Advancing Reference Information Systems on the Web

Abstract

Most existing systems of automated reference information files are microcomputer-based. The advent of the World Wide Web has created a new and rich environment for advancing these files into cyberspace. The major attractions of building a Web-based reference information system are: (a) software is virtually “free,” (b) required training is minimal, (c) systems can be accessed by a variety of platforms, and (d) reference librarians around the world are able to share their expertise. The discussion is in the context of the evolution of reference information file systems. A prototype is described to show how to construct a basic Web-based system.     

Finding Acorns in the Technical Services Arboretum: A Reference Librarian's Guide to Vendor Home Pages

Abstract

Historically reference librarians have had limited contact with the book vendors and serials agents used by their colleagues in technical services. However, most vendors now support Web sites, including information on publishing trends, price studies of books and periodicals, and access to useful databases. The proliferation of such sites offers reference librarians additional resources, particularly for questions regarding the publishing industry. An overview of the nature and scope of these sites is offered, along witH some suggested reference uses. In addition, a brief survey of some vendor home pages is presented.     

The World Wide Web

Abstract

The World Wide Web is increasingly being used by libraries as a way to extend traditional services to patrons. The Web can also be used as a tool to facilitate communications between library professionals and to deliver presentations, organize exhibits, and develop demonstration projects. The allocation of personal Web work space on a library server provides librarians with a means to experiment with using the medium and a place to publish information of interest to the library profession. This paper explores the uses of the Web to enhance communications between library professionals and addresses some of the issues associated with such uses.     

About the Web

ABSTRACT

This article reviews selected magazines and journals of interest to academic librarians that include information about the Web. Reviewed titles include library science titles, general educational titles, and popular titles found on newsstands. The titles reviewed are aimed towards two groups of librarians: those most involved with developing content (such as reference librarians and bibliographers), and those involved with Web design, development, and policy issues.     

Using the World Wide Web for Art and Humanities Reference Services

Abstract

This paper describes what the World Wide Web is and what is needed in order to access its information. It discusses the future of art and humanities reference resources and presents criteria for evaluating Web sites. A review of the literature related to “Generation X” and their information expectations was done. There is an annotated list of specific World Wide Web resources related to African Diaspora, American Poetry, Comparative Literature, Gay and Lesbian Literature, and Outsider Art. This list provides examples for evaluation and is not meant to be exhaustive.     

Using World Wide Web Softwar for Reference and Instruction

Librarians have offered reference and instruction services at the reference desk and in classrooms for many years. Now a third location, the network, is emerging as a viable place for reference and instruction. The widespread availability of software to browse, create, edit, and serve World Wide Web pages has opened exciting new opportunities for teaching librarians. With this software and the proliferation of networked personal computers in colleges and universities, it is possible to deliver reference and instruction to library users at their computers. Suggestions and guidelines for creating Web pages are offered. In the future, the Web technology may include asynchronous interactive partticipation in the teaching-learning process by students, instructors, and librarians.     

Developing Skype-Based Reference Services

ABSTRACT

Internet voice and video calling have demonstrated a dramatic rise in quality in the past several years and have quickly become communication technologies with a disruptive impact on society. Librarians, who regularly adopt such technologies in outreach and public services, should evaluate Web-calling programs as potential sources of innovative reference programming. This article describes the development of Skype video and Internet telephony pilot reference services at the Ohio University Libraries and considers the utility of Skype and VoIP in a library setting.     

A Web‐based resource model for scholarship 2.0: object reuse & exchange

Digital scholarship offers the opportunity to move beyond the limitations of traditional scholarly publication. Rather than limiting scholarly communication to text‐based static documents, the Web makes it possible for scholars to expose and share the full evidence of their research including data, images, video, and other genre of materials. These aggregations of evidence, or compound documents, can then be integrated into a linked data cloud, the basis of Scholarship 2.0—an open environment in which scholars collaborate and build new knowledge on the existing scholarship. We present Open Archives Initiative–Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI–ORE), a set of standards to identify and describe aggregations of WebResources, thereby making the Scholarship 2.0 vision possible. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Information gathering and searching approaches on the Web

