Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

March 1, 2012

The Lady Librarian of Toronto

Filed under: Librarian/Expert Searchers,Library — Patrick Durusau @ 9:00 pm

The Lady Librarian of Toronto

Cynthia Murrell writes:

Ah, the good old days. Canada’s The Globe and Mail profiles a powerhouse of a librarian who recently passed away at the age of 100 in “When Lady Librarians Always Wore Skirts and You didn’t Dare Make Noise.” When Alice Moulton began her career, libraries were very different than they are today. Writer Judy Stoffman describes:

When Alice Moulton went to work at the University of Toronto library in 1942, libraries were forbidding, restricted spaces organized around the near-sacred instrument known as the card catalogue. They were ruled by a chief librarian, always male, whose word was law. Staff usually consisted of prim maiden ladies, dressed in skirts and wearing serious glasses, like the character played by Donna Reed in It’s a Wonderful Life, in the alternate life she would have had without Jimmy Stewart.

The article about Alice Moulton is very much worth reading.

True enough that libraries are different today than they were say forty or more years ago, but not all of that has been for the good.

Libraries in my memory were places where librarians, who are experts at uncovering information, would assist patrons find more information than they thought possible. Often teaching the techniques necessary to use arcane publications to do so.

Make no mistake, librarians still fulfill that role in many places but it is a popular mistake among funders to think that searching the WWW should be good enough for anyone. Why spend extra money for reference services?

True, if you are interested in superficial information, then by all means, use the WWW. Ask your doctor to consult it on your next visit. Or your lawyer. Good enough for anyone else, should be good enough for you.

I read posts about “big data” everyday and post reports of some of them here. It will take technological innovations to master “big data,” but that is only part of the answer.

To find useful information in the universe of “big data,” we are going to need something else.

The something else is going to be librarians like Alice Moulton, who can find resources we never imagined existed.

February 10, 2012

ODLIS: Online Dictionary for Library and Information Science

Filed under: Dictionary,Information Science,Library — Patrick Durusau @ 4:05 pm

ODLIS: Online Dictionary for Library and Information Science by Joan M. Reitz.

ODLIS is known to all librarians and graduate school library students but perhaps not to those of us who abuse library terminology in CS and related pursuits. Can’t promise it will make our usage any better but certainly won’t make it any worse. 😉

This would make a very interesting “term for a day” type resource.

Certainly one you should bookmark and browse at your leisure.

History of the Dictionary

ODLIS began at the Haas Library in 1994 as a four-page printed handout titled Library Lingo, intended for undergraduates not fluent in English and for English-speaking students unfamiliar with basic library terminology. In 1996, the text was expanded and converted to HTML format for installation on the WCSU Libraries Homepage under the title Hypertext Library Lingo: A Glossary of Library Terminology. In 1997, many more hypertext links were added and the format improved in response to suggestions from users. During the summer of 1999, several hundred terms and definitions were added, and a generic version was created that omitted all reference to specific conditions and practices at the Haas Library.

In the fall of 1999, the glossary was expanded to 1,800 terms, renamed to reflect its extended scope, and copyrighted. In February, 2000, ODLIS was indexed in Yahoo! under “Reference – Dictionaries – Subject.” It was also indexed in the WorldCat database, available via OCLC FirstSearch. During the year 2000, the dictionary was expanded to 2,600 terms and by 2002 an additional 800 terms had been added. From 2002 to 2004, the dictionary was expanded to 4,200 terms and cross-references were added, in preparation for the print edition. Since 2004, an additional 600 terms and definitions have been added.

Purpose of the Dictionary

ODLIS is designed as a hypertext reference resource for library and information science professionals, university students and faculty, and users of all types of libraries. The primary criterion for including a term is whether a librarian or other information professional might reasonably be expected to know its meaning in the context of his or her work. A newly coined term is added when, in the author’s judgment, it is likely to become a permanent addition to the lexicon of library and information science. The dictionary reflects North American practice; however, because ODLIS was first developed as an online resource available worldwide, with an e-mail contact address for feedback, users from many countries have contributed to its growth, often suggesting additional terms and commenting on existing definitions. Expansion of the dictionary is an ongoing process.

