Selective permeability in interdisciplinary knowledge organization: evidence from communication studies

Nowadays there are lots of problems with a background in geotechnical engineering that cannot be separated from another important subject, fluid dynamics. Such problems include, for example, leaking problems with ground foundations, turbulent water in groundwater, and so on. This passage organized basic knowledge of two subjects that directly help to understand complex problems and introduced some advanced solutions to solve the problems of these complex problems. Darcy’s Law is the key to working out all the leaking problems under earth because of the low speed and rate of flow. Turbulent water is a hot topic to talk about and there are no such overall equations as Darcy’s Law to understand different problems but it’s possible to combine the half-rational equations and the data of the field survey together and concluded a new formula. To understand more such complex problems, using simulating software is a good choice and there will be more and more topics containing interdisciplinary knowledge in the future.

There has been a long-standing interest within academic librarian community to provide support for graduate students involved in interdisciplinary research. This column focuses on challenges that researchers face when seeking information in an unfamiliar disciplinary area as well as what is known about information behaviors of interdisciplinary researchers. Using a framework of information seeking strategies, elements of a course for interdisciplinary graduate students are proposed. Topics that are addressed are learning about culture and language of an unfamiliar discipline; including scholarly communication apparatus and organization of information; mechanisms for identifying and locating key authors, publications, research institutions, and emerging research fronts; how to determine when enough information has been gathered; and keeping up with latest research.--Editor Given increase in number and interest in interdisciplinary programs and research in U.S. institutions of higher education, academic librarians should be involved in determining information literacy needs of graduate students in interdisciplinary areas. (1) Don Spanner expresses this need in his published study of a group of interdisciplinary researchers: Is it solely domain of scholars? What is trickle down effect on students as curriculum shifts to encompass interdisciplinarity? Such a determination would allow reference librarians to consider importance of developing necessary bibliographic instructional skills to support both scholars and students in their research. (2) Recent studies of information needs and behavior of interdisciplinary researchers, including graduate students, demonstrate that researchers have difficulties discovering authoritative information sources when venturing outside their major field of study. (3) What approaches have librarians and information scientists found for teaching graduate students about developing vocabularies and learning about core information sources outside of their main disciplinary domains? This article attempts to answer this question by first exploring information behaviors of interdisciplinary researchers and difficulties they face in locating key sources of information outside their disciplines. From this review and analysis, information literacy instruction approaches are proposed for creating a course for interdisciplinary graduate students on following topics: learning about culture and language of an unfamiliar discipline; how new research is communicated and made accessible to others; identifying and locating key authors, publications, and research institutions through chaining, or footnote chasing; probing activities to increase breadth of information gathered through searching multidisciplinary databases and federated search products; networking; keeping up with research literature; and integration and consolidation of interdisciplinary knowledge. CHALLENGES OF INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH Lynn Westbrook describes interdisciplinary research as the purposeful weaving together of two or more disciplines that are usually considered to be quite unconnected in order to reach a new understanding, create a new academic end product or advance research on a particular question. (4) From an extensive literature review of issues facing interdisciplinary researchers, themes that emerged are need to learn language and culture of discipline, information-scatter issue for highly distributed research areas, nature and quality of bibliographic apparatuses to search for information, and keeping up with current research. For interdisciplinary researchers, there is a need to become familiar with cultural assumptions, language, and organization of knowledge in other discipline. (5) Being able to communicate with those outside one's own discipline requires knowledge of vocabulary of discipline. …

Nanoscience and technology is characterized by nano researchers as an increasingly interdisciplinary domain, drawing upon such disciplines as chemistry, physics, materials science, and computer, electrical, mechanical and biomedical engineering. A key challenge faced by information professionals involved in organizing and providing the related information services is to efficiently identify information resources and to carry out inclusive and effective searches in a diverse and heterogeneous range of digital libraries, web-based databases and search engines. This demand emphasizes the importance of thinking about and developing methodological models for investigating interdisciplinary knowledge organization practices. This 2008 study examined the extent of interdisciplinarity in user queries submitted to the NANOnetBASE digital library. Transaction logs of the digital library were analyzed to explore users’ search behaviour patterns and to examine the extent to which user queries were interdisciplinary. The Inspect thesaurus and Classification codes were utilized as the disciplinary or interdisciplinary focus of the queries. The results indicate that 62% of the unique top terms resulting from mapping users’ query terms to the INSPEC Classification codes represented two or more disciplines, specifically terms associated with the Classification code ‘A’ representing “physics.” The results contribute to the development of more critical information organization and classification practices in such an increasingly interdisciplinary domain as nanoscience and technology. Subject terms: digital libraries, interdisciplinarity, knowledge organization, information retrieval