The information accessible through the Internet is increasing explosively as the Web is getting more and more widespread. In this situation, the Web is indispensable information resource for both of information gathering and information searching. Though traditional information retrieval techniques have been applied to information gathering and searching in the Web, they are insufficient for this new form of information source. Fortunately some Al techniques can be straightforwardly applicable to such tasks in the Web, and many researchers are trying this approach. In this paper, we attempt to describe the current state of information gathering and searching technologies in the Web, and the application of AI techniques in the fields. Then we point out limitations of these traditional and AI approaches and introduce two aapproaches: navigation planning and a Mondou search engine for overcoming them. The navigation planning system tries to collect systematic knowledge, rather than Web pages, which are only pieces of knowledge. The Mondou search engine copes with the problems of the query expansion/modification based on the techniques of text/web mining and information visualization. Seiji Yamada, Dr. Eng.: He received the B.S., M.S. and Ph.S. degrees in control engineering and artificial intelligence from Osaka University, Osaka, Japan, in 1984, 1986 and 1989, respectively. From 1989 to 1991, he served as a Research Associate in the Department of Control Engineering at Osaka University. From 1991 to 1996, he served as a Lecturer in the Institute of Scientific and Industrial Research at Osaka University. In 1996, he joined the Department of Computational Intelligence and Systems Science at Tokyo Institute of Technology, Yokohama, Japan, as an Associate Professor. His research interests include artificial intelligence, planning, machine learning for a robotics, intelligent information retrieval in the WWW, human computer interaction, He is a member of AAAI, IEEE, JSAI, RSJ and IEICE. Hiroyuki Kawano, Dr.Eng.: He is an Associate Professor at the Department of Systems Science, Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University, Japan. He obtained his B.Eng. and M.Eng. degrees in Applied Mathematics and Physics, and his Dr.Eng. degree in Applied Systems Science from Kyoto University. His research interests are in advanced database technologies, such as data mining, data warehousing, knowledge discovery and web search engine (Mondou). He has served on the program committees of several conferences in the areas of Data Base Systems, and technical committes of advanced information systems.     

Policy Aspects of Web Page Development

Abstract

Web page creation involves many decisions beyond Hypertext Mark-up Language (HTML) coding. Developers need to consider numerous factors such as identifying the person responsible for the project, maintaining content, and establishing criteria for the evaluation and selection of resources. Other areas of consideration include identifying the target audience for the project, establishing guidelines on confidentiality and copyright issues, and coordinating a backup/disaster recovery plan. These aspects and others of Web page development are discussed. Examples are included from libraries which have loaded policy statements online as part of institutional home pages. The Uniform Resource Locators (URL's) of the library policies are listed as is a selected bibliography of publications about Web page development.     

Web Site Design Resources for the Librarian

ABSTRACT

A selective, annotated bibliography of books, journal articles, and electronic resources relating to Web site design aimed specifically at beginning library Web Managers.     

The Internet Cometh

Abstract

The coming of the Internet to the Jernigan Library, Texas A&M University-Kingsville in mid-1994 is described. An Internet team was chosen and trained. The library staff was trained first, then public sessions for faculty and staff were held. Finally the entire campus community was invited to attend Internet classes. E-mail and Gopher/Telnet were the only classes in the early sessions; later ftp, Lynx WWW, Eudora, and subject specific classes were added. Response was enthusiastic, but even requiring sign-up for classes did not solve a non-attendance problem. How to teach (in the absence of a machine or place specifically designated for instruction) also proved to be a challenge. By late 1995, Internet instruction had caught on with a number of instructors and much of the Internet instruction done by the library was professor requested. Internet instruction became incorporated in regular bibliographic instruction patterns.     

Guidelines for Creating Accessible Library Web Pages

ABSTRACT

Library Web developers can improve their Web pages and work towards accessibility by all user groups. This article describes some general accessibility guidelines to follow when creating Web pages. It discusses the recommendations of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), called the Web Accessibility Initiatives (WAI). This article focuses attention on the accessibility of Web pages to users with visual impairments, auditory impairments, and mobility impairments. Accessibility guidelines for these user groups are suggested. Another important aspect of creating accessible Web pages is to test the pages during and after development. Online products that test accessibility are discussed as well as additional test methods, such as user input.     

Searchers,Bring Your Credit Cards

ABSTRACT

Libraries will never have comprehensive collections in today's publishing and media landscape. While the ability of searchers to discover content via metadata continues to improve by leaps and bounds, retrieval is rapidly losing ground. Libraries are collecting less, interlibrary loan is less effective today than in the 20th century, and searchers are looking for things that have never been collected by libraries. Reference services need to address the direct-to-consumer download market emerging outside their traditional sphere of influence. Sometimes the best answer to a reference question is “you can buy it here.”     