Broad in scope, ODLIS includes not only the terminology of the various specializations within library science and information studies but also the vocabulary of publishing, printing, binding, the book trade, graphic arts, book history, literature, bibliography, telecommunications, and computer science when, in the author’s judgment, a definition might prove useful to librarians and information specialists in their work. Entries are descriptive, with examples provided when appropriate. The definitions of terms used in the Anglo-American Cataloging Rules follow AACR2 closely and are therefore intended to be prescriptive. The dictionary includes some slang terms and idioms and a few obsolete terms, often as See references to the term in current use. When the meaning of a term varies according to the field in which it is used, priority is given to the definition that applies within the field with which it is most closely associated. Definitions unrelated to library and information science are generally omitted. As a rule, definition is given under an acronym only when it is generally used in preference to the full term. Alphabetization is letter-by-letter. The authority for spelling and hyphenation is Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language (College Edition). URLs, current as of date of publication, are updated annually.

January 28, 2012

the time for libraries is NOW

Filed under: Librarian/Expert Searchers,Library — Patrick Durusau @ 10:54 pm

the time for libraries is NOW

Ned Potter outlines a call to arms for librarians!

Librarians need to aggressively make the case for libraries…., but I would tweak Ned’s message a bit.

Once upon a time, being the best, most complete, skilled, collection point or guide to knowledge was enough for libraries. People knew libraries and education were their tickets to economic/social mobility, out of the slums, to a better life.

Today people are mired in the vast sea of the “middle-class” and information is pushed upon willing and/or unwilling information consumers. Infotainment, advertising, spam of all types, vying for our attention, with little basis for distinguishing the useful from the useless, the important from the idiotic and graceful from the graceless.

Libraries and librarians cannot be heard in the vortex of noise that surrounds the average information consumer, while passively waiting for a question or reference interview.

Let’s drop pose of passivity. Librarians are passionate about libraries and the principles they represent.

Become information pushers. Bare-fisted information brawlers who fight for the attention of information consumers.

Push information on news channels, politicians, even patrons. When a local story breaks, feed the news sources with background material and expect credit for it. Same for political issues. Position papers that explore both sides of issues. Not bland finding aids but web-based multi-media resources with a mixture of web and more traditional resources.

Information consumers can be dependent on the National Enquirer, Jon Stewart, Rupert Murdock, or libraries/librarians. Your choice.

The Harvard Library Innovation Laboratory at Harvard Law School

Filed under: Legal Informatics,Library — Patrick Durusau @ 7:30 pm

The Harvard Library Innovation Laboratory at Harvard Law School

The “Stuff We’re Looking At” sidebar is of particular interest. A wide range of resources and projects that may be of interest.

Any similar library labs/resources that you would suggest?

BTW, The Molecule of Data by Karen Coyle raises a number of points that I think are highly contestable if not provably wrong.

Take a listen and see what you think. I will be posting specific comments this coming week.

January 5, 2012

Digging into Data Challenge

Filed under: Archives,Contest,Data Mining,Library,Preservation — Patrick Durusau @ 4:09 pm

Digging into Data Challenge

From the homepage:

What is the “challenge” we speak of? The idea behind the Digging into Data Challenge is to address how “big data” changes the research landscape for the humanities and social sciences. Now that we have massive databases of materials used by scholars in the humanities and social sciences — ranging from digitized books, newspapers, and music to transactional data like web searches, sensor data or cell phone records — what new, computationally-based research methods might we apply? As the world becomes increasingly digital, new techniques will be needed to search, analyze, and understand these everyday materials. Digging into Data challenges the research community to help create the new research infrastructure for 21st century scholarship.

Winners for Round 2, some 14 projects out of 67, were announced on 3 January 2012.

Interested to hear your comments on the projects as I am sure the projects would as well.

Everlasting Metadata?

Filed under: Library,Metadata,Museums,Preservation — Patrick Durusau @ 11:15 am

Everlasting Metadata?

Cynthia Murrell writes of the concern of some groups who want permanent metadata on digital objects:

On the other hand, there’s the law of unintended consequences. There is also the question of “language drift.” If metadata are not up to date, the searcher of the future might not be able to locate the information object because the search term does not match the metadata’s lingo.

And raises the more pragmatic concern of what happens when metadata needs to be corrected?

Curious, do institutions return to digital objects to update them to have the latest metadata?

My impression is that they don’t, but that is based on my experiences with mostly libraries and card catalog data.

Suggestions? Comments for where to look?

A topic map would enable the preservation of the original metadata and updates to that metadata.

Anyone know of digital preservation efforts that plan on preservation of metadata and its updating?

November 24, 2011

Libraries: Where It All Went Wrong

Filed under: Library — Patrick Durusau @ 3:57 pm

Libraries: Where It All Went Wrong

From the introduction:

Bill Gates wrote a bestseller in 1995. He was on a roll: Microsoft Windows had finally crushed its old foe the Macintosh computer from Apple, Microsoft was minting money hand over fist, and he was hugely respected in the industry he had helped start. He roped in other big brains from Microsoft to write a book to answer the question, “what next?” The Road Ahead talked about the implications of everyone having a computer and how they would use the great Information Superhighway that was going to happen.

