Group items tagged

"Summon occasionally fails to successfully link to articles in EBSCO databases. Instead, the full-text article link drops users at a more general EBSCO search screen and it's not clear how to get to the actual article. (...) Some vendors do not provide article-level linking. * Summon will provide a direct link to articles available through the NCSU Libraries. Sometimes, however, Summon only provides a link to a Journal, or the article link fails to turn up the full text. This is due to a lack of article-level links available through some publishers. "

"Cette application web permet aux internautes d'accéder à des articles présentés sous la forme de pages web (vignettes) et de les feuilleter (flip) virtuellement. Les articles sont classés par catégories : technologies, économie, politique, divertissement, articles les plus populaires, etc. L'internaute peut passer très rapidement d'un article à l'autre en pointant sur les flèches à droite ou à gauche des séries de vignettes. Lorsque l'internaute double-clique sur un article/vignette, il accède directement au site web du journal concerné. Néanmoins, en un seul clic, la lecture depuis la vignette choisie est aisée."

"Discovery services have begun to spring up. This article is my attempt to catalog and characterize them. Consider this article to be an introduction that sets the stage for future analysis articles."

This article will explore the space between Summon's out-of-the-box user interface and full developer API, providing practical advice on tweaking configuration information and catalog exports to take full advantage of Summon's indexing and faceting features. The article then describes the creation of OSUL's home-grown open source availability service which replaced and enhanced the availability information that Summon would normally pull directly from the catalog.

"We recently had a visit from Serials Solutions staff to talk about Summon. We are currently running an Endeca based catalog we call Mango for 11 State University Libraries. We were told that there are a couple of options for implementing Summon, one is to switch to their interface and use it as your whole catalog, with articles metadata integrated into your search results. The other option is to use their API to integrate the article searching into your next-gen catalog."

"The Wayne State Library System launched its library mapping application in February 2010, designed to help locate materials in the five WSU libraries. The system works within the catalog to show the location of materials, as well as provides a web form for use at the reference desk. Developed using PHP and MySQL, it requires only minimal effort to update using a unique call number overlay mechanism. In addition to mapping shelved materials, the system provides information for any of the over three hundred collections held by the WSU Libraries. Patrons can do more than just locate a book on a shelf: they can learn where to locate reserve items, how to access closed collections, or get driving maps to extension center libraries. The article includes a discussion of the technology reviewed and chosen during development, an overview of the system architecture, and lessons learned during development."

"This article discusses ways of semantic processing in a search engine. Major search engines have one main type of result - a list of links to matching Web sources. There are many enhancements on top of it, but the core premise remains the same: a search result consists of a set of individual pages. The user is expected to drill down into individual sources. An alternative type of result is suggested: an essay compiled of a number of relevant and ordered sentences. The search engine in this case parses Web sources, understands their semantics, and creates an overall summary of the topic. The idea is to save the user time by providing a quick overview of the topic. A Web sentiment analysis application based on semantic analysis is introduced."

"But commercial vendors, smelling a new market, are stepping in. Serials Solutions, a subsidiary of ProQuest, released a software product in July called Summon. The company has been negotiating deals with publishers and content providers to create a searchable index of their content. It's like Google, except what Summon provides is an index of the "deep Web" of paid content. So now university libraries that pay for a subscription to Summon can let their users search their licensed content as well as locally owned stuff, together. Summon has 17 customers so far, including Arizona State University and Dartmouth College. The catch? It can be expensive. Andrew S. Nagy, senior discovery-services engineer at Serials Solutions, wouldn't say how expensive. But the cost of a subscription can run into the tens of thousands, said one university administrator who was not authorized to discuss price and thus wanted to remain anonymous. Summon also does not have permission to display the full text of articles."

"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. "

"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."

"It is hard to predict what the major challenge in search will be 100 years from now. The challenge may not even be related to information retrieval itself but could be the result of shortages of electricity, network disruptions due to insurgencies, information manipulation or access denial by an uncontrolled computer-based artificial intelligence (as imagined in the science fiction movie The Terminator). Of course, we could simply extrapolate the current ongoing trends, which we know do have an effect on information storage and retrieval, and might hope this gives an indication of some of the challenges that may affect finding and understanding information in a long-term perspective. In this article our focus will be on challenges that can be traced back to Time. Search is a two-sided issue: On one side, once data has been generated it has to be stored somewhere (on volatile or non-volatile media) and this stored data must somehow be accessible to a search or indexing engine; on the other side are the processes of search, retrieval and analysis of the data."

"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. "

Project Lefty is a search system that, at a minimum, adds a layer on top of traditional federated search tools that will make the wait for results more worthwhile for researchers. At best, Project Lefty improves search queries and relevance rankings for web-scale discovery tools to make the results themselves more relevant to the researcher's specific query. Project Lefty has three components, each directed at a particular right.

"As part of an effort to improve user interactions with authority data in its online catalog, the UNC Chapel Hill Libraries have developed and implemented a system for providing real-time query suggestions from records found within its catalog. The system takes user input as it is typed to predict likely title, author, or subject matches in a manner functionally similar to the systems found on commercial websites such as google.com or amazon.com. This paper discusses the technologies, decisions and methodologies that went into the implementation of this feature, as well as analysis of its impact on user search behaviors."

"Data visualization has finally gone viral, says guest columnist UC Berkeley e-learning librarian Char Booth, and we have Twitter to thank"