A Historical Overview of Internet Reference Services for Distance Learners

SUMMARY

The advent of library services and collections on the Internet revolutionized reference services to students enrolled in distance learning programs. Prior to the Internet, reference librarians who supported distance learning programs had few methods, and many of them costly, to provide the equivalent library services advocated by the ACRL Guidelines. Through the Internet, these librarians were able to approximate the services and resources that had always been available to students who came into the library. This article describes the development of reference services on the Internet in a variety of libraries that support distance learners.     

Online Web Development Platforms Enable All Reference Staff to Work on Subject Guides

Information technology has disrupted the careers of many professionals over the past decade by changing both what work is performed and how it is performed. Technical skill set gaps among reference staff are a serious problem in libraries today. The library subject or topic research pathfinder continues to play a large supporting role in a library's reference service, yet few reference departments have a staff compliment in which each and every team member has the same Web development skill sets. Research guides are no longer static webpages with organized lists. Online Web development services like editme.com and LibGuides enable all staff to equally participate in developing webpages to support reference service, without a steep technical learning curve.     

Comparing keyword search to semantic search: a case study in solving crossword puzzles using the Google™ API

Keyword‐based search engines such as Google? index Web pages for human consumption. Sophisticated as such engines have become, surveys indicate almost 25% of Web searchers are unable to find useful results in the first set of URLs returned (Technology Review, March 2004). The lack of machine‐interpretable information on the Web limits software agents from matching human searches to desirable results. Tim Berners‐Lee, inventor of the Web, has architected the Semantic Web in which machine‐interpretable information provides an automated means to traversing the Web. A necessary cornerstone application is the search engine capable of bringing the Semantic Web together into a searchable landscape. We implemented a Semantic Web Search Engine (SWSE) that performs semantic search, providing predictable and accurate results to queries. To compare keyword search to semantic search, we constructed the Google CruciVerbalist (GCV), which solves crossword puzzles by reformulating clues into Google queries processed via the Google API. Candidate answers are extracted from query results. Integrating GCV with SWSE, we quantitatively show how semantic search improves upon keyword search. Mimicking the human brain's ability to create and traverse relationships between facts, our techniques enable Web applications to ‘think’ using semantic reasoning, opening the door to intelligent search applications that utilize the Semantic Web. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

VsLattice: A vector-based conceptual index structure for web service retrieval

With the rising adoption of web services, effective management of web services becomes a critical issue in making the paradigm of service-oriented computing more practical. In this paper, a novel structure, called Vector-based service Lattice ( VsLattice), is devised to index web services in a semantic way. Each web service is modeled as a group of Service Operation Vectors (SOVs) in the vector space, and each SOV represents an operation provided by the service. The web services, SOVs and the relationship between web services and SOVs form the Conceptual Indexing Context (CIC) of a given service collection. In the CIC, web services that provide similar operations (functions) are conceptually indexed by the same Operation Vector Concepts (OVCs). The underlying relationships among the OVCs are captured with the VsLattice, which is constructed by adopting the traditional concept lattice in a CIC. By taking advantage of the information obtained from the VsLattice, a new representation of SOV is devised. Based on this representation, a novel service retrieval model and the implemental system are developed to retrieve web services efficiently. The performance and retrieving quality of the proposed approach has been evaluated through a series of experiments.

The Organizational Politics of the World Wide Web

Abstract

The internal conflicts within an organization may hinder the successful design and set-up of a World Wide Web site. This article looks at the three most common routes that an organization may take to get on the Web, and presents guidelines for how to overcome the organizational politics that get in the way.     

Technical Report Literature on the World Wide Web

Abstract

This article reviews and analyzes the current state of Web access to technical report literature. Besides locating sites for bibliographically identifying technical reports, it also looks at the ways the full-text of technical reports are being distributed. Where appropriate, it compares the electronic bibliographic control products with their print or formerly print equivalents. Most widely available at this point are federal government reports and computer science technical reports. Information on coping with the various file formats found at the sites is also provided. URLs to the various technical report sites and to sites dealing with the software applications needed to access the reports are included.