Purpose – This paper aims to focus on academic library managers’ learning practices in the context of cooperative work supported by computational artefacts. Academic library managers’ everyday work is mainly cooperative. Their cooperation is supported predominantly by computational artefacts. Learning how to use the computational artefacts efficiently and effectively involves understanding the changes in everyday work that affect managers and, therefore, it requires deep understanding of their cooperative work practices.

Design/methodology/approach – Focused ethnography was conducted through participant observations, interviews and document analysis. Ten managers from a university library in Sweden participated in the research. A thematic method was used to analyse the empirical material. Computer supported cooperative work (CSCW) and work-integrated learning was used as the conceptual lens.

Findings – Five learning practices were identified: collaboration, communication, coordination, decision-making processes and computational artefacts’ use. The findings show that learning is embedded in managers’cooperative work practices, which do not necessarily include sufficient training time. Furthermore, learning was intertwined with cooperating and was situational. Managers learned by reflecting together on their own experiences and through joint cooperation and information sharing while using the computational artefacts.

Originality/value – The main contribution lies in providing insights into how academic library managers learn and cooperate in their everyday work, emphasizing the role of computational artefacts, the importance of the work context and the collective nature of learning. It also highlights the need for continual workplace learning in contemporary knowledge work environments. Thus, the research generates contributions to the informatics field by extending the understanding of managers’ work-integrated learning in their everyday cooperative work practices supported by computational artefacts’ use. It also contributes to the intersection of CSCW and work-integrated learning.

The paper presents ethical and legal challenges of holographic communication technologies and suggests a framework to address them. Holographic communications enable the capturing of a user’s 3D depiction via special equipment, and its high-quality transmission to another user located elsewhere, introducing a distinctive data communication experience. Their wrongful use could compromise basic human rights. Qualitative research was conducted through interviews with ethics and legal experts in Sweden and Greece, and document analysis. The collected data were analyzed thematically and discussed within the framework of Ethical Technology Assessment (eTA). The findings show that the main challenges are privacy and data protection. The design phase and users’ participation in the process of the development of holographic communication technologies were found to have a vital role in the ethical and respectful of the law use of them. Similar challenges and frameworks of existing technologies can serve as the basis to develop a new framework. Challenges in formulating a common framework, though, due to contextual, societal and geographical differences were also found. Thus, the research contributes to the informatics field by providing insights and extending the knowledge about the use of holographic communication technologies. It contributes practically to designers, developers, technology companies, and other interested stakeholders as it shortens the knowledge gap concerning the prospective ethical and legal issues posed by this technology and provides suggestions of an ethical-legal framework to address them.

Personal Informatics (PI) are information systems that allow people to process activities with the usage of information technology, aiming to produce informational products (data) either for themselves or for others. Technologies that enable PI are becoming increasingly popular, assisting people in collecting personally relevant information about their body and their behaviour. In sports industry nowadays, a great variety of PI wearable tools offer support to athletes and training staff to improve their performance. An example of such tool is the Electronic Performance and Tracking Systems (EPTS), which is a combination of hardware and software that facilitates the collection, storage, analysis and management of professional athletes’ fitness and health data. Although significant and broadly used, EPTS have not yet received much attention from researchers and, thus, understudied. Therefore, the purpose of this research paper is to explore and understand how professional football athletes and training staff make sense of the use of electronic performance and tracking systems (EPTS) in their everyday training and work. The paper explores perceptions, benefits and challenges that professional football athletes and training staff experience when using EPTS. For this, an interpretive qualitative focused ethnographic study was conducted. The data were collected through direct observations in the field and semi-structured interviews from purposively selected Greek professional football athletes and Greek training staff that use wearable EPTS in their everyday training and work. The collected data were analysed thematically to conclude to five themes, which represent the research findings. A theoretical framework, which is built upon relevant literature from the informatics field along with the theory of sensemaking was used to understand, interpret and discuss the research findings. The research findings show that EPTS have radically changed the football daily routines for both professional football athletes and training staff members enabling them, and their football clubs, to improve individual and team performance. The use of EPTS has reshaped football athletes and training staff members’ identities, making them more data driven and more accurate. EPTS build trust between professional football athletes and training staff offering them the evidence they need to justify decisions, instructions, and actions taken respectively. Visualization tools for presenting insights need to be further improved with the addition of infield monitors and 3D presentations. Furthermore, it is important for training staff members to have ethical and consistent strategy on how EPTS data are derived, used and communicated. Through daily evaluation of their work, football players and training staff members are constantly improving their work identifying exemplary patterns of training and avoiding mistakes to be repeated, and in this way improve individual and team performance. The football athletes and the training staff members through communication among them, facilitated by visualization tools, are concerned with making situations, which have been collected in the form of data by the EPTS, meaningful to them. Making sense is a collaborative cognitive and ongoing process where individual football players and training staff members try to give meaning to collective experiences retrospectively. The data that are extracted from the EPTS help them in this process as they have the chance to examine them together, reflect on them, discuss them, make sense of them, share these meanings, and finally decide how to act based on them. To do this they raise past, tacit and private knowledge to make it explicit, public, ordered and simpler. In this way, the football athletes and the training staff members turn circumstances into well understood situations, which empower them to use their understanding to build more impactful experiences to improve their future performance. Thus, the research contributes to the existing knowledge on personal informatics and adjusts them to elite team sport context. It also adds to the theory of sensemaking regarding how users make sense of PI tools that are related with their everyday routines at work. In addition, it contributes to football athletes, sport training staff members, and other interested stakeholders by suggesting a model for efficient use of EPTS technology into the everyday football practices and a model of sustainable use aiming to the overall improvement of team performance. © 2022 Copyright for this paper by its authors.

