Guide to the professional literature
This column is designed to alert readers to pertinent wider journal literature on digital information and research.
Equilateral triangle paradigm: a mathematical interpretation of the theory of tertiary sources on the world wide web
Alimohammadi, D., in Library Philosophy and Practice, Vol. 8 No. 2006www.webpages.uidaho.edu/~mbolin/alimohammadi.htm
Information science concepts can be enhanced by mathematical approaches. A mathematical interpretation of the theory of tertiary sources on the web was developed, using figure-oriented and formula-based approaches. The most ideal form of the triangle of information resources is equilateral, with the sides representing primary, secondary, and tertiary sources of information on the web.
Why OpenURL?
Apps, A., and MacIntyre, R., in D-Lib Magazine, Vol. 12 No. 5, 2006http://dlib/may06/apps/05apps.html
The improvement of access to scholarly literature caused by electronic journal publishing quickly led to the wish for seamless linking to referenced articles. This article looks at the evolution of linking technologies with a particular focus on OpenURL. The implications for stakeholders in the supply chain are explored, including publishers, intermediaries, libraries and readers. The benefits, expectations and business drivers are examined. The article also highlights some existing and potential future uses, including increased user-empowerment and possibilities beyond referencing traditional bibliographic material.
Using digital libraries to provide online access to social science journals in Latin America
Babini, D. and Smart, S., in Learned Publishing, Vol. 19 No. 2, 2006, pp. 107-113http://alpsp.publisher.ingentaconnect.com/content/alpsp/lp/2006/00000019/00000002/art00004
There is a strong history of social science research within Latin America,but its visibility (both within and outside the region) has been low for reasons of language and print distribution. The introduction of the Internet and online publication makes this information potentially more visible to the global research community, and within Latin America several organizations have undertaken to exploit this opportunity. The approaches taken show how collaboration between countries, and particularly between librarians and publishers, can provide innovative solutions. The CLACSO project uses a digital library model as a publishing platform for its member journals and this has provided a successful – and hopefully sustainable – model.
Evolution, continuity, and disappearance of documents on a specific topic on the web: a longitudinal study of “informetrics”
Bar-Ilan, J., and Peritz, B.C., in Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Vol. 55 No. 11, 2006, pp. 980-990www.asis.org/Publications/JASIS/vol55n11.html
Bar-Ilan and Peritz searched for web pages on informetrics in 1998, 1999,2002, and 2003, in order to study the growth of the web literature on this topic, as well as its tendencies toward item modification, disappearance, and resurfacing. The original search was carried out on the six largest search engines in 1998 and a union list of 886 URLs was searched and the results examined. In 1999 1,297 were found by the search and these did not include all of the previous results. However, a direct search of the missing URLs located 219 relevant pages missed by the 1999 engine search. In the 2002 and 2003 searches a new set of top five search engines was used, and additional formats beyond html and txt began to appear. In 2002, 3,746 traditional pages appeared with 329 other formats and in 2003, 4,389 traditional pages and 766 in other formats. In the five and a half year period the topic grew six fold while the web grew about ten fold. Of the 5,034 pages that satisfied the search through 2002 only 3,144 were available in 2003. Not only did 40 percent disappear but also about half the remaining were modified.
In Google we trust?
Bilder, G.W., in Journal of Electronic Publishing, Vol. 9 No. 1, 2006www.hti.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=jep;cc=jep;rgn=main;view=text;idno=3336451.0009.101
Trust, authority, and reputation are central to scholarly publishing, but the trust model of the internet is almost antithetical to the trust model of academia. Publishers have been so preoccupied with the brute mechanics of moving content to the online world that they have virtually ignored the challenge that the internet trust model poses to the scholarly publisher. Publishers can learn much about approaches to handling internet trust from the actions of major online players outside the publishing industry. Publishers should also benefit from watching the trust models that are being experimented with in the nascent realm of social software applications. Publishers once led the way in establishing the apparatus of trust during the transition from manuscript to print culture in early modern Europe. Ultimately, publishers should again take the lead in helping to establish new mechanisms of trust in what could reasonably be described as “the early modern internet”.
The new mobile scholar and the effective use of information and communication technology
Bills, D.B. et al., in First Monday, Vol. 11 No. 4, 2006www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue11_4/bills/
This article looks at how mobile ICTs can improve the work of social scientists by freeing them to move about with ready access to large datasets. The authors find that a substantial percentage of social scientists lack the skills needed to take maximum advantage of the access technologies at their disposal. Interoperability is also a barrier to the formation of effective work habits. They argue that in order to reach the full potential of ICT applications in the social sciences, a seamless web of interoperability is essential, and that social science research would improve if practitioners could become “mobile scholars”.
