A Guide to Assessing Needs


Book Description

Making informed decisions is the essential beginning to any successful development project. Before the project even begins, you can use needs assessment approaches to guide your decisions. This book is filled with practical strategies that can help you define the desired results and select the most appropriate activities for achieving them.




Assessing Information Needs


Book Description

Provides a systematic method of identifying, evaluating and comparing information needs, as well as a framework to enable information services to gather information from users to aid information system design, and monitor the effectiveness of an information service. Examines the role of the Internet in meeting information needs.The section on collecting data now includes web log analysis and focus group interviews. Introduces the concept of the I-player, the digital information user.




Assessing Information Needs


Book Description

Based on a tested model for community analysis, this book offers a guide to the management of client-centered transformative information services that can be applied in any type of library or information agency. Knowing a community enables library and information professionals to prioritize the community's information needs and design appropriate services for them. Assessing Information Needs: Managing Transformative Library Services was written to provide the rationale for community analysis, a model for gathering community data, and a process for analyzing data and applying it to the management of an information agency. The book explains why information professionals should customize services, as well as the "how to" of collecting data. A model for gathering community information is described, applied, and demonstrated through a case study. The book then shows how such information is interpreted and used to plan information services that are transformative for individuals and groups in the case-study community, providing lessons that readers can use with their own institutions. Rooted in a philosophy of customer service, the method presented here is perfect for public, school, academic, and special libraries or other types of information agencies.




Assessing Information Needs in the Age of the Digital Consumer


Book Description

Aiming at ensuring that everyone obtains the rich rewards available in today's information-centred society, this book seeks to provide a systematic method for the understanding, appreciation and evaluation of information needs, which alone can guarantee the value of information to the consumer. Based on the insights gained from research projects involving hundreds of thousands of people, it sets out to provide a framework, firmly grounded in theory but nevertheless highly practical, for information needs analysis. The book is written both for librarians, publishers, archivists, records managers, journalists and other information professionals, to help them in their efforts to design improved systems and monitor the effectiveness of their services on an ongoing basis, and for individual information consumers, to enable them better to meet their own information needs in the expanding sphere of virtual information.




Information Needs Analysis


Book Description

If you want to provide an information service that truly fulfils your users' needs, this book is essential reading. Analysing and assessing the information needs of clients is key to the provision of effective service and appropriate collections in both face-to-face and virtual library services. The importance of information needs analysis is widely recognized by information professionals, but currently there is little substantive, detailed work in the professional literature devoted to this important topic. This new book is designed to fill that gap, by supporting practitioners in developing an information needs analysis strategy, and offering the necessary professional skills and techniques to do so. It will offer guidance to team leaders and senior managers in all areas of library work, especially those involved in collection management, service provision and web development, and is equally applicable to the needs of academic, public, government, commercial and other more specialized library and information services. The text adopts a hands-on, jargon-free approach, and includes relevant examples, case studies, reader activities and sources of further reading. Key areas covered include: - what is information needs analysis? - how is needs analysis conducted? - what are the varieties of needs analysis? - how are analyses evaluated and reported? Readership: The book will be essential reading for library and information practitioners, team leaders and senior managers. It will also be a core text on course reading lists in departments of library and information studies.










Finding What Works in Health Care


Book Description

Healthcare decision makers in search of reliable information that compares health interventions increasingly turn to systematic reviews for the best summary of the evidence. Systematic reviews identify, select, assess, and synthesize the findings of similar but separate studies, and can help clarify what is known and not known about the potential benefits and harms of drugs, devices, and other healthcare services. Systematic reviews can be helpful for clinicians who want to integrate research findings into their daily practices, for patients to make well-informed choices about their own care, for professional medical societies and other organizations that develop clinical practice guidelines. Too often systematic reviews are of uncertain or poor quality. There are no universally accepted standards for developing systematic reviews leading to variability in how conflicts of interest and biases are handled, how evidence is appraised, and the overall scientific rigor of the process. In Finding What Works in Health Care the Institute of Medicine (IOM) recommends 21 standards for developing high-quality systematic reviews of comparative effectiveness research. The standards address the entire systematic review process from the initial steps of formulating the topic and building the review team to producing a detailed final report that synthesizes what the evidence shows and where knowledge gaps remain. Finding What Works in Health Care also proposes a framework for improving the quality of the science underpinning systematic reviews. This book will serve as a vital resource for both sponsors and producers of systematic reviews of comparative effectiveness research.




Business Information Needs of the Indian Corporate Sector


Book Description

Indian businesses face many challenges in today's competitive environment consisting of global players, highly demanding customers and shortage of skilled manpower. It is a complex environment that they operate in with 'information' becoming a critical component of their strategy and operations. Right information to the right person at the right time for right business actions is the greatest challenge that businesses face. Need for information exists at all levels, right from in-the-market executives to the middle management and top management in the organization. The type of information required would determine the sources of information, the media preferred, the technology used to access this information, the providers of information to be approached, the purpose of information searching and quality of information required. In this context, understanding the information need and its various aspects from the managers working in the industry was the purpose of this study. This research not only facilitates provision of right information to the right person at the right time but also helps in designing information systems and building the information culture of an organization. It is in this context that the book is written with an objective to explore the information needs of the Indian corporate sector. The study focuses on the middle or higher level of managers working in Indian corporate sector that includes public limited, private limited, family businesses, small businesses and government businesses. The study looks at the type of information required, sources used, media preferred, information providers used, purpose of information search and quality of information that is relevant and important. The research also studies the variations in results between managers in manufacturing sector and services sector to enhance the understanding of business information needs in the Indian context.