The 2nd Linnaeus Student Conference on Information Technology (LSCIT) was held for two days between September 24 and September 25, 2020 in the Växjö campus of Linnaeus University. There were also online participants from different countries as well as different parts of Sweden.

The paper examines the perceptions of knowledge workers of small-medium enterprises (SMEs) in the Chinese context in regards to managing innovation in their knowledge work with the support of digital technologies. Main concepts such as knowledge, knowledge work, knowledge workers, innovation in knowledge work and digital technologies along with Socialization, Externalization, Combination and Internalization (SECI) model form the theoretical framework of this research which is used to discuss the research findings.The research adopts the interpretive qualitative approach and collects data through semi-structured face-to-face individual and group interviews. The collected empirical material that is analyzed thematically, yields eight themes which show that knowledge workers’ active interaction with knowledge supports the conversion from tacit to explicit knowledge back and forth. This assists the creation of new knowledge and, therefore, innovation in knowledge work; digital technologies play a supportive role in managing innovation in SME knowledge workers’ daily work.This research contributes to the current body of knowledge within informatics by empowering knowledge workers to share their viewpoints in regards to managing innovation in their knowledge work with the support of digital technologies. It also deepens the understanding of the formation mechanism of innovation in knowledge work. Finally, the research enriches and extends the existing body of knowledge and provides some valuable insights for the use of digital technologies in knowledge work to promote innovation.

The paper explores the perceptions of university students and their desired features on the use of blockchain technology for the management of education records. A literature review forms the theoretical basis of the research allowing to explore how education records are managed nowadays and the potential for the use of blockchain technology in this area. The theoretical framework is then used to discuss the research findings.The research adopts the interpretive qualitative approach and collects data through a focus group interview with university students. Computer assisted thematic data analysis yields five key themes: current usage of university education records, understanding how blockchain works, sustainability of blockchain, security of blockchain and implementation of blockchain for education records. Participants were generally positive towards the use of blockchain for the management of education records and saw it as one of the potential future solutions. Nevertheless, they voiced some reservations regarding the high energy consumption, costs and security towards a possible use of the blockchain technology. Therefore, careful implementation would be needed, with increased focus on usability, solving some security and sustainability issues and ensuring a fair and transparent access model.This research contributes to the current body of knowledge within informatics by empowering students to share their perception of possible development of student record systems based on blockchain technology. It also provides insights which can be used in the future to achieve a more user focused design of education records management systems.

The dissertation presents understandings of the complex, contextual, cooperative everyday work practices of academic library managers supported by computational artefacts, as well as challenges disrupting their practices and thereby computational artefacts usage. The doctoral research approaches and conceptualises managers’ work as ‘everyday cooperative practice’, in this way adopting the computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) approach. A focused-ethnographic study explores middle managers’ everyday cooperative work practices in two academic libraries, in Sweden and Australia, when using computational artefacts, including challenges experienced. The empirical data was collected through participant observations and formal and informal face-to-face interviews, as well as organizational documents review. The thematically analysed empirical material was presented as vignettes to enable complementary contextual visualisation of managers’ practices. A conceptual framework incorporated CSCW main concepts, such as cooperative work, practice, computational artefacts, situated action, articulation work, awareness, and appropriation. Placed within a managerial environment and inspired by management theories such as sensemaking and soft systems thinking, this conceptualisation serves as a reference point to explicate the research findings and achieve the research aim, to advance the understanding of managers’ everyday cooperative work practices using computational artefacts. 

