e-Government track HICSS-42

Good papers were presented at the eGovernment track at HICSS-42. One particular paper that attracted my attention was the paper of John Bertot titled Emerging Role of Public Librarians as E-Government Providers. According to the paper libraries are becoming a central place for certain populations to access e-Government services. Some of these services you can see in the following figure taken from the article:

One of the main findings of the article is that, the demand for e-government services in libraries pose challenges. Suddenly librarians are requested to do things they were not trained for. For example, help filling up a driving license form, a birth certificate, helping with medical records etc...  Add to that the belief that many librarians share about their "neutral" role, and consequenly the article shows that librarians in some cases may serve as an obstacle to e-government deployment in Libraries. I thought one way to interprete their reluctance can be through Network Gatekeeping Theory . Gatekeepers have different rationales for gatekeeping and so librarians - it looks like one of these is the attempt to preserve their culture, the librarian's culture. E-government activities may be grasped as a threat to their training, to their neutral professional stance. Also, from a power perspective, some of them do not have enough skills to help users/patrons. That makes them feel uncomfortable and maybe afraid to be reflected externally as non-professionals or technically not-competent.

BTW - It was nice to learn that there are 17,000 public libraries in the US (which is more than the number of McDonalds branches in the US).

Understanding Global Digital Inequality: The Impact of Government, Investment in Business and Technology, and Socioeconomic Factors on Technology Utilization/Rasool Azari and James B. Pick

Another paper that received attention was this of Coward, Gomez and Ambikar - An Assessment of Venues Providing Public Access to ICT:A Tale of 25 Countries. This paper reflects the landscape project under The Center for Information & Society (CIS). which examined public access venues (Libraries, telecenters and cybercafes) and theirimpact in the context of 25 countries. Recentely I published with two colleagues from CIS (Gomez and Ambikar) a paper that elaborates the methodology of analyzing digital divide/s and inequalities, and we exemplified it through this project. The methodology paper can be found here: http://ekarine.org/wp-admin/pub/BarzilaiGomezAmbikar.pdf andt he full reports of the 25 countries can be found here .

Here are the other two papers that presented in this session:

Local-Global: Reconciling Mismatched Ontologies in Development Information Systems/Jessica Seddon Wallack and Ramesh Srinivasan

Social Ties, Literacy, Location and the Perception of Economic Opportunity: Factors Influencing Telecentre Success in a Development Context/Arlene Bailey and Ojelanki Ngwenyama

HICSS-42, Hawaii, Big Island