Archive for the ‘Information Seeking’ Category
Thursday, April 23rd, 2009
Erica Naone writes in Technology Review:
Web browsers remember the sites that they have visited in the past, but few people seem to use this information. Jing Jin, a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University, has developed a new browser-history tool, which she and her colleagues developed after studying how people use their browser history. They demonstrated the prototype in a presentation this week at the Computer-Human Interaction (CHI 2009) Conference, in Boston.
The researchers tested users’ ability to recall Web pages and found that URLs and textual descriptions (by which most browsers organize their history) weren’t as easy to remember as colors or images collected from the Web pages themselves. So the researchers’ tool–currently a plug-in for the Firefox browser–lets users browse images of websites that they have visited in the past, or type in search queries that find previously visited pages.
The researchers also used the new history tool to improve Web search, by adding thumbnails from browser history at the top of Google search results. The thumbnails were selected according to the search terms that the user entered into the search engine.
Source: Technology Review (MIT)
Posted in Information Seeking, Software and Web-Based Applications | No Comments »
Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009
This fee-based book is available from ALA’s Book Shop. A very interesting topic!
The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) announces the publication of a new title, “Library Rx: Measuring and Treating Library Anxiety” by Martina Malvasi, Catherine Rudowsky and Jesus M. Valencia.
“Library Rx” presents research findings on library anxiety in college and university students. There is strong evidence that library anxiety, the inadequate feeling students have when lost in overwhelming buildings that present mountains of information in all formats and professionals who may seem busy and unapproachable, has a negative impact on undergraduate student performance. The authors review existing research on student reactions to the library environment, describe the finding of a research project on library anxiety and present ideas for its treatment.
Malvasi, Rudowsky and Valencia compare and test various treatments for library anxiety, including traditional instruction, online tutorials and one-on-one teaching moments, as well as the effects of no library intervention or treatment at all. Using statistical analysis, the effectiveness of the various treatment methods is presented. In addition, anecdotal evidence of library initiatives and events used to reduce library anxiety is provided. “Library Rx” prescribes relevant solutions for library anxiety in all types of academic libraries.
Look for sales information at the bottom of the ALA/ACRL post here.
Posted in Information Literacy, Information Seeking, Libraries and Librarianship | No Comments »
Thursday, April 16th, 2009
From the Article:
In a bid to tackle ethical pitfalls in technology before they become a problem, a new research project will identify the Information and Communications technologies (ICTs) that are likely to emerge in the next 10 to 15 years.
The two-year study called Ethical Issues of Emerging ICT Applications (ETICA), coordinated by De Montfort University Leicester (DMU) aims to help researchers identify new technologies that could become as famous as Facebook and Twitter and enable them to devise a strategy for dealing with the unforeseen drawbacks that these emerging technologies bring along.
Source: IWR
Posted in Info Management and Retrieval, Information Industry, Information Literacy, Information Science, Information Seeking, Technology and Internet | No Comments »
Thursday, April 9th, 2009
From the Web Site:
At SDSU [San Diego State University], the Information Literacy and Instructional Services librarians are working in collaboration with several teaching and learning units on campus to strengthen student learning and effective teaching practices. This unique partnership allows us to leverage our resources and expertise for pedagogical design, explore new collaborative and social technologies, and move toward common goals for student learning and faculty development.
Source: EDUCAUSE
Posted in Information Literacy, Information Seeking, Libraries and Librarianship | No Comments »
Wednesday, April 8th, 2009
From the Abstract:
The Internet has led to an explosion of users throughout the world. Low-cost computing options are now emerging for developing countries that are changing the world’s educational landscape. Given these conditions, there is a critical need to understand the obstacles and opportunities in designing and deploying technologies for children worldwide. This paper discusses seven years of strategies and methods learned in co-designing and deploying the International Children’s Digital Library (www.childrenslibrary.org) with children in multiple countries. Our experience with iterative international co-design, and developing world deployment shows that acquiring site-specific knowledge is critical to adapting methods needed to be successful. In the case of co-design, a combination of face-to-face and email collaboration is important to building on-going partnership relationships. With deployment activities, it is important to be prepared for the unexpected – managing complex technologies in rural settings is very difficult. Therefore, the more site-specific knowledge that can be acquired the more likely there will be a successful outcome.