The World Wide Web appears in the index to The Road Ahead precisely four times. Bill Gates didn’t think the Internet would be big. The Information Superhighway of Gates’s fantasies would have more structure than the Internet, be better controlled than the Internet, in short it would be more the sort of thing that a company like Microsoft would make.

Bill Gates and Microsoft were caught flat-footed by the take-up of the Internet. They had built an incredibly profitable and strong company which treated computers as disconnected islands: Microsoft software ran on the computers, but didn’t help connect them. Gates and Microsoft soon realized the Internet was here to stay and rushed to fix Windows to deal with it, but they never made up for that initial wrong-footing.

At least part of the reason for this was because they had this fantastic cash cow in Windows, the island software. They were victims of what Clayton Christenson calls the Innovator’s Dilemma: they couldn’t think past their own successes to build the next big thing, the thing that’d eat their lunch. They still haven’t got there: Bing, their rival to Google, has eaten $5.5B since 2009 and it isn’t profitable yet.

I’m telling you this because libraries are like Microsoft.

Read this post and then re-read this post if you care about libraries.

I think he is spot on in his analysis but it is going to be up to you to find how libraries can be a value-add that is visible and vital to the general public. What difference do you make in their lives?

Before anyone flames me, let me point out that my wife is a librarian, my daughter (only child) is studying to be a librarian, I am adjunct faculty at a library school (GSLIS/UIUC), and have spent most of my life in libraries of one sort or another.

However, I do agree with Nat Torkington that libraries have an enormous value-add but they need to make that case in terms of the Internet and networking knowledge. Making the case for pre-Internet libraries is doomed to failure and dooms the libraries that make it.

November 12, 2011

Entities, Relationships, and Semantics: the State of Structured Search

Filed under: Entity Extraction,Library,Relation Extraction,Searching,Semantics — Patrick Durusau @ 8:39 pm

Entities, Relationships, and Semantics: the State of Structured Search

Jeff Dalton’s notes on a panel discussion moderated by Daniel Tunkelang. The panel consisted of Andrew Hogue (Google NY), Breck Baldwin (alias-i), Evan Sandhause (NY Times), and Wlodek Zadrozny (IBM. Watson).

Read the notes, watch the discussion.

BTW, Sandhause (New York Times) points out that librarians have been working with structured data for a very long time.

So, libraries want to be more like web search engines and the folks building search engines want to be more like libraries.

Sounds to me like both communities need to spend more time reading each others blogs, cross-attending conferences, etc.

November 5, 2011

LibraryCloud News

Filed under: Legal Informatics,Library — Patrick Durusau @ 6:44 pm

LibraryCloud News

An update from the Harvard Library Innovation Laboratory:

I spent the week working on LibraryCloud News (a project that Jeff, David, and I have been batting around for a while). We hope LibraryCloud News will become the Hacker News for library dorks (instead of startup dorks). It’s a place where you can submit questions or a link to the community and then engage the community through comment-style discussion. (Exactly the way Reddit and Hacker News work) LibaryCloud News is powered by the same code that powers Hacker News and is humming along in the Amazon Cloud. If you’re interested, we’d love to have you help us beta test LibraryCloud News at http://news.librarycloud.org/

OK, so I have a weakness for libraries and law libraries in particular. 😉

Still, I think this is a promising development and should be encouraged.

Now imagine harvesting the stories from this as a feed and mapping in related resources so people pursuing the stories have related technology, users and vendors with them. Beats the hell out of ads anyday.

October 21, 2011

Towards georeferencing archival collections

Filed under: Archives,EADitor,Encoded Archival Description (EAD),Geographic Data,Geographic Information Retrieval,Interface Research/Design,Library,Library software — Patrick Durusau @ 7:28 pm

Towards georeferencing archival collections

From the post:

One of the most effective ways to associate objects in archival collections with related objects is with controlled access terms: personal, corporate, and family names; places; subjects. These associations are meaningless if chosen arbitrarily. With respect to machine processing, Thomas Jefferson and Jefferson, Thomas are not seen as the same individual when judging by the textual string alone. While EADitor has incorporated authorized headings from LCSH and local vocabulary (scraped from terms found in EAD files currently in the eXist database) almost since its inception, it has not until recently interacted with other controlled vocabulary services. Interacting with EAC-CPF and geographical services is high on the development priority list.

geonames.org

Over the last week, I have been working on incorporating geonames.org queries into the XForms application. Geonames provides stable URIs for more than 7.5 million place names internationally. XML representations of each place are accessible through various REST APIs. These XML datastreams also include the latitude and longitude, which will make it possible to georeference archival collections as a whole or individual items within collections (an item-level indexing strategy will be offered in EADitor as an alternative to traditional, collection-based indexing soon).

