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If the point of reference service is to help people find the information resources they want or need, then the technological environment should help to dictate what a service should look like.

ibraries will need to provide a mix of services via a range of methods:

It would make more sense to play to our strengths: concerns about evaluation and quality of information sources, sophisticated tools and techniques for searching, understanding the nature of users, their communities, their needs and situations, compiling and organizing and packaging information resources for their use, helping them to understand how to help themselves and how to use and evaluate information. These, the goals and motivations for reference librarians for over a century, would lead us to a school of reference librarianship less focused on the answers to specific questions and more on providing assistance and support to people with more detailed, more demanding, more comprehensive information needs of all kinds, from the personal to the professional, from the mundane to the cosmic.

 Despite its explosive growth over the last decade, the Web remains essentially a tool to allow humans to access information. The next generation of the Web, dubbed the ‘Semantic Web’, will extend the Web’s capability through the increased availability machine-processable information. These machine-processable descriptions of Web information resources are called meta-data and are associated with ontologies, or conceptualisations of the domain of application. Meta-data and associated ontologies then allows more intelligent software systems to be written, automating the analysis and exploitation of Web-based information.This paper describes how knowledge management can be improved through the adoption of Semantic Web technology. To realise this, a number of different technologies need to be brought together. Their fusion provides the infrastructure which makes semantic knowledge management possible. Specifically, the paper discusses the use of knowledge discovery and human language technology to (semi-)automatically derive the required ontologies and meta-data, along with a methodology to support this process. We describe techniques for management and controlled evolution of ontologies and a set of semantic knowledge access tools for enhanced information access. Finally, a set of application scenarios for the technology are sketched.

To be faced with a document collection and not to be able to find the information you know exists somewhere within it is a problem as old as the existence of document collections. Information Architecture is the discipline dealing with the modern version of this problem: how to organize web sites so that users actually can find what they are looking for. Information architects have so far applied known and well-tried tools from library science to solve this problem, and now topic maps are sailing up as another potential tool for information architects. This raises the question of how topic maps compare with the traditional solutions, and that is the question this paper attempts to address. The paper argues that topic maps go beyond the traditional solutions in the sense that it provides a framework within which they can be represented as they are, but also extended in ways which significantly improve information retrieval.

If we believe all the hype and rhetoric then we are essentially Information & Knowledge Professionals [1]in an Information & Knowledge Society[2] with an Information & Knowledge Economy [3]during the formative years of the Information & Knowledge age[4].

This manifesto is intended to propose that we do just that; that as students, faculty and staff we transform SLIS and create the kind of utopian digital learning organization that we all supposedly advocate. Let us apply the Web 2.0, Library 2.0, social networking, knowledge management principles that we are all in training to implement in society at large. Let us engage in the manifestation of a vision we all allegedly maintain:

This think piece tells why the online library catalog fell from grace and why new directions pertaining to cataloging simplification and primary sources will not attract people back to the online catalog. It proposes an alternative direction that has greater likelihood of regaining the online catalog's lofty status and longtime users. Such a direction will require paradigm shifts in library cataloging and in the design and development of online library catalogs that heed catalog users' longtime demands for improvements to the searching experience. Our failure to respond accordingly may permanently exile scholarly and scientific information to a netherworld where no one searches while less reliable, accurate, and objective sources of information thrive in a paradise where people prefer to search for information.

FaceTag is a working prototype of a semantic collaborative tagging tool conceived for bookmarking information architecture resources. It aims to show how the flat keywords space of tags can be effectively mixed with a richer faceted classification scheme to improve the system information architecture.

Our Mission: To successfully establish the public library as the hub of the community in which collaborative information sharing by community members and library patrons enriches and informs their library experience, their cultural and recreational life, and their community involvement.

Art is whatever the artist wishes to call to our attention. Art is an act of attention the artist wishes to invoke in the beholder.

in an information economy, the real scarce commodity will always be human attention and that attracting that attention will be the necessary precondition of social change.

A blog about information

The American Library Association and the Information Use Management and Policy Institute (http://www.ii.fsu.edu) in the College of Information at Florida State University, with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is surveying a national sample of public libraries regarding their Internet connectivity and computing access resources.

he data from the enhanced study will help you to identify the impacts of your library's public computer and Internet access on the community that your library serves.

Several major research libraries have rebuffed offers from Google and Microsoft to scan their books into computer databases, saying they are put off by restrictions these companies want to place on the new digital collections.

Some information observers have suggested that Web 2.0's rise has been due to software applications, while it is becoming increasingly obvious to futurists that the Semantic Web will be defined by services. How those services will be developed and leveraged to bring order to the Web is central to our discussion of the Semantic Web. We discuss the broad implications of these issues through a lens of our work as library professionals, and the time we spend blogging about information on the Web, and its evolution.

The Resource Description Framework (RDF), a method of connecting URIs in a meaningful way, is the key to making the Semantic Web possible.

“What set the MarkLogic Server apart for us was the combination of its powerful ability to store, query, search, and render XML-based content with its wonderfully simple systems administration.

Contemporary libraries face the challenge of competing with major digitization projects outside the world of traditional librarianship. “We recognize that the best way to compete under these constantly changing conditions is to leverage our specialized knowledge of the content,

Mark Logic Corporation is the provider of the industry’s leading XML content server. Mark Logic works with providers of information products to accelerate new product creation, deliver products through multiple channels, integrate content from different sources, repurpose content into multiple products, build custom publishing systems, and mine content to find previously undiscovered information.

While face to face interaction is especially rich in ways to establish connection (touching, eating together, making eye contact, sharing common space, informal chitchat), people also establish connection through mediated communication. Blogs, wikis, instant messaging, email, chat, newsgroups, listservs, websites, and games are especially interesting forms of human communication that establish and maintain fields of connection as well as allow for the exchange of substantive information. M

Introduction. It is argued that the actual elements of typical browsing episodes have not been well captured by common approaches to the concept to date. Method. Empirical research results reported by previous researchers are presented and closely analysed. Analysis. Based on the issues raised by the above research review, the components of browsing are closely analysed and developed. Browsing is seen to consist of a series of four steps, iterated indefinitely until the end of a browsing episode: 1) glimpsing a field of vision, 2) selecting or sampling a physical or informational object within the field of vision, 3) examining the object, 4) acquiring the object (conceptually and/or physically) or abandoning it. Not all of these elements need be present in every browsing episode, though multiple glimpses are seen to be the minimum to constitute the act. Results. This concept of browsing is then shown to have persuasive support in the psychological and anthropological literature, where research on visual search, curiosity and exploratory behaviour all find harmony with this perspective. Conclusions. It is argued that this conception of browsing is closer to real human behaviour than other approaches. Implications for better information system design are developed.