Ann O'Brien

Web OPAC Interfaces: An Overview.

Web‐based online public access catalogues (OPACs) began to appear in the late 1990s and many libraries are currently considering implementation. As catalogues, they demonstrate advances on traditional OPACs, especially in terms of remote access by users and their potential to integrate many document types and sources via a single interface. This paper considers some of the features and functions of Web OPAC interfaces. As yet, very little evaluation of systems and users has taken place and until more such literature appears, a general approach to products available is considered to be of value. Six popular Web OPAC interfaces in use in UK academic libraries (Talis, INNOPAC, WebCat, Voyager, GeoWeb and ALEPH) have been examined with an overview of the functions offered via those interfaces. A checklist has been developed as an indicator of the important features and functions offered.

Real-Time Detection, Tracking, and Monitoring of Automatically Discovered Events in Social Media

We introduce ReDites, a system for realtime event detection, tracking, monitoring and visualisation. It is designed to assist Information Analysts in understanding and exploring complex events as they unfold in the world. Events are automatically detected from the Twitter stream. Then those that are categorised as being security-relevant are tracked, geolocated, summarised and visualised for the end-user. Furthermore, the system tracks changes in emotions over events, signalling possible flashpoints or abatement. We demonstrate the capabilities of ReDites using an extended use case from the September 2013 Westgate shooting incident. Through an evaluation of system latencies, we also show that enriched events are made available for users to explore within seconds of that event occurring.

Subject analysis: the critical first stage in indexing

Studies of indexing neglect the first stage of the process, that is, subject analysis. In this study, novice indexers were asked to analyse three short, popular journal articles; to express the general subject as well as the primary and sec ondary topics in natural language statements; to state what influenced the analysis and to comment on the ease or diffi culty of this process. The factors which influenced the process were: the subject discipline concerned, factual is subjective nature of the text, complexity of the subject, clarity of text, possible support offered by bibliographic apparatus such as title, etc. The findings showed that with the social science and science texts, the general subject could be determined with ease, while this was more difficult with the humanities text. Clear evidence emerged of the importance of bibliographical apparatus in defining the general subject. There was varying difficulty in determining the primary and secondary topics.

Digital library education: the current status

In this paper, we review and examine the current status of digital library education and compare the range of provision with that found in earlier studies. It is found that the number of institutions offering programmes or courses in digital library education is still increasing. About 43% of these programmes or courses are stand-alone rather than integrated with wider material. The curriculum design and focused teaching areas appear more systematic and comprehensive than in earlier studies. Over half the institutions examined in this study have posted their detailed course information online. Most courses offered are now based on a combination of theory and practice, and are available at different levels. There are increasing opportunities for funding for developing new initiatives in digital library education. However, since digital library education is still at an early stage, an optimized model of best practice in digital library education has not yet emerged

Scholarly output: print and digital – in teaching and research

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to report the outcomes of a Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC)‐sponsored study to determine the current state and trends in different forms of scholarly output used in teaching and research; and the nature and extent of problems associated with their use.Design/methodology/approach – A total of 60 UK HE institutions were chosen at random and a selection of departments within these was contacted. An online questionnaire was distributed to the selected departments; resulting in responses from 304 academics across a broad range of subjects and institution types.Findings – The study showed that printed output was still the preferred option in both teaching and research, although electronic journals now have a well‐established presence. Web‐based material is increasingly provided in teaching and used in research but this includes primarily traditional tools such as reading lists and links to scholarly resources. Some content creation was evident. Use of web 2.0 wa...

Integration of distributed terminology resources to facilitate subject cross-browsing for library portal systems

Purpose – The paper aims to develop a prototype middleware framework between different terminology resources in order to provide a subject cross‐browsing service for library portal systems.Design/methodology/approach – Nine terminology experts were interviewed to collect appropriate knowledge to support the development of a theoretical framework for the research. Based on this, a simplified software‐based prototype system was constructed incorporating the knowledge acquired. The prototype involved mappings between the computer science schedule of the Dewey Decimal Classification (which acted as a spine) and two controlled vocabularies, UKAT and ACM Computing Classification. Subsequently, six further experts in the field were invited to evaluate the prototype system and provide feedback to improve the framework.Findings – The major findings showed that, given the large variety of terminology resources distributed throughout the web, the proposed middleware service is essential to integrate technically and ...

Digital library education: some international course structure comparisons

Following our recent review of progress in Digital Library (DL) education [1], we present here a brief overview of current work to investigate the commonality/diversity of course structure between ten institutions outside North America which offer DL education in their library schools. The weighting of specifically DL module topic credits as a proportion of the overall course taught credits varies between 13% and 63%, and coverage of a proposed core topic set [2] is as high as 85%.

Design factors affecting relevance judgment behaviour in the context of metadata surrogates

This paper reports on the findings of a user study which investigated the effects of structure, highlighting and quantity of information on university students’ interaction with metadata surrogates of learning object repositories (LORs) during the relevance judgement process. The literature review revealed a lack of studies investigating how metadata surrogates should be designed to meet users’ needs and improve the effectiveness of relevance judgement. In order to address this issue, different versions of a prototype system, called META-LOR 2, were developed and evaluated in terms of the time needed for users to find relevant information, the accuracy of their relevance judgements and their satisfaction. To evaluate the prototype, a user study was conducted where participants were asked to complete a set of tasks and fill in satisfaction questionnaires. The findings showed that participants performed better and were more satisfied with those versions of the prototype which highlighted metadata elements that included the query terms, used clusters or categories to organize metadata elements in the surrogates and included metadata elements which were relevant to the query or task at hand. The paper concludes with some recommendations for improving the design of metadata surrogates in search result interfaces.

A proposed model of knowledge management in the software industry sector

This paper reports on a research project that aimed to identify the different aspects of knowledge management (KM) in the software (SW) industry sector. The study employed an inductive qualitative approach based on a single case study of a successful SW development company in Taiwan. The company was selected as it is already explicitly using knowledge sharing (KS) through story telling in their practices. Overall twenty-one participants were interviewed using a semi-structured interview script. The findings of the study show that it is tacit knowledge that is more difficult to share and that this type of knowledge is of a very different nature depending on the stages of design and development. The study showed that tacit knowledge in the SW process ranges from very soft skills of dealing, dialoguing and negotiating with users to the very technical aspects of programming. This clearly represents a serious challenge to professionals in this sector and requires inclusive KM and KS processes based on an in-depth understanding of both the process and tacit knowledge involved. This paper aims to provide an extended and revised taxonomy and model for KM and KS in the sector.