The outcome of this dissertation illustrates the complex, contextualised, multidimensional and often diverse reality of academic library managers’ everyday cooperative work practices using computational artefacts, as well as emergent challenges that have implications for the use of computational artefacts and workplace practices. The interconnectedness of articulation work, awareness and appropriation, which emerged as a research outcome, vividly illustrates the interdependent and interrelated nature of managers’ everyday work. It extends the understanding of everyday cooperative work practices of academic library managers and provides rich analysis of their practical doing of managing and using of computational artefacts. Thus, this doctoral research generates contributions for the informatics field and, particularly, the computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) research and, modestly, for the management and library domains.

Contemporary organizations frequently employ projects to leverage work across organizational units, utilizing specialized knowledge from different areas of the organization to meet specific quality criteria in a defined time period, at a set cost. Project managers act as hubs of knowledge in directing projects and driving their success, often using technology for this purpose. To date, little is known in how far technology support this knowledge sharing in the project management.The paper aims to explore project managers’ perceptions regarding their knowledge sharing and how this is supported by recent technology. The paper further explores benefits and challenges experienced by project managers when using the specific technology for their knowledge sharing. The research adopts the interpretive qualitative approach and collects data through semi-structured interviews with project managers using such a technology. 3 C’s analysis was used to analyze the collected empirical material to generate 6 concepts. The concepts are then reviewed in context of selected theoretical framework, including the informatics domain model by Beynon-Davies. The findings indicate that the technology largely supports knowledge sharing of project managers, both presenting opportunities for more efficiency as well as new challenges. The technology leads to change in the modus of knowledge sharing and also individuals’ approach: what, when and how knowledge is shared.This enhanced understanding contributes to existing theory and the insights can aid practitioners in development or introduction of technology in the workplace. The work also contributes to theory about how project managers can leverage knowledge across projects with the aid of such a technology as well as to project managers’ and managers’ work, such as to make efficient use of a technology and avoid certain challenges.

This interpretive focused-ethnographic study was conducted to illuminate and gain deeper understanding on managers’ everyday cooperative work practices using artefacts. In the dissertation, artefacts refer to digital technologies and information. The doctoral research specifically examines how artefacts in the workplace of an academic library are used in academic library managers’ everyday cooperative work practices; and provide suggestions of how artefacts can be used to better fit those practices. The empirical data was collected through participant observations, face-to-face interviews and documents from two technologically advanced academic libraries, one in Sweden and another one in Australia. The study uses soft systems thinking theory and concepts from computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) such as awareness, articulation and appropriation to analyze and discuss how cooperative work is conducted in the everyday work practices of academic library managers with the use of artefacts. Thus, this research contributes insights from the field of computer-supported cooperative work to the information systems and library domain by considering social aspects of cooperative everyday work practices.

As has been argued by systems thinking scholars, science and scientific thinking can be seen as socially constructed systems of institutionalized sets of activities through which systems thinking emerged. In this paper, the development of systems approaches is discussed to argue for the research approach adopted. Further, main concepts of systems thinking such as complexity, worldview, and human activity systems are discussed and applied to empirical data on academic library managers’ use of digital technologies in their everyday work practices. Recognizing that the use of digital technologies has changed the way we live, work and communicate, we explore in depth library managers’ everyday work practices with a focus on the way they use information for managing their organization. Practices refer to what library managers do when they do their job using digital technologies. Their work practices are presented as a complex reality where different managers have different, although interconnected, perspectives and see different priorities. The use of digital technologies is part of library managers’ everyday work practices. However not all managers have the same perspectives on the use of digital technologies. The various interacting perceptions of reality can be explored as different managers have different worldviews that affect their respective approach of managing and of using the technology for that purpose. The Library organization is conceptualized as an information-intensive ecosystem consisting of complex interplays among academic library managers, everyday work practices, digital technologies and content. Within the library system, several human activity systems constructed by managers exist. By the use of Soft Systems Methodology modelling we illustrate some of these existing human activity systems and relate these to purpose and function within the overall organization. Our focus is on information created and mediated within these human activity systems and discuss the means of technology to facilitate managers’ everyday work practices.