Direct to Full Text Report (23 pages; PDF)
Source: Human-Computer Interaction Lab, University of Maryland
Posted in Databases, Directories, and Guides, Digitization Projects, E-books, Info Management and Retrieval, Information Seeking | No Comments »
Wednesday, April 8th, 2009
From an E-Mail Announcement:
….a team of faculty and students at Rutgers have just launched the long awaited, highly anticipated Virtual Reference Bibliography designed to be used by librarians, students, scholars, and others who are interested in publications dealing with all aspects of virtual reference.
Hosted by Rutgers University’s SCILS, this site is a continuation of the digital reference services bibliography maintained from 2000 to 2004 by Bernie Sloan. It now contains 700+ entries from Bernie’s original bibliography, plus 200+ new items published from 2004 to the present. The redesigned site and new search interface was created by Ben Bakelaar of Rutgers as part of a final project for Information Design class, taught by Jacek Gwizdka, Ph.D.
Direct to VR Biblipgraphy
Source: SCLIS, Rutgers University
Posted in Bibliographies, Webliographies, Info Management and Retrieval, Information Seeking, Libraries and Librarianship | No Comments »
Thursday, April 2nd, 2009
From the Web Site:
As part of its ongoing programs in digital scholarship and the cyberinfrastructure to support teaching, learning and research, the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) in cooperation with the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) held a symposium on September 15, 2008 in which a group of some 30 leading scholars was invited to articulate the research challenges that will use the new media to advance the analysis and interpretations of text, images and other sources of interest to the humanities and social sciences and in so doing, pose interesting problems for ongoing computational research. White papers were commissioned to help frame the issues. This report contains the final versions of those papers, as well as an account of the day’s discussion and a summary of a report by Diane Zorich on digital humanities centers.
+ Direct to Full Text (PDF)
+ Direct to Executive Summary (PDF)
Source: Council on Library and Information Resources.
Posted in Education, Information Seeking, Libraries and Librarianship, Scholarly Publishing, Technology and Internet | No Comments »
Tuesday, March 31st, 2009
From the Abstract:
This paper explores how people read books online. Instead of observing individuals, we analyze usage of an online digital library of children’s books (the International Children’s Digital Library). We go beyond typical webpage-centric analysis to focus on book reading in an attempt to understand how people read books from websites. We propose a definition of reading a book (in comparison to others who visit the website), and report a number of observations about the use of the library in question.
Direct to Full Text (8 pages; PDF)
Source: Human-Computer Interaction Lab, U. of Maryland
Posted in Info Management and Retrieval, Information Seeking, Search News | No Comments »
Wednesday, March 18th, 2009
Articles in this issue include:
+ Evaluating shared workspace performance using human information processing models
+ Seeking information about health and lifestyle on the Internet
+ Intelligent agent appropriation in the tracking phase of an environmental scanning process: a case study of a French trade union
+ Scientific journal publishing: yearly volume and open access availability
+ Epistemic work and knowing in practice as conceptualizations of information use
+ The influence of information behaviour on information sharing across cultural boundaries in development contexts
+ Information synergy as the catalyst between information technology capability and innovativeness: empirical evidence from the financial service sector
+ Term based comparison metrics for controlled and uncontrolled indexing languages
Source: IR
Posted in Info Management and Retrieval, Information Science, Information Seeking, Libraries and Librarianship, Scholarly Publishing | No Comments »
Thursday, March 12th, 2009
Los Alamos Researchers Create ‘Map of Science’
Los Alamos National Laboratory scientists have produced the world’s first Map of Science—a high-resolution graphic depiction of the virtual trails scientists leave behind when they retrieve information from online services. The research, led by Johan Bollen, appears this week in PLoS ONE (the Public Library of Science).
+ Clickstream Data Yields High-Resolution Maps of Science
Source: Los Alamos National Laboratory/PLoS ONE
Posted in Information Science, Information Seeking, Papers and Presentations, Scholarly Publishing, Science, Search News, Source File, Technology and Internet | No Comments »
Monday, March 9th, 2009
Newspaper Web Site Audience Skyrockets in January
As newspaper professionals gather in Las Vegas for the Newspaper Association of America’s first annual mediaXchange conference, new data from Nielsen Online indicates that average monthly unique audience figures for newspaper Web sites grew by more than 7.9 million in January to 74.8 million visitors, an increase of 11.9 percent over the same period a year ago. These figures, which comprise home and work Internet usage, are the highest for any month since NAA began tracking these numbers in 2004.