This looks very interesting.

Details:

EADitor project site (Google Code): http://code.google.com/p/eaditor/
Installation instructions (specific for Ubuntu but broadly applies to all Unix-based systems): http://code.google.com/p/eaditor/wiki/UbuntuInstallation
Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/eaditor

October 17, 2011

CENDI: Federal STI Managers Group

Filed under: Government Data,Information Retrieval,Librarian/Expert Searchers,Library — Patrick Durusau @ 6:44 pm

CENDI: Federal STI Managers Group

From the webpage:

Welcome to the CENDI web site

CENDI’s vision is to provide its member federal STI agencies a cooperative enterprise where capabilities are shared and challenges are faced together so that the sum of accomplishments is greater than each individual agency can achieve on its own.

CENDI’s mission is to help improve the productivity of federal science- and technology-based programs through effective scientific, technical, and related information-support systems. In fulfilling its mission, CENDI agencies play an important role in addressing science- and technology-based national priorities and strengthening U.S. competitiveness.

CENDI is an interagency working group of senior scientific and technical information (STI) managers from 14 U.S. federal agencies:

  • Defense Technical Information Center (Department of Defense)
  • Office of Research and Development & Office of Environmental Information (Environmental Protection Agency)
  • Government Printing Office
  • Library of Congress
  • NASA Scientific and Technical Information Program
  • National Agricultural Library (Department of Agriculture)
  • National Archives and Records Administration
  • National Library of Education (Department of Education)
  • National Library of Medicine (Department of Health and Human Services)
  • National Science Foundation
  • National Technical Information Service (Department of Commerce)
  • National Transportation Library (Department of Transportation)
  • Office of Scientific and Technical Information (Department of Energy)
  • USGS/Core Science Systems (Department of Interior)

These programs represent over 97% of the federal research and development budget.

The CENDI web site is hosted by the Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC), and is maintained by the CENDI secretariat. (emphasis added)

Yeah, I thought the 97% figure would catch your attention. 😉 Not sure how it compares with spending on IT and information systems in law enforcement and the spook agencies.

Topic Maps Class Project: Select one of the fourteen members and prepare a report for the class on their primary web interface. What did you like/dislike about the interface? How would you integrate the information you found there with your “home” library site (for students already employed elsewhere) or with the GSLIS site?

BTW, I think you will find that these agencies and their personnel have bee thinking deeply about information integration for decades. It is an extremely difficult problem that has no fixed or easy solution.

Networked Knowledge Organization Systems/Services NKOS

Filed under: Knowledge Organization,Library,Ontology,Terminology,Thesaurus,Vocabularies — Patrick Durusau @ 6:40 pm

Networked Knowledge Organization Systems/Services NKOS

From the website:

NKOS is devoted to the discussion of the functional and data model for enabling knowledge organization systems/services (KOS), such as classification systems, thesauri, gazetteers, and ontologies, as networked interactive information services to support the description and retrieval of diverse information resources through the Internet.

Knowledge Organization Systems/Services (KOS) model the underlying semantic structure of a domain. Embodied as Web-based services, they can facilitate resource discovery and retrieval. They act as semantic road maps and make possible a common orientation by indexers and future users (whether human or machine). — Douglas Tudhope, Traugott Koch, New Applications of Knowledge Organization Systems

A wide variety of resources that will interest anyone working with knowledge systems. I would expect any number of these to appear in future posts with comments or observations.

October 11, 2011

Linked Literature, Linked TV – Everything Looks like a Graph

Filed under: Graphs,Librarian/Expert Searchers,Library,Maps — Patrick Durusau @ 5:55 pm

Linked Literature, Linked TV – Everything Looks like a Graph

From the post:

…When do graphs become maps?

I report here on some experiments that stem from two collaborations around Linked Data. All the visuals in the post are views of bibliographic data, based on similarity measures derrived from book / subject keyword associations, with visualization and a little additional analysis using Gephi. Click-through to Flickr to see larger versions of any image. You can’t always see the inter-node links, but the presentation is based on graph layout tools.

