Stuart A. Sutton

The panda syndrome : An ecology of LIS education

The fundamental changes that are shaping the future environment of educational programs in library and information studies (LIS) are explored in the context of two overlapping ecosystems, the rapidly changing information universe in which the LIS profession operates and the university settings in which the LIS educational programs are housed. We use ecological theory-biological, organizational, and professional- and the sociological theory of Pierre Bourdieu to describe the radical nature of the change facing LIS education and to identify adaptive strategies. We warn that survival of LIS education does not necessarily mean the survival of current programs, and certainly not in their current forms. We warn that the increasing value of information is bringing other professions into the information field and changing the boundaries and rules of competition. We suggest that LIS education needs to further substitute an information-centered focus for its traditional institutional focus. Finally, we suggest that the habitus or system of dispositions of LIS, derived from libraries and the public sector, may disadvantage LIS in its competition with professions and their associated educational programs that are more accustomed to competition for domain. Because habitus consists of largely unexamined assumptions and interpretations, an awareness of it is the essential first step to determining whether it is conducive to the survival of a professions knowledge basis, values, and practices

The role of attorney mental models of law in case relevance determinations: an exploratory analysis

This article examines the information seeking and evaluative behavior of attorneys as they search the corpus of law for primary authority in order to solve context sensitive legal issues. First, the dynamic mental models attorneys construct of the law as expressed in its published artifacts is explored. The relevance judgment of cases is then explicated in terms of these models. The conclusion reached is that relevance judgments shift along a knowledge continuum depending on the status of the attorneys mental model, and that the factors underlying these judgments are complex, multidimensional, and knowable. Current empirical research into the retrieval effectiveness of two full‐text legal databases is evaluated in light of the behavioral theory and mental models developed. The implications of attorney information seeking behavior for future information retrieval system design for this domain are also explored.

Automatic metadata generation & evaluation

The poster reports on a project in which we are investigating methods for breaking the human metadata-generation bottleneck that plagues Digital Libraries. The research question is whether metadata elements and values can be automatically generated from the content of educational resources, and correctly assigned to mathematics and science educational materials. Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning techniques were implemented to automatically assign values of the GEMgenerate metadata element set tofor learning resources provided by the Gateway for Education (GEM), a service that offers web access to a wide range of educational materials. In a user study, education professionals evaluated the metadata assigned to learning resources by either automatic tagging or manual assignment. Results show minimal difference in the eyes of the evaluators between automatically generated metadata and manually assigned metadata.

Conceptual design and deployment of a metadata framework for educational resources on the Internet

The metadata framework described in this article stems from a growing concern of the U.S. Department of Education and its National Library of Education that teachers, students, and parents are encountering increasing difficulty in accessing educational resources on the Internet even as those resources are becoming more abundant. This concern is joined by the realization that as the Internet matures as a publishing environment, the successful management of resource repositories will hinge to a great extent on the intelligent use of metadata. We first explicate the conceptual foundations for the Gateway to Educational Materials (GEM) framework including the adoption of the Dublin Core Element Set as its base referent, and the extension of that set to meet the needs of the domain. We then discuss the complex of decisions that must be made regarding selection of the units of description and the structuring of an information space. The article concludes with a discussion of metadata generation, the association of metadata to the objects described, and a general description of the GEM system architecture.

Breaking the metadata generation bottleneck: preliminary findings

The goal of our 18 month NSDL-funded project is to develop Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning technology which will accomplish automatic metadata generation for individual educational resources in digital collections. The metadata tags that the system will be learning to automatically assign are the full complement of Gateway to Educational Materials (GEM) metadata tags – from the nationally recognized consortium of organizations concerned with access to educational resources. The documents that comprise the sample for this research come from the Eisenhower National Clearinghouse on Science and Mathematics.

A Trends, Trend Projections, and Crystal Ball Gazing

The KALIPER study revealed six general trends denoting change in the professional education for librarianship and information science (LIS). This article explores those changes in light of the framework set down by Nancy Van House and Stuart Sutton in The Panda Syndrome: An Ecology of LIS Education.

Gateway to educational materials (GEM): metadata for networked information discovery and retrieval

Abstract Enhanced access to educational materials on the Internet for the nations teachers and students is one of President Clintons second-term goals. In pursuit of this goal, the National Library of Education 2 (NLE) identified lesson plans and teacher guides as a critical area in which library and information science expertise should be applied in order to improve the organization and accessibility of large collections of educational materials that are already available on various federal, state, university, non-profit, and commercial Internet sites. The U.S. Department of Education 3 and the NLE charged the ERIC Clearinghouse on Information and Technology 4 at Syracuse University with the task of spearheading a project to develop an operational framework to provide the nations teachers with “one-stop/any-stop” access to this vast pool of educational materials. The goal of the Gateway to Educational Materials 5 project (GEM) is to achieve this goal through development and deployment of a metadata element set and accompanying procedures for its use.

Metadata Quality, Utility and the Semantic Web : The Case of Learning Resources and Achievement Standards

ABSTRACT This article explores metadata quality issues in the creation and encoding of mappings or correlations of educational resources to K-12 achievement standards and the deployment of the metadata generated on the Semantic Web. The discussion is framed in terms of quality indicia derived from empirical studies of metadata in the Web environment. A number of forces at work in determining the quality of correlations metadata are examined including the nature of the emerging Semantic Web metadata ecosystem itself, the reliance on string values in metadata to identify achievement standards, the growing complexity of the standards environment, and the misalignment in terms of granularity between resource and declared objectives.

Planning for the twenty-first century: the California State University

The San Jose State University School of Library and Information Science and the Office of the Chancellor in cooperation with industry partners designed and implemented a broadband network prototype to explore leveraging human and instructional resources among the 22 campuses of the California State University. With its current OC‐3 capacity, the prototype network is capable of supporting near‐broadcast quality two‐way interactive video with simultaneous access to multi‐ and hypermedia resources across the network. Faculty and student collaborative work is facilitated by desktop video teleconferencing from faculty offices and student computer labs.

Developing a mission for the national education network: The challenge of seamless access

The National Library of Education (NLE) recently created the National Education Network (NEN). This article explores the potential mission of the NEN in light of the emerging global learning infrastructure made possible by the Internet. Given the NEN membership of Internet-based collection holders of educational resources, the article develops a five-part framework for exploring the nature of education information provision in a networked digital environment. It examines a number of government sponsored and private sector initiatives that stand as exemplars of the elements of the framework. Once defined, the framework provides the mechanism for framing a policy-based mission for the NEN in which it advocates for education information collections, educates its constituents in terms of the emerging education object economy, and promotes collective dissemination of information regarding the digital learning infrastructure.