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ITI Bloggers March 24th, 2006

Taxonomies occupied a double slot ("Taxonomy Tales") on the program on Thursday afternoon. Jennifer Evert, Taxonomy Product Manager at LexisNexis and Marjorie Hlava, President of Access Innovations each discussed their work on taxonomies.

LexisNexis

At LexisNexis, taxonomies and indexing are seen as a key strategic focus to help users find answers quickly and efficiently. They are used to analyze answer sets and suggest search terms, classify sources, and launch new searches. The power of taxonomies lies in their ability to manage large amounts of information, provide a common terminology, create metadata to enhance the search process, and help users find answers to make more informed decisions.

The LexisNexis taxonomy has more than 3500 subject or industry terms, 330,000 company names, and 900 geographic area terms. Many of the terms were created using rules developed by the indexers. The rules base includes rules for weighting, location, frequency, and variety of terms. Expert indexers research, test, and maintain the rule sets, and the entire archive is re-indexed quarterly. Automated indexing helps develop terms, but human editorial expertise is still needed. The coverage is currently being extended from English to other languages; German and French are the first non-English languages to be included. LexisNexis has developed parallel interfaces: one for sophisticated searchers that takes full advantage of the taxonomies and thesaurus metadata to build queries, and one for casual users that provides simple search aids and analysis of answer sets to help them fine-tune their searches.

Access Innovations

Access maintains the thesaurus of the National Information Center for Educational Media (NICEM). Developers have access to a tool that provides them with various views of the thesaurus: alphabetic, hierarchical, and term records. Extensive use is made of machine-aided indexing (MAI), which suggests terms, tracks suggestions and editor’s choices, and enables rule changes. However, MAI is only an aid and prompt; the editor makes the decisions about term inclusion. The editors can also write rules based on term selection criteria.

Requirements for indexing tools include: suggesting terms that are valid, correctly formatted, and conceptually appropriate, but not suggesting terms not meeting these criteria. Good indexing tools will lead to faster and more consistent production by providing memory prompts for forgotten terms, indexing all relevant concepts deeply and specifically, and integrating the thesaurus with the database management system.

Searchers find info 50% faster using browsable categories instead of list returned from a full text search. They prefer browsable category search terms. Integrated thesaurus tools provide cross-checks, validation, feedback, error prevention, interconnection, cooperation, coordination, and seamless integration with the database.

With all these benefits, there is little wonder why thesauri and taxonomies are such popular subjects today.

Don Hawkins
Columnist, Information Today

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ITI Bloggers March 24th, 2006

How does a talk on plagiarism fit into a conference on computers in libraries? Because the Internet makes it easier than ever to plagiarize, plagiarism has become a significant problem in academic institutions. So yes, this talk was relevant. A panel from Eastern Connecticut State University (ECSU) reviewed what they have done to educate their students and faculty on the plagiarism problem.

The key issues in plagiarism are prevention, detection, policy, and enforcement. At ECSU, a Web site and a blog have been developed to present guidelines for both students and faculty. Students are shown the links the faculty can use to detect plagiarism (one of which is TurnItIn), so they know what the faculty can see. This site has done much to dispel the “Them” vs. “Us” mentality.

The library staff has taken a lead in this area and is active in promoting information literacy as a significant way to deter plagiarism. An unexpected fallout from their educational efforts was a high interest in the subject by the faculty, which has resulted in the library being invited to faculty meetings and even receiving invitations from other institutions to come and present their course.

Don Hawkins
Columnist, Information Today

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ITI Bloggers March 24th, 2006

Lee Rainie, Director, Pew Internet & American Life Project, keynoted the third day of CIL 2006. More of my notes on this talk.

As we move through our last day of sessions at the CIL 2006 conference, we are also looking ahead to next year’s event, CIL 2007 which will be held at the Crystal City Hyatt, April 16-18. Mark your calendars!
Jane Dysart, Program Chair, CIL 2006
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ITI Bloggers March 24th, 2006

These two attendees were immersed in thought before one of the keynote sessions.

Making choices about what to attend is tough with four sessions, plus CyberTours in the exhibit hall. Today’s the last day of Computers in Libraries 2006, with sessions like “Is Google the Next Dialog” (A305) and “The Future of the Net: Croquet” (D305), plus two other tracks, running all the way until 5:00. And don’t forget the post-conference workshops tomorrow morning and afternoon if you’re looking for more!

Nancy Garman
ITI, ngarman {at} infotoday(.)com
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ITI Bloggers March 23rd, 2006

“We had some state funds but they’ve sort of … gone away.”

A sad statement from Sheryl Mase as she discussed work on a statewide resource-sharing project in Michigan.

We feel your pain, Sheryl!

