World Cities) and high Internet penetration rates. Social media platforms are increasingly being used by governments to foster user interaction and it was investigated if social media platforms are valuable tools for reaching high numbers of citizens.

This paper is based on an iterative content and Web analysis from November 2012 till January 2013 and offers a comparison of different social media service types and the particular use.

This empirical investigation of 31 Informational World Cities provides an overview of social media services used for governmental purposes, of their popularity among governments and of their usage intensity in broadcasting information online. Even as cities in a globalized world become more similar, a variety in the use of social media by governments was detected, which is due to regional and cultural characteristics.

The findings are limited to calculable data, e.g. number of used social media accounts, posts and followers which were available through a content and Web analysis at the time of investigation.

A more detailed content analysis, as well as a more differentiated analysis of users, must be conducted in the future.

This paper is one of the first that presents a global comparison of governmental social media use of cities of the knowledge society and compares different social media platforms.

The term “library management” covers many different aspects of the way that a library is operated and conjures up different concepts in the minds of different people, depending on their own interests, agendas and requirements. Research into the subject is even more difficult to define because the application of research in one field can be vital to the development of another. Some researchers would not consider their research central to library matters at all, whereas the practising librarian might well see it as casting new light on a difficult area of understanding or development.

As a new editor faced with a short deadline, it was gratifying to receive a large number of outstanding submissions in the past 6 months. This volume focuses on topics that push the edge in our increasingly electronically driven world. Not only is the field of library and information science awash in changes wrought by rapidly evolving technologies but so are almost all sectors that touch our daily lives. From e-banking to movies delivered through Wii and to smart phones with webcams and GPS applications, we face complexities that can paralyze us or make us embrace the digital environment. As our information environment becomes enriched, so do the challenges of keeping current as individuals and as librarians and information scientists. The most troublesome quandary is how we can learn from these early days of becoming digital to plan and accept changes in our work, our learning environments, and our personal and family lives. Just as industrialization changed the world a century ago, the digital explosion is causing another radical shift in our world.