Community information portals: content and design issues for information access

Abstract

If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information. About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.comEmerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and services.Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation. AbstractPurpose -The purpose of this paper is to report on the findings of an audit of community information (CI) portals to provide an overview of how CI is being organised and presented on the web by aggregating services, and how CI is being shaped and shared in community networks. It also investigates the role that public libraries play in online CI provision. Design/methodology/approach -The research sampled CI portals online within the Australian web domain (.au). An audit of 88 portals was undertaken to establish the scope, role and usefulness of the portals. The audit included a comprehensive usability analysis of a sub set of 20 portals evaluated for 20 different heuristics based on Nielsen's heuristic model. Findings -The research finds that the challenge facing portals is not a lack of information, it is the need to improve the mediation between the community services and people that CI portals promise useful and usable information for. While public libraries remain integral to the provision of CI in their geographical area, they now form part of a larger online network for CI provision, involving a wide range of organisations. Originality/value -The paper discusses the ways CI portals contribute to the provision of information about community services and identifies areas where improvements are needed. In particular, it discusses how these sites function as part of larger CI networks and where more innovative, and more standardised, design could lead to greater levels of engagement and utility.

Exploring continuance intention of social networking sites

“…In the age of the internet, community information portals and referral services can be considered as the origin of informational support. The internet enables information service providers to take information and referral services online to present rich and wide-ranging community information, such as health care, financial assistance, housing, transportation, education and childcare services as well as information on recreation programs, clubs, community events and information about all levels of government (Day, 2007;Hider et al, 2014). However, compared with professional information service providers, informational support on SNSs are partly user-generated content and mostly belongs to spontaneous behaviors from SNS users.…”

The functional requirements for community information

“…an ethnic community), while others aim for a more general coverage. In Australia alone, there are hundreds of organisations aggregating and disseminating CI, from those covering a handful of services to those covering many thousands (Hider, Given and Scifleet, 2014). Unfortunately, most of the databases and directories that these organisations have made available are not integrated, and many do not conform to common data standards.…”