Kathy Dempsey, CIL magazine Editor in Chief

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ITI Bloggers March 23rd, 2006

Digital projects of all kinds were featured in this morning’s sessions. At 11:30 there were 3 sessions all tackling aspects of the digital world. Over in the content management track, one speaker talked about digital project development at University of Nevada, Reno using CONTENTdm. In the track on planning in and for a digital world, speakers from the National Archives, GPO, and LC talked about their approaches to digital preservation and planning for the future. I popped into the digital libraries track to hear about some digitization issues and challenges.

According to ebrary’s CEO Christopher Warnock, libraries need to consider the following questions when considering a digitization project or product: does it support the library’s brand, does it extend its services, does it enable the library to integrate its physical and electronic resources, and can it integrate multiple discrete databases of information.

Ebrary had announced a partnership with Kirtas Technologies at ALA midwinter to offer turn-key digitization to libraries. Kirtas has an automatic book scanner. The CEO of the company, Lofti Belkhir, said that digitization is just the first step. It’s not the end of books as we know them, but rather it’s an enhancement for books. It can enable print-on-demand, even for single copies, and many other possibilities. He talked of 5 critical components to the success of digitization projects: content, standards, hardware, software, and workflow. The Kirtas scanner can handle 2,400 pages per hour scan speed—sounds pretty impressive to me, though I don’t know how this compares to other options.

Lloyd Davidson of Northwestern University said that changes that have occurred in STM libraries—no print journals, few print reference works, online book access—are just a bit ahead of what other academic libraries will experience in our digital world. The cost of STM journals has provided funds to publishers for further digitization. Many changes have occurred including the closing of many STM libraries and integration of staff and remaining collections into the main university libraries. His outlook was fairly bleak and provided a rather stark contrast to the upbeat ebrary presentation. Librarians have had to become advocates for library services, especially for government libraries, such as the EPA. Librarians have been in the forefront of the move for open access to information. And provisions of the Patriot Act continue to challenge anonymity for library services.

I had a meeting and therefore missed what I’m sure was an interesting presentation from Stephen Abram of SirsiDynix. Guess I’ll just have to check the audio CD. If you were able to hear him and have a comment to add, please do so.

Paula J. Hane
News Bureau Chief
Information Today, Inc.
www.infotoday.com
phane {at} infotoday(.)com

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ITI Bloggers March 23rd, 2006

OCLC’s Lorcan Dempsey talked about exploiting the value of structured metadata with examples from the mother of all structured metadata, the holdings in (no surprise here) WorldCat and tied the presentation to Tim O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 characteristics:

Flat applications
Rich interaction
Data is the new functionality
Participation

He showed examples of lightweight service composition, by which he means using data implicit in WorldCat to suggest a probably audience level for individual book titles. Based upon numeric scores assigned to the type of library holding a book, an audience level is assigned. Using a Greasemonkey script, these levels can be embedded in an Amazon page to suggest the audience level. The higher the score, the more likely the book is to be held in an academic, research library. Low numbers correspond to school libraries.

His next example was LiveSearch, a prototype that uses AJAX. The whole idea here is give searches quick results that change instantaneously as each letter is typed into the search box. You can narrow by Dewey attributes. It’s a satisficing engine that gives more interesting results. The Phoenix Public Library is using this. Results are FRBR-inspired. Class numbers are automatically extracted and show on the left side of the screen, labeled “top categories.” Suggested book titles display under the label “items from social groups.” It’s a way of doing interesting things with underlying data. It uses existing structure to create a better user experience. It’s rich interaction in the browser.

Now it’s on to FictionFinder, an interface to be released in April that supports searching and browsing of fiction materials cataloged WorldCat, using a faceted browser. There’s an alphabetical browse display in the redesined interface. You get a list of works ordered by holdings. This is a popularity ranking, very similar to Google’s Page Rank. You can narrow your list by format and languages. You can sort by libraries, date, and there’s a link to Find in a Library service. Like the other things Dempsey has shown, FictionFinder makes existing data work harder and gets users to hidden data.

The idea is to build higher level services on top of existing data. Does the pattern of holdings say something about the book?

To my mind, this is some interesting use of existing data. It shows how much OCLC is paying attention to next generation technologies and repurposing data they already have.

Marydee Ojala
Editor, ONLINE: The Leading Magazine for Information Professionals

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ITI Bloggers March 23rd, 2006

The second day of CIL opened with a keynote on “Planning for a Handheld Mobile Future” by Megan Fox, Web & Electronic Resources Librarian at Simmons College. It’s clear that an entirely new way of accessing information and providing library services is about to burst upon us. The mobile future has become an absolute necessity. There are 1.4 billion cell phone users in the world today, 109 million of whom are in the US. Almost all of today’s phones are capable of Web surfing, taking pictures, instant messaging, etc., and there are many other types of mobile devices in use as well: PDAs, iPods, GPS devices, tablet PCs, ultra-PCs, gaming devices, and smart phones.

Increasingly, smart phones are appearing in libraries; some of the new ones incorporate calendars, address books, Web browsing, full keyboards (some of them slide out from the phone, keeping the overall size of the device small), and a mobile version of Windows. Electronic book readers are making a comeback with new super-reflective screens and easy to read typefaces. Microsoft is about to introduce a new ultra-mobile PC with a 7 inch display, USB ports, Wi-Fi capability, and a touch pad interface with larger buttons to accommodate fingers (no more need for a stylus).

