School of
Information Management & Systems
Previously School of Library & Information Studies
296a-1
Seminar: Information Access.
("The Friday Afternoon Seminar")
Summaries - Spring 2005.
Fridays 3-5. 107 South Hall.
Schedule.
Jan 21: Introduction to Seminar & Introductions.
Introductions. Information about the Seminar.
All attendees will be invited to report briefly on recent
conferences, projects, papers, and other developments of interest:
HICSS, National Academies Knowledge Economy Conference,
some comments on papers presented at Beyond Personalization
meeting in San Diego, reports from Pew Internet and American
Life project, Digicult, etc.
Jan 28: Clifford LYNCH: Report on Progress on Research
on Stewardship: Implications of Personal Collections
and Personal Storage.
Over the last two years, I've been examining
questions about changes to the practices of stewardship in
the digital age. I'll give a brief overview of my current
thinking on this topic, and then report on some issues about
stewardship at the state and institutional level.
More and more of individual memory, personal
records, and personal libraries are moving to digital form,
and individuals have comparatively huge amounts of personal
storage available to them. I'll examine some of the behavioral
and social implications of these changes, comment in some of
the implications for markets in cultural materials and
entertainment.
Feb 4: Judson KING, Center for the Study of Higher Education:
Academic Change and the Information Age.
Much of current academic planning and change
centers around the enhanced capabilities that stem from the
information age. This seminar will include several examples
drawn from personal experience, starting with the creation of
the School of Information Management and Systems. Others
include the launching of the California Digital Library,
the impact of information technology upon undergraduate
admissions policy and adaptation to Proposition 209, and
the creation of a new initiative at the Center for Studies
in Higher Education focusing upon the future of scholarly
publication and communication.
Jud King started as a faculty member
in Berkeley's chemical engineering department forty-two years
ago. In addition to chairing that department, he has been
Dean of the College of Chemistry and Provost for Professional
Schools and Colleges at Berkeley, and Provost and Senior Vice
President -- Academic Affairs for the UC system. Since leaving
that latter post in April 2004 he has been Director of the
Center for Studies in Higher Education.
Feb 11: Ray LARSON and others: Organizing Places, Periods, and Persons.
Almost all information management applications
involve named places, named time periods, and named persons,
but there appears to have been
very little attention to standards, interoperability, or even best practices
with respect to named time periods or biographical records.
Prof Larson will lead a discussion of needs, options, and possible standards
for handling temporal, biographical, geographical, and other data
- both separately and in conjunction. Join us and bring your experience
and suggestions.
This discussion arises from the IMLS-supported
project "Support for the Learner: What, Where, When, and Who"
http://ecai.org/imls2004/.
Feb 18: David S.H. ROSENTHAL, Chief Scientist, Stanford University Libraries, and
Victoria REICH, Director, LOCKSS Program, Stanford University Libraries:
Electronic Collections and the Future of Libraries.
Publishing is transitioning from paper to the Web, making content
more accessible to and useful for readers. This transition poses
existential questions for libraries. If they are to continue to
serve as society's memory, preserving important information for
use by future generations, they need to continue to build
collections. Formidable legal, business, technical and economic
difficulties prevent libraries building electronic collections to
match their historic paper collections. Failure to overcome these
obstacles will lead to a new dark age; material published on the
web has a half-life of a month or two.
For six years, the LOCKSS program at Stanford Libraries has been
designing, implementing, testing and deploying an affordable tool
that libraries can use to collect, preserve and disseminate content
published on the Web. It is now in production use at over 80
libraries worldwide, ranging from the Library of Congress to the
University of Otago. Publishers responsible for over 2000 titles
endorse its use.
The talk will detail the legal, business, technical and economic
problems libraries face in preserving Web content, and the
innovative ways the LOCKSS system has engineered solutions to
them. These include radical and synergistic approaches to
licensing, backup, format migration, system administration,
fault tolerance and peer-to-peer networking. It will describe
the ways librarians are applying this new tool to areas
outside the system's original focus on scientific,
technical and medical journals, including the Humanities,
Government Documents and local newspapers.
Feb 25: Michael BUCKLAND: Theorizing "Information": Book review
What should we mean by "information"?
I'll briefly summarize and comment on two significant
recent publications: (1) The Winter 2004 issue on "The Philosophy of Information"
of Library Trends (MAIN: Z671 .L739; available online from UCB accounts:
Try
link.
Else try through http://uclibs.org/PID/14707
(Leave keyword query box empty, limit search to "on" "2004" and
journal "Library Trends" then scroll down result set): and
(2) Bernd FROHMANN: Deflating Information: From Science Studies to
Documentation (U. of Toronto Pr., 2004).
Brief round the table review of ongoing projects.
including a visit to the National Library and Archives of Canada;
Net@edu; some comments on the Digital Cultural Content Forum; Web-Wise;
the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Clifford LYNCH: Personal Information Management (concluded).
