Anita Sundaram Coleman

Scientific models as "works"

SUMMARY This paper is about important artifacts of scientific research, namely models. The author proposes that the representations of scientific models be treated as works. Bibliographic families of models may better reflect disciplinary intellectual structures and relationships, thereby providing information retrieval that is reflective of human information seeking and use purposes such as teaching and learning. Two examples of scientific models are presented using the Dublin Core metadata elements.

Instruments of cognition: use of citations and web links in online teaching materials

Use of citations and Web links embedded in online teaching materials was studied for an undergraduate course. The undergraduate students enrolled in Geographic Information Science for Geography and Regional Development used Web links more often than citations, but clearly did not see them as key to enhancing learning. Current conventions for citing and linking tend to make citations and links invisible. There is some evidence that citations and Web links categorized and highlighted in terms of their importance and function to be served may help student learning in interdisciplinary domains.

William Stetson Merrill and Bricolage for Information Studies

Purpose – This paper examines William Stetson Merrill, the compiler of A Code for Classifiers and a Newberry Library employee (1889‐1930) in an attempt to glean lessons for modern information studies from an early librarians career. Design/methodology/approach – Merrills career at the Newberry Library and three editions of the code are briefly examined using historical, bibliographic, and conceptual methods. Primary and secondary sources in archives and libraries are summarized to provide insight into Merrills attempts to develop or modify tools to solve the knowledge organization problems he faced. The concept of bricolage, developed by Levi‐Strauss to explain modalities of thinking, is applied to Merrills career. Excerpts from his works and reminisces are used to explain Merrill as a bricoleur and highlight the characteristics of bricolage. Findings – Findings show that Merrill worked collaboratively to collocate and integrate a variety of ideas from a diverse group of librarians such as Cutter, Pettee, Poole, Kelley, Rudolph, and Fellows. Bliss and Ranganathan were aware of the code but the extent to which they were influenced by it remains to be explored. Although this is an anachronistic evaluation, Merrill serves as an example of the archetypal information scientist who improvises and integrates methods from bibliography, cataloging, classification, and indexing to solve problems of information retrieval and design usable information products and services for human consumption. Originality/value – Bricolage offers great potential to information practitioners and researchers today as we continue to try and find user‐centered solutions to the problems of digital information organization and services.

Impact: the last frontier in digital library evaluation

The NSF-funded National Science Digital Library (NSDL) is engaged in an ongoing discourse about digital library evaluation. The Educational Impact and Evaluation Standing Committee (EIESC) has successfully identified desirable features in digital libraries such as usability and usage, but the hardest measure is impact. What is the impact of a DL? Members of the EIESC have engaged in pilots and feasibility studies using bricolage (a blend of qualitative and quantitative approaches to evaluation), and these activities are moving NSDL toward a richer understanding of impact

Bricoleurs: exploring digital library evaluation as participant interactions, research, and processes

The NSF-funded National Science Digital Library (NSDL) is working to develop community-based processes for implementing shared evaluation goals and instruments among its distributed library network to examine library usage, collections growth, and library governance processes. The bricoleur modality of evaluation research is one that integrates scientific methods as well as humanistic values. These activities are helping to provide the foundation for the development of a scientific program of digital library evaluation that crosses disciplinary boundaries.

Collaboration in digital libraries: Luminous ideas from health informatics, academic libraries, and historical archives

A widespread effort to develop digital libraries in science and academia in recent years has produced numerous success stories. This panel shares professional and personal experiences about the development and maintenance of digital libraries. As a group they offer a luminous description of how to apply methodologies, processes and workflow representations of collaboration to digital library creation and maintenance in various domains.

Copyright transfer agreements and self-archiving

Concerns about intellectual property rights are a significant barrier to the practice of scholarly self-archiving in institutional and other types of digital repositories. This tutorial demystifies the journal copyright transfer agreements (CTA) that often are the source of these rights concerns of scholars. In addition, we introduce the deposit processes of self-archiving in an interdisciplinary repository and open access archive (OAA), such as DLIST, Digital Library for Information Science and Technology

Humanizing information retrieval: Organizing “works.” Sponsored by SIG CR

The purpose of this panel is to explore our understanding of the “work” entity and its role in information retrieval. In the past, works have been discussed in the context of bibliographic control, or more narrowly in the context of the library catalog. But as research into the nature of works has matured over the past decade or so, we have begun to broaden the basic definitions of the components of the work-relationship, the better to view the problem of works from an information retrieval perspective. A work, at a basic level, is a deliberately created knowledge-record (i.e. a text, and oeuvre, etc.) representing a coordinated set of ideas (i.e., ideational content) that is conveyed with the purpose of being communicated to a consumer. A document may contain one or more works, and a work may exist on one or more documents. Quite frequently, as it turns out, a given work exists in many instantiations, which means it appears on many different documents, which presents an interesting problem for information retrieval. Research into the nature of the work entity points to an evolving research front.

A science of public knowledge? Theoretical foundations of LIS. Sponsored by SIG HFIS

In this session, we examine several related aspects of the ongoing quest to map the intellectual structure of our field and to consolidate its theoretical foundations. The conceptual relationships between bibliometrics, informetrics and related fields are explored; the historical connections between classification and information retrieval researchers are examined; and the distinction between information science and information technology is analyzed both bibliometrically and from the perspective of social epistemology.

DLIST: opening LIS research and practice

We describe DLIST, a digital library for Library and Information Science Research and Practice and for Information Technology as it relates to LIS. It is built upon the open access eprints model, but that extends materials in the collection beyond the formal, scholarly literature to include other types of content created by researchers and practitioners. DLIST is intended to promote resource sharing in LIS and IT and to attempt to bridge the gap between research and practice. The notion of open access is briefly discussed as a central tenet for the development of the intellectual commons as an interactive space for learning.