Overview of content related to 'research'

Review of Where the Wild Things Are: Librarian's Guide to the Best Information on the Net

editor — Tue, 19 Nov 1996 00:00:00 +0000

Marylaine Block describes the construction of Where the Wild Things Are: Librarian's Guide to the Best Information on the Net.

Becoming a Gatekeeper, or,
Creating Where the Wild Things Are: Librarian's Guide to the Best Information on the Net

by Marylaine Block, Associate Director for Public Services, O'Keefe Library, St. Ambrose University
"Where the Wild Things Are: Librarians's Guide to the Best Information on the Net" can be found at: http://www.sau.edu/cwis/internet/wild/index.htm

Infopolecon

editor — Tue, 19 Nov 1996 00:00:00 +0000

John Lindsay comments on the evolution of the UK network infrastructure, and the problems arguably generated along the way.

Jeremy Bentham coined the term 'panopticon' in his proposal for a circular prison, whose cells were exposed to a central well in which the warders were located, allowing the prisoners to see all other prisoners and to be observed at all times without ever knowing when they were being watched. Bentham also promoted the idea of political economy as the greatest good for the greatest number. Drawing on his terminology as the basis for this article, I therefore propose the new term 'infopolecon' to describe the political economy of information.

SOSIG: Training to Support Social Science Teaching and Research

editor — Tue, 19 Nov 1996 00:00:00 +0000

Lesly Huxley, the SOSIG Documentation and Training Officer, describes the workshops that SOSIG, one of the projects from the Access to Network Resource section, run.

Meeting end users' needs

Although the 'bread and butter' end user workshops in the Internet for Social Scientists portfolio are aimed at less-experienced netusers there are fewer absolute beginners now than there used to be. Libraries and faculties alike are establishing and developing provision of networked machines running WWW client software and some have their own excellent general Internet training programmes. Fewer sites rely on access to the Web via text-based browsers such as Lynx, with the majority of sites visited now running Netscape.

Mailbase: Unique Electronic Discussion List Service for UK Higher Education Tops 100,000 Users

editor — Tue, 19 Nov 1996 00:00:00 +0000

Morna Findlay and Elaine Blair report on the passing of a milestone for UK academia's premier Mailing List resource.

The National Mailbase Service has this month welcomed its 100,000th user!

An Investigation Into World Wide Web Search Engine Use from within the UK: Preliminary Findings

editor — Tue, 19 Nov 1996 00:00:00 +0000

Simon Stobart and Susan Kerridge give some of the preliminary results of a JISC- funded investigation into the use of Search Engines such as Alta Vista and Lycos within the UK.

The use of the World Wide Web (WWW) is increasing and is likely to continue to do so for the considerable future. The UK is served with a very good quality internal Internet backbone providing JANET (Joint Academic NETwork) users with a high level of bandwidth, resulting fast communications. Unfortunately, international connections from the UK are poor and it is clear that ways of addressing the limited bandwidth the UK has at its disposal have to be found.

Catriona II

editor — Tue, 19 Nov 1996 00:00:00 +0000

Mary Fletcher introduces a new seeker after Web resources. CATRIONA II is a project from the Access to Network Resources section of the programme.

This is an exciting period of growth in the development of electronic resources for teaching and research. Many examples of electronic resources for teaching and research such as lectures, slides and research papers are now readily available on the Web. However, a large proportion of the research and teaching material that is being created on computers is not yet available to the wider academic community. It is often only available to the creator and perhaps to local students. There can be many reasons why the electronic resources are not being made more widely available.

Lessons Learned from Developing and Delivering the BORGES Information Filtering Tool

editor — Tue, 19 Nov 1996 00:00:00 +0000

Alan Smeaton discusses the development and implementation of BORGES, an information filtering service for WWW pages and USENET news.

Although it may appear that it is only recently that we have discovered a need for automatic information filtering, the practice of automatically filtering a flow of information has been in use for over 30 years. The emphasis in systems since the earliest days has been on the speed of the filtering operation, ensuring that it is performed as quickly as possible. Because of the volume of information now being generated and the requirement to have this filtered, issues of quality or the relevance of information filtered for a user, are now becoming increasingly important.

The BNBMARC Currency Survey

editor — Tue, 19 Nov 1996 00:00:00 +0000

Ann Chapman describes the BNBMARC Currency Survey, a performance measurement survey on the supply of bibliographic records.

Performance measurement has been used as a research tool for many years, and as such has been used in some of the studies undertaken by UKOLN and its predecessor bodies (the Centre for Catalogue Research - CCR, and the Centre for Bibliographic Management). In the past few years, however, increasing demands for accountability to the public and to local and central government, combined with the requirements of compulsory competitive tendering, have led to performance measurement becoming an integral part of public sector management.

ILRT: The Institute for Learning and Research Technology

editor — Tue, 19 Nov 1996 00:00:00 +0000

Gillian Austen, External Relations Manager at the recently founded Institute for Learning and Research Technology at the University of Bristol, gives an overview of its structure and objectives.