Firstly, in my ongoing work in the NoTube project, we have been working with TV-related data, ranging from ‘social Web’ activity streams, user profiles, TV archive catalogues and classification systems like Lonclass. Secondly, over the summer I have been working with the Library Innovation Lab at Harvard, looking at ways of opening up bibliographic catalogues to the Web as Linked Data, and at ways of cross-linking Web materials (e.g. video materials) to a Webbified notion of ‘bookshelf‘.

I like the exploratory perspective of this post.

What other data could you link to materials in a library holding?

Since I live in the Deep South, what if entries in the library catalog on desegregation had links to local residents who participated in civil rights (or resisted) activities? The stories of the leadership are well known. What about all the thousands of others who played their own parts, without being sought after by PBS during Pledge week years later?

Or people who resisted the draft, were interred during WW II, by the Axis or Allied Powers, or who were missile launch officers, sworn to “turn the keys” on receipt of a valid launch order.

Would that help make your library a more obvious resource of community and continuity?

October 9, 2011

The RDA Vocabularies: Implementation, Extension, and Mapping

Filed under: Library,RDA — Patrick Durusau @ 6:42 pm

NISO/DCMI Webinar: “The RDA Vocabularies: Implementation, Extension, and Mapping”

If you are unfamiliar with RDA, I would suggest the D-Lib article, RDA Vocabularies: Process, Outcome, Use, by Diane Hillmann, Karen Coyle, Jon Phipps, and Gordon Dunsire, cited by the webinar announcement as a starting point.

The article concludes (in part, emphasis added):

But the benefit of using a modern and fully registered standard is not only to others — library reliance on data standards that require that all data be created by hand by highly trained individuals is clearly unsustainable. In a recent presentation to an audience at ALA Annual in Chicago, Jon Phipps demonstrated that continued library use of a standard only we understand has cut us off from reuse of data being built exponentially by entities such as DBpedia, which are clearly, for a host of reasons, choosing not to access and reuse library data [Phipps] [DBpedia]. Only by changing what we do in library environments can we hope to participate with other large users of data in building better descriptive data that we can then hope to reuse to improve our own services.

I don’t disagree with the assessment but am not altogether sure about the solution. That is to say that what constitutes the “common standard” varies from time to time. Cataloging in Latin would have been the most accessible once upon a time. And those records still exist.

As we chase another “standard,” what provision have we made not to cut ourselves (and users) off from prior information?

While we pursue exposing users to the equivalent of an coarsely edited annual Almanac of fact, surmise and rumor.

I don’t think you will find the answer with RDA.

Still, you may find the webinar informative (if a bit pricey).

From the post:

DATE: 16 November 2011
TIME: 1:00pm – 2:30pm EDT (17:00-19:30 UTC)
REGISTRATION: http://www.niso.org/news/events/2011/dcmi/rda

ABOUT THE WEBINAR

During a meeting at the British Library in May 2007 between the Joint Steering Committee for the Development of RDA and DCMI, important recommendations were forged for the development of an element vocabulary, application profile, and value vocabularies [1], based on the Resource Description and Access (RDA) standard, then in final draft. A DCMI/RDA Task Group [2] has completed much of the work, and described their process and decisions in a recent issue of D-Lib Magazine [3]. A final, pre-publication technical review of this work is underway, prior to adoption by early implementers.

This webinar will provide an up-to-the-minute update on the review process, as well as progress on the RDA-based application profiles. The webinar will discuss practical implementation issues raised by early implementers and summarize issues surfaced in virtual and face-to-face venues where the vocabularies and application profiles have been discussed.

[1] http://www.bl.uk/bibliographic/meeting.html
[2] http://dublincore.org/dcmirdataskgroup/
[3] http://dlib.org/dlib/january10/hillmann/01hillmann.html

SPEAKERS:

Diane Hillmann is Vocabulary Management Officer for DCMI and a partner in the consulting firm Metadata Management Associates. She is co-chair (with Gordon Dunsire) of the DCMI/RDA Task Group and is the DCMI Liaison to the ALA Committee on Cataloging: Description and access, the US body providing feedback on RDA Development.

Thomas Baker, DCMI Chief Information Officer (Communications, Research and Development), was recently co-chair of the W3C Semantic Web Deployment Working Group and a W3C Incubator Group on Library Linked Data (report pending).

REGISTRATION:

For registration and webinar technical information, see http://www.niso.org/news/events/2011/dcmi/rda. Registration closes at 12:00 pm Eastern on 16 November 2011.

October 5, 2011

Early Music Online

Filed under: Library,Music — Patrick Durusau @ 6:57 pm

Early Music Online

From the website:

Early Music Online is a pilot project in which 300 of the world’s earliest surviving volumes of printed music, held in the British Library, have been digitised and made freely available online.

