Co-edited by yours truly. From our press release:
We are pleased to announce the release of a new book, Scholarly Practice, Participatory Design and the eXtensible Catalog, based on user research for eXtensible Catalog, available now from ACRL or Amazon.
As part of the development of eXtensible Catalog (XC), a project to develop open source software sponsored by the University of Rochester’s River Campus Libraries, and funded by the Mellon Foundation and project partners, four institutions conducted eighty interviews and numerous workshops to understand how researchers learn about, acquire, and use scholarly resources. Research findings informed the design and development of XC, a set of open-source applications that provides access to resources across a range of databases, metadata schemas, and standards. In this volume, members of the project team report on key findings of the user research that was done at Cornell University, Ohio State University, the University of Rochester, and Yale University, and discuss the value of including library users and technology specialists from many disciplines in the software design and development process. Editors: Nancy Fried Foster, Katie Clark, Kornelia Tancheva and Rebekah Kilzer. Authors: Jennifer Bowen, Kaila Bussert, Katherine Chiang, Katie Clark, Maureen Donovan, Nancy Fried Foster, Gabriela Castro Gessner, David Lindahl, Melissa S. Mead, Kornelia Tancheva and Wendy Wilcox.
New date & time for this session!!
November Presentation : November 4, 2010 : 11 am : L33 Hagerty Library
Please join us as iSchool faculty member Christopher Yang presents his grant project on creating unified subject categories across institutional repositories He would especially like to get feedback on this idea from librarians and practitioners. The project abstract is below.
The November session will be videoconferenced using Adobe Connect and the URL will be distributed with the meeting invitation. Finally, please welcome Rebecca Goldman as co-organizer of future Spark! sessions. Please feel free to send ideas for future Spark! meetings to either Rebecca or Rebekah.
Project Abstract:
Owing to the information explosion, today’s libraries face the necessity of building unified collections derived from different repository sources and integrating resource types from different institutional repositories. In this situation, it is imperative to integrate the distinct subject directories such as classification and taxonomy into a unified subject directory. This will facilitate federated searching of information resources and will in turn enhance the user experience of seamless information access. Furthermore, the importance of information and resource sharing through collaboration across libraries, museums and other institutions have been increasingly recognized; accordingly, there is a critical need for integrating subject categories and taxonomy derived from different repositories. However, there are enormous challenges for information professionals in undertaking such an integration task. The core of the challenges stems from the fact that each of these subject directories evinces a complex semantic and syntactic structure that is embedded in local collections; moreover, there is no existing tool to support the integration task. In order to overcome such obstacles, it is necessary to devise a semi-automatic tool to support information professionals in apprehending relationships from the subject categories of different repositories and in recommending plausible changes and fine-tuning of the integration process.
To address these critical issues and challenges, in this two-year research project the research team at the College of Information Science and Technology at Drexel University seeks to develop techniques for facilitating an effective integration task and developing open source tools which enable information professionals to successfully integrate and expand taxonomy and subject categories derived from different repositories. Toward this end, we shall test our techniques using the Internet Public Library 2 (IPL2: http://research.cis.drexel.edu/index.html) IPL and Librarian’s Internet Index (LII)–and develop a new platform to share the open source. The platform will also be used to obtain feedback from information professionals to enhance our tools and will serve as an online community forum (i.e., a social networking site) through which information professionals express and exchange experiences in using the developed techniques and open source tools for the integration tasks.
The goals of the project are listed as follows:
Goal 1: To determine relationships between subject categories from different repositories (e.g. IPL and LII) through several text classification models.
Goal 2: To develop integration operations and process based on the identified subject category relationships of IPL and LII.
Last week’s issue of The Economist discussed the challenges of data, data management and the importance of relevancy and good metadata. There are several interesting articles, including one mentioning librarians as information managers.