+ Data (from Nielsen Online)
Source: Newspaper Association of America
Posted in Information Seeking, Search News, Technology and Internet | No Comments »
Friday, March 6th, 2009
From the Introduction:
In the past, the research process began with two, distinct phases: discovery and access. After determining a topic, a researcher would enter the discovery phase, in which he or she would look through library catalogs and article indices to identify resources that might pertain to his or her research. During this phase, the researcher would sift through records containing resource descriptions, not the resources themselves. Then, after assembling a list of promising records, the researcher would use these records to try to locate the resources in order to evaluate them. The goal of the researcher during this access phase was to get a physical copy of the resource. The Internet and advancements in search engine technology and library information systems have made research easier in some ways and more difficult in others. The change that has the greatest implications for UC-eLinks – and for library services in general – is the collapsing of the discovery and access phases into a single workflow.
The desired end result of this new workflow remains the same, although most researchers now prefer an electronic version of a resource to a physical one. The process still begins with discovery, but once researchers start entering queries into a search engine and getting search results back, they want to be able to immediately evaluate the results. They repeat this searchand- evaluate cycle as many times as needed. Thus, the research workflow has evolved from search-then-evaluate to search-and-evaluate.
Direct to Complete Report (15 pages; PDF)
Source: California Digital Library
Posted in Information Literacy, Information Seeking, Libraries and Librarianship, Search News | No Comments »
Friday, February 27th, 2009
From the News Release:
Searches for several terms related to the economic downturn showed dramatic gains during the past year. Among the most notable increases were searches relating to the deteriorating job market, including searches using the term “unemployment” (up 206 percent to 8.2 million searches) and “unemployment benefits” (up 247 percent to 748,000 searches). Meanwhile, terms relating to personal asset situations, including “mortgage” (up 72 percent to 7.8 million searches), “bankruptcy” (up 156 percent to 2.6 million searches), and “foreclosure” (up 67 percent to 1.4 million searches) also grew strongly. And Americans, resilient as they are, are seeking ways to save money, as evidenced by the increase in the number of searches for “coupons” (up 161 percent to 19.9 million) and “discount” (up 26 percent to 7.9 million).
Source: comScore
Posted in Information Seeking, Search News, Web Search | No Comments »
Monday, February 23rd, 2009
From the Article:
More efficient management of the increasing influx of information may be an untapped opportunity for government and education cost savings, according to a new survey of the U.S. public sector conducted jointly by Xerox Corp. and Harris Interactive.
Findings indicated that 58 percent of surveyed U.S. government and education workers said they spend nearly half of their average workday filing, deleting or sorting paper or digital information. According to Basex, a knowledge economy research firm, this amounts to at least $31 billion spent managing information each year by local, state and federal governments.
Source: Government Technology
Posted in Government Documents and Political Information, Information Industry, Information Science, Information Seeking | No Comments »
Monday, February 23rd, 2009
From the Abstract:
Information-seeking behavior remains an important research area. Libraries and other information providers strive to understand users’ information needs and how they try to fulfill these needs. This understanding helps design and offer appropriate user-centered information systems/services. Bruce (2005) states that, “information plays a significant role in our daily professional and personal lives and we are constantly challenged to take charge of the information that we need for work, fun and everyday decisions and tasks.” In the digital era, research on information-seeking behavior has taken on even more importance worldwide. Most of the literature on information-seeking behavior comes from developed countries, while conditions in developing countries vary significantly. The scarcity of studies on information-seeking behavior in Pakistan is revealed in a recent article by Anwar (2007), who establishes the need of such studies in a Pakistani context.
Direct to Article
Source: Library Philosophy and Practice
Authors: Muhammad Rafiq and Dr. Kanwal Ameen
Posted in Info Management and Retrieval, Information Literacy, Information Seeking | No Comments »
Sunday, February 22nd, 2009
Turning Business Intelligence into Business Decisions
Business or competitive intelligence (CI) can deliver value to an organization only when it drives decision-making. Without a clear intelligence-decision link, business intelligence becomes little more than information research. And we all know that the last thing businesses need is more information.
Many organizations, however, have spent substantial time and effort building a business intelligence capability only to struggle with acting on the intelligence gathered. Often, competitive intelligence fails to include actionable insights that decision-makers can put to use. Other times, intelligence points to a range of decision options, but decision-makers either cannot choose from them, or do not effectively execute the decisions they settle upon.
How then, to ensure that business intelligence drives decision-making?
Source: Kiplinger Business Resource Center
Hat tip: PW
Posted in Business and Economics, Information Seeking, Search News | No Comments »
