Group items tagged

"This article updates the findings from a study by Hal Kirkwood in 2000 of the organization and content of academic business library Web sites. The authors examined 75 sites, focusing on five general aspects of the sites: organization, terminology, instructional elements, integration of resources across formats, and annotations. Results of the study show that business library Websites have dramatically improved in the 7 years since the original study. "

"This paper details a way to extend classic information architecture for web-based applications. The goal is to enhance traditional user experiences, mainly based on navigation or search, to new ones (also relevant for stakeholders' requirements). "

"There are several kinds of conceptual models for information seeking and retrieval (IS&R). The paper suggests that some models are of a summary type and others more analytic. Such models serve different research purposes. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the functions of conceptual models in scientific research, in IS&R research in particular. What kind of models are there and in what ways may they help the investigators? What kinds of models are needed for various purposes? In particular, we are looking for models that provide guidance in setting research questions, and formulation of hypotheses. As a example, the paper discusses [at length] one analytical model of task-based information seeking and its contribution to the development of the research area."

"Traditional on-line search services such as Dialog, DataStar and Lexis provide a wide range of search features (boolean and proximity operators, truncation, etc). This paper discusses the use of these features for effective searching, and argues that these features are required, regardless of advances in search engine technology. The literature on on-line searching is reviewed, identifying features that searchers find desirable for effective searching. A selective survey of current digital libraries available on the Web was undertaken, identifying which search features are present. The survey indicates that current digital libraries do not implement a wide range of search features. For instance: under half of the examples included controlled vocabulary, under half had proximity searching, only one enabled browsing of term indexes, and none of the digital libraries enable searchers to refine an initial search. Suggestions are made for enhancing the search effectiveness of digital libraries; for instance, by providing a full range of search operators, enabling browsing of search terms, enhancement of records with controlled vocabulary, enabling the refining of initial searches, etc."

"In this paper we propose a multi-agent Selective Dissemination of Information service to improve the research community's access to digital library resources. The service also provides a new recommendation approach to satisfy researchers' specific information requirements." "Semantic Web technologies and fuzzy linguistic modelling provide the means to develop value-added services for digital libraries, which improve users' access to resources of interest to them. Furthermore, the recommendation approach here proposed allows researchers to satisfy specific information needs not covered by traditional recommender systems."

"The goal of this study is to expand our understanding of the relationships between selected tasks, cognitive abilities and search result interfaces. The underlying objective is to understand how to select search results presentation for tasks and user contexts"

"Les interfaces graphiques de recherche relèvent presque toutes d'un modèle unique et primaire : un champ de saisie uniligne et un bouton permettant de valider la requête saisie dans le champ. Face à la diversité des individus et de leurs besoins en informations, de nombreuses techniques de visualisation et d'interaction innovantes ont émergés ces dix dernières années. Pourtant ces innovations sont rarement utilisées et le but de cet article est de faire le point sur l'état de l'art des techniques de visualisation et d'interaction qui peuvent être pertinentes pour la recherche d'information."

"The Web puzzle of online information resources often hinders end-users from effective and efficient access to these resources. Clustering resources into appropriate subject-based groupings may help alleviate these difficulties, but will it work with heterogeneous material? The University of Michigan and the University of California Irvine joined forces to test automatically enhancing metadata records using the Topic Modeling algorithm on the varied OAIster corpus. We created labels for the resulting clusters of metadata records, matched the clusters to an in-house classification system, and developed a prototype that would showcase methods for search and retrieval using the enhanced records. Results indicated that while the algorithm was somewhat time-intensive to run and using a local classification scheme had its drawbacks, precise clustering of records was achieved and the prototype interface proved that faceted classification could be powerful in helping end-users find resources. "

"Many libraries are now designing and implementing their own tools to meet users' needs for search and data discovery. The aim of this study is to share the experiences of the HAM-TMC Library, one of the largest US medical libraries, in creating and implementing such a tool. Many libraries accept federated search and other technologies directly from their library management system vendors as the simplest way to proceed with implementing new technologies. The HAM-TMC Library recognized that its particular information environment required learning the "problem space" thoroughly before investigating available options. As a result, the new tool the Library is providing is much more likely to meet specific user information needs."

"This paper aims to discuss whether there is difference between pragmatic and scholarly approaches to data gathering in libraries."

"The purpose of this paper is to present the implementation of LibraryThing for Libraries LTFL in an academic library and analysis of usage of LTFL data and their potential for resource discovery in the catalog. Design/methodology/approach - The paper reviews the literature on social tagging and incorporation of third-party user-generated metadata into the library catalog. It provides an assessment based on the analysis of total absolute usage figures and frequency of use of LTFL data. Findings - Based on the data available, usage of LTFL data in the catalog is low, but several possible contributing factors are identified."

"Many Web 2.0 services (including Library 2.0 catalogs) make use of folksonomies. The purpose of this paper is to cut off all tags in the long tail of a document-specific tag distribution. The remaining tags at the beginning of a tag distribution are considered power tags and form a new, additional search option in information retrieval systems. In a theoretical approach the paper discusses document-specific tag distributions (power law and inverse-logistic shape), the development of such distributions (Yule-Simon process and shuffling theory) and introduces search tags (besides the well-known index tags) as a possibility for generating tag distributions."

"This editorial aims to introduce a special issue of Library Hi Tech on "Virtual research environments: issues and opportunities for librarians". It defines the concept of the virtual research environment (VRE), describes its relationship both to the virtual learning environment and to Web 2.0, and proposes that librarians play a central role in VRE development and use. "