You can explore the digitised content via the British Library Catalogue. Included are full details of each digitised book, with an inventory of the contents of each, searchable by composer name, title of composition, date and subject, and with links to the digitised content. (Click ‘I want this’ in the Library catalogue to access the digitised music.)

(The British Library link takes you directly to the collection and not to the British Library homepage.)

There are a number of uses which suggest themselves for this data.

September 21, 2011

Online Master of Science in Predictive Analytics

Filed under: Computer Science,CS Lectures,Degree Program,Library,Prediction — Patrick Durusau @ 7:07 pm

Online Master of Science in Predictive Analytics

As businesses seek to maximize the value of vast new stores of available data, Northwestern University’s Master of Science in Predictive Analytics program prepares students to meet the growing demand in virtually every industry for data-driven leadership and problem solving.

Advanced data analysis, predictive modeling, computer-based data mining, and marketing, web, text, and risk analytics are just some of the areas of study offered in the program. As a student in the Master of Science in Predictive Analytics program, you will:

  • Prepare for leadership-level career opportunities by focusing on statistical concepts and practical application
  • Learn from distinguished Northwestern faculty and from the seasoned industry experts who are redefining how data improve decision-making and boost ROI
  • Build statistical and analytic expertise as well as the management and leadership skills necessary to implement high-level, data-driven decisions
  • Earn your Northwestern University master’s degree entirely online

Just so you know, libraries schools were offering mostly online degrees a decade or so ago. Nice to see other disciplines catching up. 😉

It would be interesting to see short courses in subject analysis, as in subject identity and the properties that compose a particular identity, in specific domains.

September 16, 2011

Information Bridge

Filed under: Information Retrieval,Library — Patrick Durusau @ 6:41 pm

Information Bridge

From the webpage:

The Information Bridge: DOE Scientific and Technical Information provides free public access to over 282,000 full-text documents and bibliographic citations of Department of Energy (DOE) research report literature. Documents are primarily from 1991 forward and were produced by DOE, the DOE contractor community, and/or DOE grantees. Legacy documents are added as they become available in electronic format.

The Information Bridge contains documents and citations in physics, chemistry, materials, biology, environmental sciences, energy technologies, engineering, computer and information science, renewable energy, and other topics of interest related to DOE’s mission.

Another important source of US government funded research on information retrieval.

Scientific and Technical Information (STI)

Filed under: CS Lectures,Library — Patrick Durusau @ 6:40 pm

Scientific and Technical Information (STI)

From the “about” page:

STI (scientific and technical information) is the collected set of facts, analyses, and conclusions resulting from scientific, technical, and related engineering research and development efforts, both basic and applied.

That has to be a classic as far as non-helpful explanations. 😉

Or you can try:

This site helps you locate, obtain, and publish NASA aerospace information and find national and international information pertinent to your research and mission.

A little better.

Access publicly available NASA and NACA reports, conference papers, journal articles, and more. Includes over a quarter-million full-text documents, and links to more than a half-million images and video clips.

Better still.

And then:

NTRS promotes the dissemination of NASA STI to the widest audience possible by allowing NTRS information to be harvested by sites using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). OAI-PMH defines a mechanism for information technology systems to exchange citation information using the open standards HTTP (Hypertext Transport Protocol) and XML (Extensible Markup Language). NTRS is designed to accept and respond to automated requests using OAI-PMH. Automated requests only harvest citation information and not the full-text document images.

Which means you can populate your topic map with data from this source quite easily.

EECS Technical Reports UC Berkeley

Filed under: CS Lectures,Library — Patrick Durusau @ 6:39 pm

EECS Technical Reports UC Berkeley

From the webpage:

The EECS Technical Memorandum Series provides a dated archive of EECS research. It includes Ph.D. theses and master’s reports as well as technical documents that complement traditional publication media such as journals. For example, technical reports may document work in progress, early versions of results that are eventually published in more traditional media, and supplemental information such as long proofs, software documentation, code listings, or elaborated examples.

Technical reports listed here include the EECS Technical Report series (started in October 2005), the CS Technical Report series (from 1982 to 2005), and the ERL Technical report series (from 1984 to 2005, plus selected titles from before 1984). Full text is included for the EECS and CS series, but not for the ERL series. In the case of the ERL series, full text may be available on other web sites (such as the personal web pages of the authors).

September 15, 2011

DTIC Online

Filed under: Information Retrieval,Library — Patrick Durusau @ 7:50 pm

DTIC Online

From the webpage:

The Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC®) serves the DoD community as the largest central resource for DoD and government-funded scientific, technical, engineering, and business related information available today .

