| Community plays an important role in emergency management as one of main parts in the basic responses to disasters. Facing lots of unclear conditions and various uncertain factors which appear in emergent events, the managers have to collect and process huge quantities of information and then make a viable and suitable scheme in time. A high quality scheme strongly depends on the accuracy, promptness and reliability of the information that were got in emergent events. If these information needs are not satisfied the responses to the disasters can be delayed and some swart results leaded, such as more injured people, loss in economy and turbulence in society.In order to improve efficiency and ability in information collection, processing and utility, supporting the last strategy making, surrounding monitoring and resource allocation, in different stages of community emergency management people generally use diverse information techniques and systems which are helpful to emergency workers for information needs. These usages of techniques and systems do bring great convenience in community emergency management. However it is difficult to give an accurate estimation that how well these systems work because these systems can’t understand emergency managers exactly. As a direct result, strategy makers are confused to choose what emergency response system they should have and many emergency response systems are developed in a blind way.Researchers have taken into account that information needs in scenarios (i.e. academic, business and daily life) and relevant subjects on user research, information behavior and so far. While further work is necessary to have a conclusion that whether these methods and results from the researchers work in understanding the exact information needs of community emergency managers, due to the big difference between career characteristic of managers and academic and business. Besides, currently information needs are regarded as the same as the contents needed in most of researches on information needs analysis of emergency management and its existence is think to be static, which work little in designing emergency management systems because the analysis result is nothing but only the list of contents of information needs.As for the research on information needs of emergency managers today, there is little work in that features of community emergency management are considered as well as how to design emergency response systems conveniently. Therefore, referring works of several subjects, a new information needs cognition framework for community emergency response managers and a novel method of information needs identification are proposed in this thesis to adapt to emergency response scenarios and help with system design. They are organized as seven chapters.Chapter1:Elaborate necessity of information needs for community emergency managers, reviewing and carding relevant researches. With these work our research and idea are presented, also the involved conceptions and our difficulties.Chapter2:Through analysis on work surroundings of community emergency response managers, get some important features of their work that ranges and mingles widely, having extensive collaboration and depending highly on dynamic and static information.Chapter3:With the theories and models of informatics, make clear and cognize information needs on the base of knowing the work of community emergency response managers. Expand the understanding of information needs from community emergency response managers into three dimensions:contents, format and channel and obtain the basic requirements of emergency response management system and information needs analysis methods. Besides providing needed contents of information, an emergency response management system should have the ability to do following things:speeding up the procedure that community emergency response managers know their information needs analogues at first and specific at last; helping community emergency response managers understanding and using information; supporting a series of behaviors of community emergency response managers. Accordingly, a single way to ask directly for information needs should be avoided in information needs methods, and the right way is to construct the connection between information needs and macro-operation in community emergency management tasks, at the same time to investigate and understand the information needs of community emergency response managers from the context.Chapter4:Introduce basic conceptions and principles on activity theory, then explain the reason why use activity theory to analyze information needs of community emergency response managers. In spite of the advantage that activity theory can concentrate various kinds of methods so that it has many merits, one of the most important reason is that this theory is helpful for researchers to think about information needs in context and make an easier communication between research on information behavior and information needs and practice of information system.Chapter5:First order basic requirements of analysis with activity theory, then describe the importance of construction of context before activity analysis and help researchers to constitute a simple framework of context with PSR model, last in this chapter, combining the fundamental understanding of information needs from community emergency response managers, scheme out whole steps of information needs identification based on activity analysis through analyzing current practical research on activity theory.Chapter6:Practice the emergency response management in the community which is Donggang street and Jiayuguan Xilu in Lanzhou city and construct context of non-conventional emergency. With the analyzed framework and identification method of emergency response information needs stated in the thesis, tracking entire emergency management work and investigating on the spot, carry out analysis on emergency information needs.Chapter7:Draw a conclusion of main results and discuss some shortages in the research and present future outlook.There are three innovation in this thesis:(1) according to using results of user research in the aspect of informatics cognition to understand information needs of community emergency response managers, explore a method of information needs for design information system.(2) Extend information from one dimension (content) to three dimensions (content, format and interaction with system). Connect information needs, specific emergency response management tasks and strategy procedure, avoiding the shortage that only consider user actions but ignore its underlying determinations in analysis of information needs.(3) Apply activity theory to analysis on information needs of community emergency response managers and construct specific framework and steps on using activity theory.This paper is supported by the Project of Humanity and Social Science Youth foundation of Ministry of Education of China "Analysis and visualization on emergency response information needs in disaster-reducing community"(10YJC630186)... |
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