News from OCLC

News from OCLC

OCLC and ALISE announce 2003 research grant award recipients

OCLC Research and the Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE) have awarded three grants to university researchers for 2003. The OCLC/ALISE Library and Information Science Research Grant Program awards grants of up to $15,000 to foster quality research by faculty in schools of library and information science. "The university-based research aided by these grants complements the efforts of OCLC to advance librarianship and information science", said Lorcan Dempsey, Vice President, OCLC Research.

The awards for 2003 were made to:

• Abby A. Goodrum, School of Information Studies, Syracuse University,for her study, "Image intermediation: visual resource reference services for digital libraries". Dr Goodrum's research will develop, test and evaluate procedures and mechanisms for the exchange of questions and answers that support handling image requests and the retrieval of images on the Web.

• Rebecca Green, College of Information Studies, University of Maryland, for her project, "Vocabulary alignment via basic level concepts". Preliminary research in retrieval of information suggests that concepts at a hierarchical level called the "basic level" are more likely to be shared across classifying systems than concepts at more general or more specific levels. Dr Green's project will extend and generalise previous research, propose a set of linguistic criteria for identifying basic-level concepts, and apply the basic-level concepts identified to an online lexical reference system.

• Joseph Janes, Information School, University of Washington, for his project, "The thank you study: user satisfaction with digital reference service". Dr Janes' study unobtrusively examines transcripts of digital reference e-mail interactions for which thank you messages were received from users. Factors such as speed, thoroughness, accuracy, helpfulness, clarity and instruction will be examined to determine which quality elements are most important to adult digital reference users and most likely to generate a "thank you" response. Researchers seek to bring a new understanding of user perspectives on quality to the evaluation of digital reference services.

Korea Education and Research Information Service forms netLibrary eBooks consortium

The Korea Education and Research Information Service (KERIS) has formed a consortium of over 70 universities to share access to more than 8,000 eBook titles from netLibrary. It is the first netLibrary eBooks consortium formed in Korea.

"OCLC has had the privilege of working with KERIS since 1999 to provide online cataloguing, interlibrary loan, and OCLC FirstSearch services to university students, faculty members and researchers in Korea", said Andrew H. Wang, Executive Director, OCLC Asia Pacific. "The formation of this eBooks consortium further expands the information service that KERIS provides through OCLC."

KERIS, which operates as part of the Republic of Korea Ministry of Education,is responsible for providing electronic information services in support of education and research in the country.

netLibrary, a division of OCLC, develops, hosts, maintains and preserves electronic book collections for academic, corporate, public and school libraries. Thousands of libraries worldwide are currently providing netLibrary eBooks to their users.

For further information please contact: OCLC Europe, the Middle East and Africa, 7th Floor, Tricorn House, 51-53 Hagley Road, Birmingham B16 8TP, UK. Tel: +44(0) 121 456 4656; Fax: +44(0) 121 456 4680; E-mail: Europe@oclc.org; URL: www.oclc.org