Earlier this semester,
I discussed the development of large, long-lived personal digital
collections of "published" material and some of the implications
of these collections as part of a broader examination of stewardship,
preservation and memory in an ever-more-digital world. I'll conclude
(at least for the moment) the examination of these issues with some
comments on personal collections of unpublished materials (e.g. things
created by the individual and his or her immediate circle) and touch
on some of the social, legal and technical implications of the
growth of such collections.
Mar 4: Ricky ERWAY, Merrilee PROFFITT & Günter WAIBEL,
Research Libraries Group:
Unifying and Delivering Digital Assets for Classroom Use.
We'll offer a smorgasbord of recent RLG
investigation into unifying and delivering digital assets for
classroom use.
- Integrating collections from different institutions puts
descriptions of cultural heritage materials to the ultimate test.
The new RLG Descriptive Metadata Guidelines advocate good practice
among the diverse set of contributors to RLG's Cultural Materials
database. We'll talk about the pitfalls of providing guidance for
descriptive metadata, and demonstrate the Cultural Materials
service resulting from our efforts to unionize descriptions.
- Once collections have been aggregated, how can digital images
from licensed resources best find their way into the classroom?
The RLG Advisory Group on Instructional Technology investigated
this issue by reviewing current practice in the community and
interviewing faculty who teach with digital images.
- The findings of the Advisory Group also reinforced our
decision to expose the treasures in Cultural Materials through
our free and widely indexed Trove.net site. Trove.net makes
Cultural Materials content discoverable via Google and other
internet search engines -- often the first stop for faculty
who are searching for classroom content.
&nbps; URLs:
RLG Cultural Materials
http://culturalmaterials.rlg.org/
(for access at UCB see
http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/collections/rlg.html)
RLG Descriptive Metadata Guidelines
http://www.rlg.org/en/page.php?Page_ID=214
RLG Advisory Group on Instructional Technology
http://www.rlg.org/en/page.php?Page_ID=557
Trove.net http://www.trove.net
Mar 11: Nancy VAN HOUSE: The Social Uses of Personal Photos
(and New Photographic Technologies)
A recurring problem in designing new technology is anticipating how
and for what purposes it will be used, and how best to design it for
those uses. In this project, we are developing an analytical approach
to forecasting the uses of new technology: in this case, personal
photography.
Personal photos are of great value: often the one thing that people
rush to save when their houses burn is their pictures. Digital
cameras and networked imaging devices (now represented by
cameraphones) are becoming ubiquitous. Cameraphones place cameras
always at hand. The internet makes sharing, with known and unknown
others, easy. We contend that this technology is fundamentally
changing personal photographic practices in ways both continuous and
discontinuous with past practice. To understand how people do and
will use new photographic technology and design it to be usable and
attractive, then, requires an understanding of the purposes for which
photos have been used and those -- old and new -- for which they, and
the associated technologies, are likely to be used.
In this project, we are using social science perspectives, methods,
and findings to understand personal photography. We are empirically
investigating the purposes for which people have used personal photos,
and cutting-edge uses as harbingers of how people will use images and
associated technology for new purposes. We are using a combination of
Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) and Activity Theory
approaches to interpret these findings. We are collaborating with
the MMM2 project (which Marc Davis will talk about on March 18th) in
using these insights to develop a prototype context-aware cameraphone
application for mobile media sharing, and an associated web-based
photo sharing application.
Mar 18: Marc DAVIS: Mobile Media Metadata:
The Future of Mobile Imaging.
The devices and usage context of consumer digital
imaging are undergoing rapid transformation from the traditional
camera-to-desktop-to-network image pipeline to an integrated mobile
imaging experience. Since 2003, more camera phones were sold than
digital cameras worldwide; since 2004, 5 megapixel cameraphones
with optical zoom and camera flash have been on the market. The
ascendancy of these mobile media capture devices makes possible
a significant new paradigm for digital imaging because, unlike
traditional digital cameras, cameraphones integrate: media
capture; software programmable processing; wireless networking;
rich user interaction modalities; and automatically gathered
contextual metadata (spatial, temporal, and social) in one
mobile device. We will discuss our Mobile Media Metadata (MMM)
prototypes that leverage the spatio-temporal context and social
community of media capture to infer the content and the sharing
recipients of media captured on cameraphones. Over the past two
years we have deployed and tested MMM1 (context-to-content
inferencing on cameraphones to infer media content) and MMM2
(context-to-community inferencing on cameraphones to infer sharing
recipients) with 60 users in the fall of 2003 and 2004 respectively.
We will report on findings from our system development, user testing,
ethnographic research, design research, and student generated product
concepts for MMM-supported applications. As a result of our approach
to context-aware mobile media computing, we believe our MMM research
will help solve a fundamental problem in personal media production
and reuse: the need to have content-based access to the media
consumers capture and share on mobile imaging devices.
Mar 25: No seminar - Spring recess.
