Purpose: Neutrality is a much debated value in library and information science (LIS). The “neutrality debate” is characterised by opinionated discussions in contrasting contexts. The purpose of this paper is to fill a gap in the literature by bringing these conceptions together...

Purpose: Since Poland's accession to the European Union in 2004, migration from Poland to the UK has increased substantially. These migrants are generally young and highly educated, and are migrating for reasons of economic improvement and self-fulfilment. Many are women migrating...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to adapt a repertory grid technique to investigate fiction readers’ attitudes and beliefs, with a specific focus on minority ethnic fiction. Design/methodology/approach – The study required participants ( n =36) to rate on a seven-point Likert scale a...

Purpose Social media (SM) has been heavily criticised in recent years for its damaging effects on societies globally. Tasked with empowering those same societies, libraries’ continued use of SM is considered ethically contentious. This study presents the findings of a University of Sheffield...

Purpose – The aim of this paper is to determine the extent to which readers perceive correctly the reasons why authors cite items in scholarly texts. Design/methodology/approach – The authors of ten library and information science articles provided the reasons for citing material in their...

A study has been made of the effect of controlled variations in indexing vocabulary size on retrieval performance using the Cranfield 200 and 1400 test collections. The vocabularies considered are sets of variable‐length character strings chosen from the fronts of document and query terms so...

This paper describes the use of fixed‐length character strings for controlling the size of indexing vocabularies in reference retrieval systems. Experiments with the Cranfield test collection show that trigram encoding of words performs noticeably better than the use of digrams; however, use...

This paper considers the classifications produced by application of the single linkage, complete linkage, group average and Ward clustering methods to the Keen and Cranfield document test collections. Experiments were carried out to study the structure of the hierarchies produced by the...