The Electronic Journal of Information Technology in Construction (ITcon): an open access journal using an un-paid, volunteer-based organization
Björk, B-C. and Turk, Z., in Information Research, Vol. 11 No. 3, 2006http://informationr.net/ir/11-3/paper255.html
This case study is based on the experiences with the Electronic Journal of Information Technology in Construction (ITcon), founded in 1995. This journal is an example of a particular category of open access journals, which use neither author charges nor subscriptions to finance their operations, but rely largely on unpaid voluntary work in the spirit of the open source movement. The journal has, after some initial struggle, survived its first decade and is now established as one of half-a-dozen peer reviewed journals in its field. The journal publishes articles as they become ready, but creates virtual issues through alerting messages to “subscribers”. It has also started to publish special issues, since this helps in attracting submissions, and also helps in sharing the workload of review management. From the start the journal adopted a rather traditional layout of the articles. After the first few years the HTML version was dropped and papers are only published in PDF format. The overall experience demonstrates that it is possible to publish this type of OA journal, with a yearly publishing volume equal to a quarterly journal and involving the processing of some 50 submissions a year, using a networked volunteer-based organization.
Search engines: where we were, are now, and will ever be
Bradley, P., in Ariadne, Vol. 47, 2006www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue47/search-engines/
Bradley looks at the development of search engines over the lifetime of Ariadneand points to what we might anticipate in the years to come. He begins with AltaVista, reminding us of its quirks and shortcomings; moves on to Google, MSN and Yahoo!; and includes discussion of applications such as Rollyo and Squidoo,which offer users the ability to create their own search tools and resources to a much greater extent than ever before. Bradley also looks briefly at other emerging trends and concludes that search engines will become “more pervasive than they already are, but paradoxically less visible, if you allow them to personalize increasingly your own search experience. Alerting services will become even more commonplace as search engines learn your interests and preferences and can inform you of new developments … ”
No bad web pages: reader empowerment and the web
Brooks, T.A., in Information Research, Vol. 11 No. 3, 2006http://informationr.net/ir/11-3/paper257.html
User scripting heralds a paradigm shift towards web reader empowerment. Powerful web writers of the first decade of the web needed to be cautioned about usability and accessibility issues. As power shifts to web readers, they become capable of customizing web pages to their own tastes and purposes. This paper describes the development of Greasemonkey extension of the Firefox browser. The Greasemonkey extension of the Firefox browser permits web readers to write JavaScripts that change the look and feel of web pages, change the functionality of web page controls, and facilitates web page “mash-ups”, hybrid web presentations composed of content from two or more web pages. The only naturally occurring limit to web page modification may be difficult web page source code. Tools that shield web readers from the complexity of HTML are being introduced. The paradigm shift to web readers, armed with powerful and easy-to-use tools for customizing web pages heralds a new era of the web. It threatens the idea that a web page has a single look and feel, and emphasizes the trend to design web pages as mere input to the reading experience, subject to modification of presentation device as well as reader taste and purpose.
Of portals, policies, and poets
Bunt, R., and Pennock, L., in Educause Quarterly, Vol. 29 No. 2, 2006www.educause.edu/apps/eq/eqm06/eqm0624.asp
Implementing a portal provides an opportunity for collaboration, reflection,and change on campus. When we think about better ways of doing business at a university, the spur is often some new and compelling technology. Indeed,technology offers abundant scope for radical improvement to our processes. If we simply change our processes in response to evolving technology, though, we miss a valuable opportunity to reflect on the continuing relevance of the policies behind the processes and to review and reaffirm the institutional principles they serve. Introducing a campus portal is a terrific case in point for the effect that a technology project can have as a catalyst for institutional reflection and change.
Finding governmental statistical data on the web: a study of categorically organized links for the FedStats topics page
Ceaparu, I., and Schneiderman, B., in Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Vol. 55 No. 11, 2006, pp. 1008-1015www.asis.org/Publications/JASIS/vol55n11.html
Ceaparu and Shneiderman summarize three studies of alternate organization concepts for the FedStats portal that was designed to provide a single point of access to multiple federal agencies providing statistical data. Three questions; one broad and loosely defined, one specific, and one requiring a comparison were run against FedStat’s original alphabetical list of links,against a categorical grouping of these links, and against a categorical listing that links to the providing agency’s site rather than directly to the information. A different group of fifteen graduate students searched the three questions in each structure, participating in a think aloud protocol, and completing a post search questionnaire on their opinions as to satisfaction and ease of use. Correct answers, as judged by the experimenter, were at 15.6 percent in the first study, 24.4 percent in the second, and 42.2 percent in the third. Judgment of the site as useful increased from 35 to 47 percent and then to 69 percent. Perception of ease of use increased form 42 to 56 percent, and finally to 73 percent. The design principles of universal usability, easy navigation, common language, the availability of comparative search and an advanced search facility, and granularity of data as to time and geography, are seen as important for statistical data.