For more than 65 years DTIC has provided the warfighter and researchers, scientists, engineers, laboratories, and universities timely access to over 2 million publications covering over 250 subject areas. Our mission supports the nation’s warfighter.
….

The United States government and I suspect other national governments has sponsored decades worth of research on text processing, mining and evaluation. This is one of the major interfaces to US based literature. The Literature-Related Discovery (LRD) material originated from this source.

You will find things such as: “Research in Information Retrieval – Final Report – An investigation of the techniques and concepts of information retrieval,” dated 31 July 1964 as well as current reports.

A real treasure trove of historical and current material on information retrieval. The historical material will help you recognize when you are re-solving a well known problem. And sometimes help you avoid repeating old mistakes.

CERN Document Server (CDS)

Filed under: Library — Patrick Durusau @ 7:50 pm

CERN Document Server (CDS)

If you want to talk about “big data” and tools for dealing with it, what better place to start than where big data is the norm, not the exception.

You may want to start off with the help page as this is one of the barest interfaces I have seen in a while.

September 13, 2011

Reference Interview

Filed under: Librarian/Expert Searchers,Library — Patrick Durusau @ 7:11 pm

Reference Interview by Jimmy Ghaphery.

More for library students in my topic maps class but others may benefit as well.

The same questions that librarians ask in a “reference interview” are the same sort of questions that will help you identify subjects that should go in a particular topic map.

Your users may not realize there are subjects that will make their finding of other subjects easier in the future. Or that are used by other users in the same department, etc.

June 23, 2011

British Library Makes Available 250,000 Digitized Books

Filed under: Books,Library — Patrick Durusau @ 1:58 pm

British Library Makes Available 250,000 Digitized Books

From the post:

The British Library is making available 250,000 texts through Google’s Books system.

As a legal deposit library,The British Library gets copies of all books produced in the U.K. and Ireland, as well as overseas books published in Britain.

The texts, some published in the 18th century, are in the public domain. Included in the collection will be books on mathematics, science, and engineering, which would serve as invaluable resources for historians of science and today’s scientists and researchers. It’s plausible that there is plenty of original thinking that’s been overlooked and forgotten–and which will soon be only a Google search away.

This comes on top of the British Library’s effort at bringing 60,000 digital copies of historic books to the general public as a free iPad app. At 150 million texts, the size of Library’s collection is second only to that of the Library of Congress.

See also the IPad, 60,000 Text Story.

The amount of available semantically diverse data grows everyday.

May 3, 2011

The Proverbial Lone Wolf Librarian’s Weblog

Filed under: Authoring Topic Maps,Library,Searching — Patrick Durusau @ 1:08 pm

The Proverbial Lone Wolf Librarian’s Weblog

A blog that will be of interest to librarians and library school students in particular.

It collects presentations that focus on digital issues from a library perspective.

Acquiring the skills long taught to librarians will make you a better topic map author.

January 22, 2011

Heads they win, tales we lose: Discovery tools will never deliver on their promise – Post

Filed under: Library,Searching — Patrick Durusau @ 10:01 am

Heads they win, tales we lose: Discovery tools will never deliver on their promise is an enlightening tail on a problem topic maps may or may not solve.

From the post:

As strange as it may sound, the future is not in unified databases powering discovery tools, Matt told me yesterday. He can’t foresee a time when the major database vendors will find it profitable to combine their metadata for our benefit. Instead, the future is in hybrid systems that combine discovery and federation. As I see it, libraries will have to decide if they care whether their EBSCO products or their ProQuest products are seamlessly integrated, choose the discovery layer that matches the company of their choice, and then federate in the content from the other database providers. Federated search is dead; long live federated search. And I’m sure the thinking at EBSCO is that we’ll be paying someone for a discovery tool, and that someone should be them.

(Matt in that quote is Matt Andros, Vice President of Field Sales at EBSCO, a major online content vendor.)

One wonders what it would look like to have a local, federated overlay for viewing a vendor’s resources.

Create metadata about their metadata/data. Have to show it in order for you to use it.

January 12, 2011

ACM Digital Library for Computing Professionals

Filed under: Computer Science,Digital Library,Library — Patrick Durusau @ 2:59 pm

ACM Digital Library for Computing Professionals

The ACM has released a new version of it digital library, and, is offering a free three-month trial of it.

