Debra Hiom

A framework for evaluating automatic indexing or classification in the context of retrieval

Tools for automatic subject assignment help deal with scale and sustainability in creating and enriching metadata, establishing more connections across and between resources and enhancing consistency. Although some software vendors and experimental researchers claim the tools can replace manual subject indexing, hard scientific evidence of their performance in operating information environments is scarce. A major reason for this is that research is usually conducted in laboratory conditions, excluding the complexities of real‐life systems and situations. The article reviews and discusses issues with existing evaluation approaches such as problems of aboutness and relevance assessments, implying the need to use more than a single “gold standard” method when evaluating indexing and retrieval, and proposes a comprehensive evaluation framework. The framework is informed by a systematic review of the literature on evaluation approaches: evaluating indexing quality directly through assessment by an evaluator or through comparison with a gold standard, evaluating the quality of computer‐assisted indexing directly in the context of an indexing workflow, and evaluating indexing quality indirectly through analyzing retrieval performance.

Research Data Management at the University of Bristol: Charting a course from project to service

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to chart the development of research data management services within the University of Bristol, from the initial Jisc-funded project, through to pilot service and planned core funding of the service. Design/methodology/approach – The paper provides a case study of the approach of the University of Bristol Library service to develop a sustainable Research Data Service. Findings – It outlines the services developed during the project and pilot phases of the service. In particular it focuses on the sustainability planning to ensure that research data management is embedded as a core university service. Originality/value – The case study provides practical advice and valuable insights into the issues and experiences of ensuring that research data management is properly valued and supported within universities.

SOSIG; an Internet Hub for the social sciences, business and law

SOSIG (Social Science Information Gateway) aims to provide a trusted source of selected, high quality Internet information for researchers and practitioners in the social sciences, business and law. This article tracks the development of the gateway since its inception in 1994, describes the current features and looks at some of the associated research and development areas that are taking place around the service including the automatic classification of Web resources and experiments with multilingual thesauri.

The desire project: Promoting and facilitating web usage among Europe's research community

This paper reports on the outputs of the DESIRE project’ ‐ a large, international project aiming to promote and facilitate use of the World‐Wide Web (WWW) in the European research community. DESIRE is funded by the European Union, under the Telematics Application Programme2. The project originally ran from January 1996 to March 1998 but has since received further funding until the year 2000. This paper will focus on the outputs from the first phase of DESIRE. An overview of all the DESIRE tools and reports will be given, followed by a more in‐depth look at the outputs from the work on Resource Discovery strand of the project’, which focused on the development of Web catalogues (subject gateways) and Web indexes. The DESIRE outputs are freely available and this paper will describe and reference them all. Given the size and scope of the project, different outputs are likely to be of interest to different audiences, including network managers, librarians, Web researchers and researchers in general. This pape...