Customizing and using a popular online information literacy tutorial: one library’s experience
Flatley, R., and Jefferson, W., in Library Philosophy and Practice, Vol. 8 No. 2, 2006www.webpages.uidaho.edu/~mbolin/flatley-jefferson.htm
To teach information literacy, many colleges and universities use a version of TILT (the Texas Information Tutorial) or Searchpath, a modification of TILT by Western Michigan University. This paper describes our experience customizing Searchpath for Kutztown University’s Rohrbach Library, including the impetus behind the project, the process of customizing Searchpath, the project pilot, collaborative efforts, and challenges encountered. The authors also discuss the decision to select Searchpath rather than TILT, how Kutztown’s version of tutorial is currently being used, and future plans for the product,along with suggestions to those considering Searchpath for their libraries.
Google Scholar: potentially good for users of academic information
Friend, F.J., in Journal of Electronic Publishing, Vol. 9 No. 1, 2006www.hti.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=jep;cc=jep;view=text;rgn=main;idno=3336451.0009.105
Use of the Google search engine is commonplace among all sectors of the academic community. The development of the specialist Google Scholar search service will benefit the academic community in bringing to their attention content more relevant to their needs. The vast number of web sites containing potentially relevant information requires a search engine ranging over many millions of web sites but with the ability to target very specific types of information. The Google Scholar service has the potential to grow if it develops close contacts with both providers and users of academic information. Use of Google Scholar will benefit the authors and managers of open access content, but there are opportunities for all types of academic content providers in the way Google Scholar is set up. Google Scholar will face competition and have to keep pace with user expectations and technological developments.
PANIC: an integrated approach to the preservation of composite digital objects using semantic web services
Hunter, J., and Choudhury, S., in International Journal on Digital Libraries, Vol. 6 No. 2, pp. 174-183, 2006www.springerlink.com/(zkwcg5qo1agbqj55141bhd55)/app/home/contribution.asp?referrer=parent&backto=issue,7,11;journal,2,22; linkingpublicationresults,1:100475,1
To date, long-term preservation approaches have comprised of emulation,migration, normalization, and metadata – or some combination of these. Most existing work has focused on applying these approaches to digital objects of a singular media type: text, HTML, images, video or audio. In this paper, we consider the preservation of composite, mixed-media digital objects, a rapidly growing class of resources. We describe an integrated, flexible system that we have developed, which leverages existing tools and services and assists organizations to dynamically discover the optimum preservation strategy as it is required. The system captures and periodically compares preservation metadata with software and format registries to determine those objects (or sub-objects)at risk. By making preservation software modules available as Web services and describing them semantically using a machine-processable ontology (OWL-S), the most appropriate preservation service(s) for each object (or sub-object) can then be dynamically discovered, composed and invoked by software agents (with optional human input at critical decision-making steps). The PANIC system successfully illustrates how the growing array of available preservation tools and services can be integrated to provide a sustainable, collaborative solution to the long-term preservation of large-scale collections of complex digital objects.
A technical approach and distributed model for validation of digital objects
Littman, J., in D-Lib Magazine, Vol. 12 No. 5, 2006http://mirrored.ukoln.ac.uk/lis-journals/dlib/dlib/dlib/may06/littman/05littman.html
This article describes the current technical approach for digital object validation used by the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP), a partnership between the Library of Congress (LC) and the National Endowment for the Humanities for the digitization of historical newspapers. The article also describes the scheme for distributing validation across the participating institutions that will be creating and submitting digital objects to NDNP.
METS: standardized encoding for digital library objects
McDonough, J., in International Journal on Digital Libraries, Vol. 6 No. 2, 2006, pp. 148-158www.springerlink.com/(zkwcg5qo1agbqj55141bhd55)/app/home/contribution.asp?referrer=parent&backto=issue,5,11;journal,2,22;linkingpublicationresults,1:100475,1
METS is an XML document format intended for the encoding of complex objects within digital libraries. It provides the means to record all of the descriptive, administrative, structural and behavioral metadata needed to manage and provide access to complex digital content. While it was designed to promote interoperability of digital content between digital library systems and contribute to the preservation of digital library materials, a variety of practical barriers to achieving these goals remain. However, many of these obstacles are shared by other communities of practice, such as the e-Learning community working on the IMS content packaging standards and the MPEG-21 community, and the digital library community faces a unique opportunity at the moment to work closely with others to try to improve the interoperability of our content not only with our own repository systems, but those being used by others.
