Information Ethics and its Implications for Library and Information Professionals: A Contemporary Analysis
Information ethics provides an ethical framework for the information professionals for carrying out various information related works like acquiring, storing, processing and using of information. This has become vitally important in modern times, which has been dubbed as ‘information age’, because of the central role played by information in the socio-economic development of world nations. This also poses unique challenges for the library and information professionals, because the emergence of an ICT-driven information society has made their job much more challenging than before. This article explores the key questions related to information ethics and, in the light of codes of ethics promoted by national and international information organizations, discusses how information professionals could discharge their duties in an ethical and morally justifiable manner. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3329/pp.v51i1-2.17677
Exploring barriers and possible actions suggested in rural libraries for information society: Perspectives from library practitioners in Malaysia
This study aims to explore the barriers when developing information societies and to suggest possible actions for rural libraries to participate in information societies, tailored to the needs of Malaysian rural libraries. This study employed a three-round Delphi technique; including a face-to- face interview in the first round, followed by two rounds of close-ended survey questions presented in a Likert-type scale format distributed to a selected group of leaders with experience in rural library planning and strategies. It reveals how funding, library infrastructures, information communication technology, local content resources, and human resources adversely affected rural libraries in the development of an information society. Based on the recommendation elicited for the five categories, this study suggests possible actions that provide practical guidance on the actions to be taken by the rural libraries in developing an information society.
A traffic scheduling framework in broadband wireless access systems
In this paper, we present a traffic scheduling framework for allocating the upstream channel bandwidth in broadband wireless access systems, where both voice and data applications are supported. Our traffic scheduling framework is aimed at supporting diverse QoS requirements and obtaining high utilization of the upstream bandwidth. It prioritizes traffic streams according to different classes of service, and provides fair access of bandwidth to the users. The presented framework consists of three algorithms: a calibration algorithm for the jittered constant bit rate (CBR) traffic, a scheduling algorithm for the jittered CBR traffic, and a scheduling algorithm for the unspecified bit rate traffic. The proposed algorithms are feasible when either the asynchronous transfer mode or multi-protocol label switching protocol is deployed at the network edge. Simulation results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithms in achieving high bandwidth utilization and the good traffic performance in terms of both cell loss ratio and mean queuing delay.