From the announcement:

  • Reorganized author profile pages that present a snapshot of author contributions and metrics of author influence by monitoring publication and citation counts and download usage volume
  • Broadened citation pages for individual articles with tabs for metadata and links to facilitate exploration and discovery of the depth of content in the DL
  • Enhanced interactivity tools such as RSS feeds, bibliographic exports, and social network channels to retrieve data, promote user engagement, and introduce user content
  • Redesigned binders for creating personal, annotatable collections of bibliographies or reading lists, and sharing them with ACM and non-ACM members, or exporting them into standard authoring tools like self-generated virtual PDF publications
  • Expanded table-of-contents opt-in service for all publications in the DL—from ACM and other publishers—that alerts users via email and RSS feeds to new issues of journals, magazines, newsletters, and proceedings.

I mention it here for a couple of reasons:

1) For resources on computing, whether contemporary or older materials, I can’t think of a better starting place for research. I am here more often than not.

2) It sets a benchmark for what is available in terms of digital libraries. If you are going to use topic maps to build a digital library, what would you do better?

January 11, 2011

International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries

Filed under: Conferences,Library,Library software,Topic Maps — Patrick Durusau @ 6:40 am

International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries – Call for papers in four general areas:

Foundations: Technology and Methodologies

  • Digital libraries: architectures and infrastructures
  • Metadata standards and protocols in digital library systems
  • Interoperability in digital libraries, data and information integration
  • Distributed and collaborative information spaces
  • Systems, algorithms, and models for digital preservation
  • Personalization in digital libraries
  • Information access: retrieval and browsing
  • Information organization
  • Information visualization
  • Multimedia information management and retrieval
  • Multilinguality in digital libraries
  • Knowledge organization and ontologies in digital libraries

Digital Humanities

  • Digital libraries in cultural heritage
  • Computational linguistics: text mining and retrieval
  • Organizational aspects of digital preservation
  • Information policy and legal aspects (e.g., copyright laws)
  • Social networks and networked information
  • Human factors in networked information
  • Scholarly primitives

Research Data

  • Architectures for large-scale data management (e.g., Grids, Clouds)
  • Cyberinfrastructures: architectures, operation and evolution
  • Collaborative information environments
  • Data mining and extraction of structure from networked information
  • Scientific data curation
  • Metadata for scientific data, data provenance
  • Services and workflows for scientific data
  • Data and knowledge management in virtual organizations

Applications and User Experience

  • Multi-national digital library federations (e.g., Europeana)
  • Digital Libraries in eGovernment, elearning, eHealth, eScience, ePublishing
  • Semantic Web and Linked Data
  • User studies for and evaluation of digital library systems and applications
  • Personal information management and personal digital libraries
  • Enterprise-scale knowledge and information management
  • User behavior and modeling
  • User mobility and context awareness in information access
  • User interfaces for digital libraries

Topic maps have a contribution to make in these areas. Don’t be shy!

Important dates

Abstract submission (full and short papers): March 21, 2011

Research paper submission: March 28, 2011 (midnight HAST, GMT -10hrs)

Notification of acceptance: May 23, 2011

Submission of final version: June 6, 2011

******
PS: Note the call for demos on all the same areas. Demo submission – Due March 28, 2011; Notification of acceptance – May 23, 2011; Submission of final version – June 6, 2011

January 6, 2011

Moving Forward – Library Project Blog

Filed under: Interface Research/Design,Library,Library software,Software,Solr — Patrick Durusau @ 8:30 am

Moving Forward is a blog I discovered via alls things cataloged.

From the Forward blog:

Forward is a Resource Discovery experiment that builds a unified search interface for library data.

Today Forward is 100% of the UW System Library catalogs and two UW digital collections. The project also experiments with additional search contextualization by using web service APIs.

Forward can be accessed at the URL:
http://forward.library.wisconsin.edu/.

Sounds like a great opportunity for topic map fans with an interest in library interfaces to make a contribution.

December 31, 2010

Libraries and the Semantic Web (video)

Filed under: Library,Semantic Web — Patrick Durusau @ 6:15 am

Libraries and the Semantic Web (video)

This is a very amusing video.

December 14, 2010

World Library and Information Congress : 77th IFLA General Conference and Assembly

Filed under: Conferences,Library,Library Associations — Patrick Durusau @ 3:30 pm

Calls for Papers: World Library and Information Congress : 77th IFLA General Conference and Assembly 13-18 August 2011, San Juan, Puerto Rico

You should visit the main site as well but I linked directly to the call for papers listing. Some 15 of 16 calls for the main conference are still open and there are calls for satellite meeting papers as well.

Proceedings from prior conferences are available (at least the two that I checked) and I will include links to those in an upcoming post.

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