Although the leading uses of Web sites for mobile devices are weather, e-mail, searching, maps, and news, some traditional library content (dictionaries, encyclopedias, reference titles, etc.) is now being made available for mobile devices. Database providers such as Ovid, LexisNexis, Westlaw, PubMed, and Factiva have developed interfaces for mobile devices, particularly in the medical and legal areas. Typically, a mobile device user wants answers, not searching or lists of links. Devices are coming that will sense a user’s location and present them with customized weather information. The well known question-answering service Answers.com has a mobile device interface with a special section for librarians.

Short Message Service (SMS, also known as text messaging) is used by 62% of mobile device owners, and SMS information services are already available. Yahoo! Go sends text messages giving gas price information or traffic reports to phones, and AskMeNow provides answers to questions. SMS is extremely popular in Europe and Asia, and it’s clear that the US market is ripe for development.

Many library services are being developed for mobile devices; examples are reference services sent to SMS users, notifications when held materials have arrived at the library, news feeds, live audio content, audiobooks, or podcast feeds to database resources. Mobile video is also poised to explode. Examples of interfaces being developed for mobile devices include shopping services (i.e. Froogle), sporting event results, and the ability to purchase movie tickets using a mobile phone. Perhaps in the future, we will be able to take a picture of a book cover using a mobile phone, send it to a library catalog and have a reserve automatically placed.

It is clear that mobile devices are making a significant mark on all areas of the information society, and Fox’s presentation was a good overview of them. For a look at her slides (which have pictures of a wide variety of devices), click here.

Don Hawkins
Columnist, Information Today

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ITI Bloggers March 23rd, 2006

Gaming in Libraries?? Does that mean gambling? Or is it playing video games? When I saw the title of Mark Puterbaugh’s talk (he’s Information Services Librarian at Eastern University, St. Davids, PA), I got really curious. Does Eastern University have a casino in its library? No, it doesn’t, but it’s using some really cool video game technology from ActiveWorlds, a virtual reality platform provider, to develop library services. Eastern has used the ActiveWorlds service to build not only a virtual library tour, but also a Virtual Bibliographic Instruction (VBI) module in its “VBI World”. For example, you can click on a virtual bookcase and get a link to online resources. VBI World is still in active development; future features will incorporate “bots” to give directions, links to subject guides, and perhaps even virtual reference. Multimedia will be used to provide real-time virtual reference and chat services.

Developing a virtual world takes a significant amount of time; although you can build a building in an hour, you must then decide what content to place in it and how you want users to navigate through your world.

Students love VBI World. They see it as a game and a place where they can come and socialize, and it creates a sense of community. They can also remain anonymous, so they are freer to ask “dumb” questions or those on sensitive subjects.

The use of game technology is definitely something to watch because it has significant implications for libraries. I was extremely fascinated and impressed with the implementation that Eastern University has created. (Click here for further information.)

Don Hawkins
Columnist, Information Today

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ITI Bloggers March 23rd, 2006

Blogging has become really popular. But of course, you knew that—you’re reading one! A session yesterday on “Weblogs as Communication and Collaboration Tools” explored some interesting and different uses for blogs. For example, Christina Pikas (she has a blog called Christina’s LIS Rant) at a the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory set up a blog on the lab’s intranet. They needed a newsletter so that researchers could keep abreast of what each other was doing, but the intranet portal design was too inflexible for this. Also the lab’s server and technical support person were going away. Christina found some space on another server and set up a blog. It works well. Interestingly, posters don’t receive comments on their blog postings, but they receive e-mails, phone calls, and in-person communications for comments. Since the blog is behind the firewall, they don’t have to worry about spam. Christina’s recommendations:
• Try to get a stable host for your blog.
• Don’t assume users and even information technology staff know about or understand anything about blogs.
• Backup and consider ways to export or import content.
• Provide lots of contact information.
• Get the blog advertised on the intranet pages that users visit often.

Susan Klopper at Emory University mentioned an article in the Chicago Tribune suggesting that blogging may have peaked. However, in the academic community, blogs are all the rage because they are current and proactive. She uses a blog as a knowledge management tool for library staff to facilitate discussions and share knowledge.

Clara Hudson at the library of the University of Scranton uses a blog to facilitate communication among members of a community. She said that blogging requires marketing, and people must be trained to use it. Blogs are also used at her institution for classroom instruction and have the advantage that students can communicate outside the classroom with each other and the instructor even after the class has finished. The instructors like blogs because they don’t have to prepare handouts for the students.

So has blog usage peaked, as the Chicago Tribune article indicated? I don’t think so—on the contrary, from this session, it seems like their usage is growing, and new innovative uses for them continue to be found.

Don Hawkins
Columnist, Information Today

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