Internet use by researchers: a Study of Panjab University, Chandigarhh
Mahajan, P., in Library Philosophy and Practice, Vol. 8 No. 2, 2006www.webpages.uidaho.edu/~mbolin/mahajan2.htm
A survey was used to gather information about use of the Internet by researchers at Panjab University, Chandigarh in the sciences, social sciences and humanities. The results indicate that researchers in the sciences are the most positive about the impact of the internet, while 70 percent of the social science and 20 percent of the humanities felt positive about the internet and its impact. Other survey results contrast the use of electronic journals, access to computers, and other topics.
Coming together around Library 2.0: a focus for discussion and a call to arms
Miller, P., in D-Lib Magazine, Vol. 12 No. 4, 2006www.dlib.org/dlib/april06/miller/04miller.html
The author defines Library 2.0 as “an attitude, not a technology”. This attitude encourages sharing of information and better integration with other systems and with the “workflows” of our users. The author uses library holdings appearing on Amazon as an example, but the approach can be extended to other Web 2.0 software and platforms. The author also identifies a trend that “moves beyond the reengineering of applications deployed within a single institution, or offered by a single vendor, and allows us to move towards a network-based Platform of subsystems encapsulating the functionality required by anyone wishing to construct the next generation of applications”.
A model-driven method for the design and deployment of web-based document management systems
Paganelli, F., and Pettenati, M.C., in Journal of Digital Information, Vol. 6 No. 3, 2005http://jodi.tamu.edu/Articles/v06/i03/Paganelli/
Most existing document management systems (DMSs) are designed according to an approach that is technology-driven rather than based on standard methodologies. Related shortcomings are vendor dependence, expensive maintenance and poor interoperability. Information model-driven methodologies could help DMS designers to solve these issues. As a matter of fact, information models can provide a technology-independent abstract representation of information systems’functionalities. Based on standard formalisms, they are useful to designers to describe the managed domain and to developers to understand and develop the modeled entities according to a standard methodological approach. However, while information models are commonly used by software designers for the design of information systems, such as databases and digital libraries, their use in DMS design is still in its infancy. This paper provides a contribution in this research area proposing a method for web-based DMS design based on an information model, named document management and sharing information model(DMSM). We have also developed a set of tools, the DMSM framework, that provide designers with DMS design and deployment facilities. Based on this instrumental support, the proposed method facilitates the design and fast prototyping of DMSs, dealing with requirements of open standard compliance, cost effectiveness and uniform access to heterogeneous data sources.
In Google we trust: information integrity in the digital age
Shaker, L. in First Monday, Vol. 11 No. 4, 2006www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue11_4/shaker/
Shaker tracks how the New York Times reported on Google over a two-year period. It turns out appears that Google’s initial public offering and the trajectory of its stock price has as much to do with how favourably the company is regarded as its innovative search capabilities. Shaker argues that if all it takes is fiscal successful to build customer loyalty and respect, then society has not yet grasped the essence of “information integrity”.
MedBiquitous and journal publishers: scholarly content and online medical communities
Smothers, V., Clarke, M., and Van Dyck, C., in Learned Publishing, Vol. 19 No. 2, 2006, 125-132http://alpsp.publisher.ingentaconnect.com/content/alpsp/lp/2006/00000019/00000002/art00006
MedBiquitous is a consortium whose members are working to develop a common technology framework that will support reforms in healthcare education and competence assessment. The mission of MedBiquitous is to advance healthcare education through technology standards that promote professional competence,collaboration, and better patient care. The consortium members include professional medical associations, technology companies, e-learning firms, and publishers, among others. Two publishers actively working within MedBiquitous are John Wiley & Sons, Inc., and the American Academy of Pediatrics, who are pursuing their own objectives to help to create improved online medical communities.
Sampling the web: the development of a custom search tool for research
Snelson, C., in LIBRES: Library and Information Science Research, Vol. 16 No. 1, 2006http://libres.curtin.edu.au/libres16n1/index.htm
Research designed to study the internet is beset with challenges. One of these challenges involves obtaining samples of web pages. Methodologies used in previous studies may be categorized into random, purposeful, and purposeful random types of sampling. This paper contains an outline of these methodologies and information about the development of a custom sampling tool that may be used to obtain purposeful random samples of web page links. The custom search application called Web Sampler works through the Google Web APIs service to collect a random sample of pages from search results returned from the Google index. Web Sampler is inexpensive to develop and may be easily customized for specialized search needs required by researchers who are investigating web page content. The purpose of this paper is to articulate the challenges associated with web research, summarize several strategies that have been used to obtain samples of web pages in previous studies, and describe the development of a custom search application designed to obtain purposeful random samples of web pages.
