Alastair G. Smith

Applying evaluation criteria to New Zealand government websites

Criteria for the evaluation of Government web sites were adapted from Eschenfelder, Beachboard, McClure, and Wyman ((1997) Gov. Inform. Quart. 14(2), 173) and applied to a sample of five websites of NZ government entities. Issues that arose in applying the criteria are examined, and lessons for designers of government websites explored. In particular, it is important that websites provide orientation information, that conditions for re-use of information be made clear, that privacy concerns be addressed, that print materials be properly adapted to the web environment, that materials be kept current, that contact details be available, that metadata be used effectively, that external links be made appropriately, that pages be accessible to users with disabilities, and that help information on search engines and other facilities be made available to users.

Web Impact Factors for Australasian universities

In this paper we report on the results of an exploratory study of knowledge exchange between disciplines and subfields of science, based on bibliometric methods. The goal of this analysis is twofold. Firstly, we consider knowledge exchange between disciplines at a global level, by analysing cross-disciplinary citations in journal articles, based on the world publication output in 1999. Among others a central position of the Basic Life Sciences within the Life Sciences and of Physics within the Exact Sciences is shown. Limitations of analyses of interdisciplinary impact at the journal level are discussed. A second topic is a discussion of measures which may be used to quantify the rate of knowledge transfer between fields and the importance of work in a given field or for other disciplines. Two measures are applied, which appear to be proper indicators of impact of research on other fields. These indicators of interdisciplinary impact may be applied at other institutional levels as well.

Interlinking between Asia-Pacific University Web sites

An investigation into the pattern of international interlinking between Asia-Pacific university Web sites is described. AltaVista advanced searches were used for the data collection and network diagrams used to portray the results from four perspectives. It was found that each of the four angles allowed novel interpretations of the data, but that Australia and Japan were nevertheless clearly at the heart of the Web in the region, with Australia being a particularly common target of links and Japan having a more balanced profile of ingoing and outgoing hyperlinks. Interestingly, one of the perspectives mimicked an official grouping of less wealthy countries in the region whilst another contained the more developed countries, with Singapore and Thailand appearing in both. It was hypothesised that the nature of larger Web sites covered was qualitatively different from that of smaller ones, making the deduction of relationships between the hosting institutions difficult from the link counts alone.

Which academic subjects have most online impact? A pilot study and a new classification process

The use of the Web by academic researchers is discipline‐dependent and highly variable. It is increasingly central for sharing information, disseminating results and publicising research projects. This pilot study seeks to identify the subjects that have the most impact on the Web, and look for national differences in online subject visibility. The highest impact sites were from computing, but there were major national differences in the impact of engineering and technology sites. Another difference was that Taiwan had more high impact non‐academic sites hosted by universities. As a pilot study, the classification process itself was also investigated and the problems of applying subject classification to academic Web sites discussed. The study draws out a number of issues in this regard, having no simple solutions and point to the need to interpret the results with caution.

Benchmarking Google Scholar with the New Zealand PBRF research assessment exercise

Google Scholar was used to generate citation counts to the web-based research output of New Zealand Universities. Total citations and hits from Google Scholar correlated with the research output as measured by the official New Zealand Performance-Based Research Fund (PBRF) exercise. The article discusses the use of Google Scholar as a cybermetric tool and methodology issues in obtaining citation counts for institutions. Google Scholar is compared with other tools that provide web citation data: Web of Science, SCOPUS, and the Wolverhampton Cybermetric Crawler.

Citations and Links as a Measure of Effectiveness of Online LIS Journals

Examines the use of citation counts and web links to evaluate online LIS journals. The Journal Impact Factor, a traditional metric for comparing journals, is based on the citation counts of a journal over a specified period of time, compared with the citable articles published in the journal. The Web Impact Factor (WIF) has been proposed as an equivalent metric for websites. The WIF is broadly defined as the ratio of links made to a site, compared to the number of information units (e.g. pages) at the site. The study compares the WIFs of a sample of online LIS journal websites with their conventional citation counts. Links to online journals are often considered to be equivalent to citations, but there are significant differences. Provides indications of how effective the online medium is for communicating LIS research and offers guidance for LIS authors and journal editors to help them make effective use of online journals.

Think local, search global? Comparing search engines for searching geographically specific information

This study evaluates the retrieval of New Zealand information using three local New Zealand search engines, four major global search engines and three metasearch engines. Searches for NZ topics were carried out on all the search engines, and the relative recall calculated. The local search engines did not achieve higher recall than the global search engines or metasearch engines, but no search engine achieved more than 45 percent recall. Despite the theoretical advantage of searching the databases of several individual search engines, metasearch engines did not achieve higher recall. Of relevant pages for the queries, 36 percent were outside the .nz domain. Implications for searching for geographically specific information, and for evaluation of search engines, are discussed.

Searching for NZ information in the virtual library

This paper explores resource discovery issues relating to New Zealand/Aotearoa information on the WWW in the twenty‐first century. Questions addressed are: How do New Zealand search engines compare with global search engines for finding information relating to New Zealand? Can search engines find everything that is available on the web? What are effective strategies for finding information relating to New Zealand on the web? What is the quality of NZ information on the web? What can librarians do to make NZ information more accessible on the web? Based on a study, it concludes that neither local nor global search engines are by themselves sufficient, and that to maximize retrieval a variety of engines is necessary. The NZ librarian can play a role in ensuring that NZ information is made both available and accessible. Although the paper discusses the situation in New Zealand, the results and conclusions are applicable to other countries.