2013 Awards for Excellence

Citation

(2014), "2013 Awards for Excellence", The Electronic Library, Vol. 32 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/EL.26332aaa.001

2013 Awards for Excellence

Article Type:

2013 Awards for Excellence

From:

The Electronic Library, Volume 32, Issue 1

The following article was selected for this year's Outstanding Paper Award for The Electronic Library

‘‘Why and how can ‘sleeping beauties’ be awakened?’’

Juncheng Wang
Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China, Beijing, People’s Republic of China

Feicheng Ma, Minjie Chen, Yiqing Rao
Center for Studies of Information Resources, Wuhan University, Wuhan, People’s Republic of China

Purpose – ‘‘Sleeping beauties’’ are very common in science, so this paper aims to uncover the reasons and formulation mechanism of information awakening on a more general level. Based on this, the paper will further propose useful strategies to awaken those ‘‘sleeping beauties’’ earlier. Design/methodology/approach – Explanation-building of case study is used to develop some models of information awakening and also to uncover different types of reasons for triggering academic information to be awakened.
Findings – Based on the three basic elements of information utilisation, namely, information value, access channel and user needs, the paper summarises several reasons for information awakening: the information value is re-mined because of the relevance among various information; different uses of information are discovered; information availability and visibility are improved; information is placed into the appropriate place; and, with time passing by, demands for the information rise.
Practical implications – The presence of excessive ‘‘sleeping beauties’’ is not only a kind of idleness and waste to knowledge, but also may result in aggravation of information redundancy and increasing cost of storage. The revelation of its essence and reasons is not only helpful to establish better management mechanism to awaken ‘‘sleeping beauties’’ and thus to maximise their value, but also helpful to distinguish ‘‘sleeping beauties’’ from ‘‘pseudo-sleeping beauties’’ as early as possible, so that all that worthless information can be cleared up without hesitation.
Originality/value – Most existing studies remain on the level of collecting instances and interpreting specific cases, but this paper investigates reasons from a more general level. What is more, current understandings are very one-sided in that they treat information awakening and delayed recognition
as the same, so this paper clarifies their differentiation and summarises the reasons comprehensively.

Keywords Information, Information awakening, Information obsolescence, Information utilization, Obsolescence, Prince, Sleeping beauty

http://www.emeraldinsight.com/10.1108/02640471211204033

This article originally appeared in Volume 30 Number 1, 2012, pp. 5-18, The Electronic Library

The following articles were selected for this year’s Highly Commended Award

‘‘Developing a Taiwan library history digital library with reader knowledge archiving and sharing mechanisms based on the DSpace platform’’

Chih-Ming Chen, Yong-Ting Chen, Chin-Ming Hong, Chin-Wen Liao and Chia-Meng Huang

This article originally appeared in Volume 30 Number 3, 2012 The Electronic Library

‘‘Exploring the affordance and acceptance of an e-reader device as a collaborative learning system’’

Boon-Chong Seet and Tiong-Thye Goh

This article originally appeared in Volume 30 Number 4, 2012 The Electronic Library

‘‘Metacognition and web credibility’’

Andrew D. Madden, Nigel Ford, Genevieve Gorrell, Barry Eaglestone and Peter Holdridge

This article originally appeared in Volume 30 Number 5, 2012 The Electronic Library

Outstanding Reviewers

Dr Anne Morris Dr Dusan Surla