The Institute for Learning and Research Technology (ILRT) at the University of Bristol is host to more than seventeen funded projects at the forefront of learning and research technology, including four eLib projects ranging across the subject divide, from medicine to business to social science and beyond into generic issues. In this article we describe these four projects, SOSIG, ROADS, biz/ed and MIDRIB, as well as providing an overview of the Institute and its other projects.

Access V Holdings, Cranfield

editor — Tue, 19 Nov 1996 00:00:00 +0000

Sarah Ashton reports on an event of interest to the Document Delivery community.

I can only apologise for the brevity of parts of this report, and offer my excuses in the Sideline column in issue 7 of Ariadne (mid-January 1997). For reasons to be revealed there, I missed the first half of the Access v Holdings seminar, held at Cranfield University on 30th October 1996.

Allerton 1996

editor — Tue, 19 Nov 1996 00:00:00 +0000

Clare Davies reports on this years event in an annual conference series addressing user-centred aspects of library and information science.

The Allerton Institute is an annual conference series addressing user-centred aspects of library and information science, organised by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, USA. The conference, which this year took place from 27-29 October, is held in the disorientatingly English-stately-home-ish setting of the Robert Allerton House and Park near Monticello, Illinois. This lovely mansion and its landscaped wooded grounds were built around the turn of the century, and were later donated to the university.

10th Annual Anglo-Nordic Seminar

editor — Tue, 19 Nov 1996 00:00:00 +0000

Kelly Russell from the eLib programme describes this seminar, which heavily featured speakers and current issues relevant to the UK digital libraries movement.

On 11-13 October 1996 I was fortunate to be invited to participate in the 10th annual Anglo-Nordic Seminar, held in Lund, Sweden. This annual event is co-organised by the British Library and their Nordic colleagues at NORDINFO. Each year the seminar is based on a particular theme and this year it was Networking.

Ticer Summer School on the Digital Library at Tilburg University, The Netherlands

editor — Tue, 19 Nov 1996 00:00:00 +0000

Robert van der Zwan describes a two week summer school in digital library developments at one of Europe's main research centres in this field.

For two weeks, from 4 - 16 August 1996 at Tilburg University in The Netherlands, a group of 60 librarians and information specialists from around the world was introduced to the strategic and practical issues relating to digital library developments. Participants came from as far afield as Japan and Costa Rica, but mostly from Western Europe, with a significant representation from the Netherlands itself. I was the only UK delegate, however three of the lecturers were from the UK including one from Ireland.

British Library Corner: Setting Priorities for Digital Library Research, The Beginnings of a Process?

editor — Tue, 19 Nov 1996 00:00:00 +0000

Graham Jefcoate describes the background behind the recently announced British Library Research and Innovation Centre call for proposals in the field of digital library research.

Further details on the call for proposals mentioned in this article can be found at: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/papers/bl/callforproposal.html The British Library Research and Innovation Centre has initiated a process of discussion and debate among those working in the field of digital library research. This discussion is intended to help gain some idea of which issues need to be addressed and to establish how the research programmes and funding agencies in the field might set their own priorities.

OMNI-Corner: Meeting the Visible Human

editor — Tue, 19 Nov 1996 00:00:00 +0000

Sue Welsh reports from the Visible Human Project Conference of October 1996, an event that brought together many of the people involved with one of the most high profile Internet-based medical resources.

The Visible Human is one of the Internets best known sites; one of its big stories. However, the size of the Visible Human Dataset (VHD) means that most of us have no way of making use of the raw data itself. We have, so far, been more impressed by the idea than the reality.

Interface Miriam Drake: A Rainy Night in Georgia?

editor — Tue, 19 Nov 1996 00:00:00 +0000

The Library is still busy, as Miriam Drake explains to Alison Kilgour.

Miriam Drake, Dean and Director of the Library and Information Centre at Georgia Institute of Technology, feels that librarians should concern themselves with making money for their libraries and confesses that most of her time is spent doing just that. The climate is changing and universities have to become more and more self-sufficient. In the US, says Drake, "...there will be more jobs created by small business than big. My advice to you is to identify and seek out the potential small business starters - and be very good to them.

Overview of content related to 'research'

Review of Where the Wild Things Are: Librarian's Guide to the Best Information on the Net

Becoming a Gatekeeper, or,Creating Where the Wild Things Are: Librarian's Guide to the Best Information on the Net

Infopolecon

SOSIG: Training to Support Social Science Teaching and Research

Meeting end users' needs

Mailbase: Unique Electronic Discussion List Service for UK Higher Education Tops 100,000 Users

An Investigation Into World Wide Web Search Engine Use from within the UK: Preliminary Findings

Catriona II

Lessons Learned from Developing and Delivering the BORGES Information Filtering Tool

The BNBMARC Currency Survey

ILRT: The Institute for Learning and Research Technology

Access V Holdings, Cranfield

Allerton 1996

10th Annual Anglo-Nordic Seminar

Ticer Summer School on the Digital Library at Tilburg University, The Netherlands

British Library Corner: Setting Priorities for Digital Library Research, The Beginnings of a Process?

OMNI-Corner: Meeting the Visible Human

Interface Miriam Drake: A Rainy Night in Georgia?

Becoming a Gatekeeper, or,
Creating Where the Wild Things Are: Librarian's Guide to the Best Information on the Net