Apr 1: Dan GREENSTEIN, California Digital Library:
After Google Scholar What? Future Directions for the Academic Library.
The talk will evaluate the potential impact on academic
library services of
the two products - Google Scholar and Google Library - launched recently by
Google.
Based in part on recent analyses of scholarly
users' information needs and
speculation about possible business trajectories for the information
industry in an era of massively available online scholarly information
resources, the talk will identify what if any distinctive service roles
remain for the academic library.
It will also look at possible impact that new online information services
may have on how academic libraries are organized and staffed and on how they
are situated within their host institutions.
Throughout, a variety of references will be made to recent experience of "new
generation" library services, particularly those becoming available to the
UC community.
Apr 8: Barbara ROSARIO: Natural Language Processing in Bioinformatics: Uncovering
Semantic Relations.
Most of the biomedical research and new discoveries are available
electronically but only in free text format. Automatic mechanisms are
needed to convert text into more structured forms.
I will discuss several lines of research on one of the core problems that
arise in this domain---the identification of semantic relations between
constituents in sentences. First, I will describe two methods for
identifying relationships between two-word noun compounds (to
characterize, for example, the treatment-for-disease relationship between
the words of "migraine treatment" versus the method-of-treatment
relationship between the words of "aerosol treatment".) Second, I'll
describe my work in the area of Information Extraction, in particular the
problem of identifying semantic entities such as "treatment" and "disease"
from biomedical text.
Finally, I will present my recent work on the problem of predicting
protein-protein interactions from biological text.
Apr 15: Taecksoo CHUN;
also Fabio CRESTANI.
Taeck-soo CHUN, Dept of Economics, The Academy of Korean Studies:
The Korean Indigenous Local Cultures and
the Korean Economic Development in Global Age.
The 21st century is the Century of Culture and Arts. Everyday life
will be more affected by culture and arts now than in the past. More wealth can be
created more easily by culture and arts than by other resources. Creativity from
culture and arts will be the most important factor for economic development.
Indigenous local cultures are treasury of creativity. The "Electronic Encyclopedia
of Korean Indigenous Cultures" (EEKILC) is collecting the cultural heritages of
232 local districts. Systematic aggregation through research and analysis will create
a multimedia electronic encyclopedia including audio, visual motion and text.
The rationale, methods, budget, and expected impacts of the EEKILC will be
summarized. Two previous investments in Korean Indigenous Local Culture -- rice
wine and anti-malaria medicine -- have been very profitable.
Prof. Chun is spending a year at Berkeley, attached to
the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative in International and Areas Studies.
Fabio CRESTANI, Glasgow and SIMS:
Information-retrieval-based automatic ontology population.
In the first part of the talk I will present an overview of the
Diogene project. Diogene was an EU funded project under the 5th
Framework Programme that started in April 2002 and ended in
November 2004. The main objective of the project was to design,
implement and evaluate with real users an innovative training Web
broker environment for ICT individual training. This environment
supports learners during the whole cycle of the training, from the
definition of objectives to the assessment of results, through the
construction of custom self-adaptive courses. The system uses
several state-of-the-art technologies, such as: metadata and
ontologies for knowledge manipulation, fuzzy learner modelling,
intelligent course tailoring, co-operative and online training
support. In addition, it includes a set of innovative features,
including: dynamic learning strategies, Semantic Web openness, Web
services for learning object handling and property rights
management, curriculum vitae generation and searching facilities,
free-lance teacher support, and assisted definition of learning
objectives. In the second and main part of the talk I will
concentrate on the design, implementation and experimentation of
the WebCatcher agency: a component of the Diogene system aimed at
searching the web for learning objects and using them to populate
the Diogene ontology for the benefit of the learners.
Fabio Crestani, a faculty member in the Department of
Computer and Information Sciences,
University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK, is spending a year at
SIMS as a visiting scholar.
Apr 22: Peter MONTFORE: Blogging and the Internet: Progress Report.
AnnaLee SAXENIAN: New Directions for SIMS.
We will discuss possible directions for SIMS in the
coming years, including offering more undergraduate courses, growing
the PhD program, and working with other information schools to promote
wider recognition of the "I School" mission and programs.
Apr 29: Geoffrey BOWKER, U. of Santa Clara: Memory Practices in the Sciences.
Lev Manovich has argued that the database is the central symbolic
form of our times. In this paper, I take a long history of databases and
databasing technologies over the past two hundred years, discussing the
organizational and social dimensions of working with a new information
infrastructure. At the same time, I explore the consequences of this
change for the kinds of stories that scientists get to tell about the
past - be this of human history, the history of our species or the history
of our planet. Finally, I discuss how the proclaimed development of a new
global cyberinfrastructure for science both inflects and is affected by
current work practice.
May 6: No seminar meeting.
The seminar will resume in the Fall semester on Sept 2.
Spring 2005 schedule.
Fall 2004 schedule
and
summaries.