Group items tagged

The goal of the Digital Reference Electronic Warehouse Project (DREW) is to create a large database of reference transactions so that researchers might better understand the process and then create tools for measurement and evaluation that managers of reference services could employ.

The full-service network (FSN) is a telecommunications infrastructure capable of providing all of today's known telecommunications applications as well as laying the foundation for future applications.

. This tutorial reviews the FSN as deployed in a rural setting.

Our profession has been talking a lot lately about centralization of cataloging efforts, digital library efforts, and even IT services. In retrospect, the conversation about centralized reference services was a bit premature, but a new distributed—but as yet unmanaged—infrastructure seems to be emerging. (Perhaps a new cottage industry opportunity?)

In January 2007, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) announced its second multi–year technology grant program for America’s public libraries. The purpose of Phase II, Keeping communities connected: The next step is to help public libraries sustain the public access computing infrastructure laid down during Phase I. Now, as then, the goal of the program is to bridge the digital divide. But it is a digital divide as defined by Bill Gates and not the public library community. Situating Gates’ philanthropy within a critical policy frame, this paper considers two alternatives to Gates’ problem definition of the digital divide, and how knowledge of these might benefit those communities served by public access computing (PAC) services as found in public libraries. The two specific alternatives considered come from the Free Software Foundation (FSF), and Community Informatics (CI). Significantly, both social movements promote the potential of free and open software as an important part of any solution. Finally, the public library literature is reviewed for patterns in the community’s use of FOSS, and the argument is made for its use in the delivery of PAC services.

 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.