School of Information Management & Systems
 Previously School of Library & Information Studies

 296a-1 Seminar: Information Access.
 ("The Friday Afternoon Seminar")
 Summaries - Fall 2005.


Fridays 3-5. 107 South Hall. Schedule.
Summaries will be added as they become available.

Sep 2: Clifford LYNCH: Welcome to the Seminar. Introductions.

Sep 9: Michael BUCKLAND, Lin MUEHLINGHAUS, Vivien PETRAS & others: Supporting the Learner: Project Progress Report.
    Update and open discussion on the progress at the midpoint of the "Support for the Learner: What, Where, When, and Who" project. See http://ecai.org/imls2004. Building on prior work, the project has two parallel tasks. The technical task is to develop tools to enhance searching in library catalogs by place (by linking with a gazetteer and map interface), by time (with a novel time period directory and time-line), and by person (with an enhanced design for biographical directories). The applied task is to work with collaborating faculty to find additional digital resources and to adapt the technical developments to provide a convenient portal to these and other digital resources and to assess the effectiveness of what has been developed. We hope that some of the collaborating faculty from Dominican University of California and UC Berkeley will join us.

Sep 16: Clifford LYNCH: Katrina; and Institutional Repositories.
    A two-topic double-header. First, some thoughts on risk management, insurance, and digital preservation in the wake of Katrina. Second, an update on the state of institutional repositories, drawing on data gathered for the May 2005 JISC/SURF/CNI Amsterdam conference on institutional repositories and two articles due to be published this September in D-lib magazine.

Sep 23: Katherine KOTT, Digital Library Federation: AQUIFER.
    Aquifer is an initiative of the Digital Library Federation. Envisioned as a means of leveraging digital library content, DLF Aquifer will create scalable solutions to enable teaching, learning and scholarship. Beginning with a significant, well-bounded collection of digital content in the area of American culture and life, DLF Aquifer will create a test-bed of tools for selecting, collecting and providing access to quality digital content. Grounded in the thinking that libraries add value through the organization of information, DLF Aquifer offers opportunities for collaboration among libraries and with partners building repositories, content management systems, course management systems and other solutions that support the scholarly process. Future broader scale collaborations can be modeled on the DLF Aquifer experience. http://www.diglib.org/aquifer/.

Sep 30: Ray LARSON & Vivien PETRAS: Hot News from Europe! Report on CLEF and ECDL.
    The Cross-Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF) supports global digital library applications by (i) developing an infrastructure for the testing, tuning and evaluation of information retrieval systems operating on European languages in both monolingual and cross-language contexts, and (ii) creating test-suites of reusable data which can be employed by system developers for benchmarking purposes. http://clef.iei.pi.cnr.it/
    ECDL 2005 is the 9th European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries. ECDL is the major European conference on digital libraries, and associated technical, practical, and social issues, bringing together researchers, developers, content providers and users in the field. http://www.ecdl2005.org/

Oct 7: **From 12:30 p.m. - 5:00 p.m.** Joint session with the opening session of the DOCAM05 Conference
    Organized by the Document Academy.
12:30: Welcome: Dean Saxenian & Niels W. Lund.
1:00: Keynote: W. Boyd Rayward: The Legacy of the New Documentation Movement.
2:00-5:00 Session 1: General Issues:
  -   Ron Day: Primary and Secondary Documents in Suzanne Briet's What is Documentation
  -   Manuel Zacklad: Documentarization Processes in Document for Action.
  -   Jean-Michel Salaün: Pedauque 3: Document as/and Medium.
    Program and abstracts are at http://thedocumentacademy.hum.uit.no/docam05/index.html.

Oct 14: Neil THURMAN, City Univ., London: Electronic Newspapers: Globalisation and Reader Participation
    Using a mixture of qualitative research interviews with the editors and managing editors of major British online news sites and user data provided by Nielsen//Netratings, Neil's research focuses on the international audience for news on the web and the mainstream media's response to so-called citizen journalism. Neil is a senior lecturer in the Department of Journalism, City University, London and visiting scholar at SIMS.

Oct 21: Information Schools: Education, Recruitment, and Positioning:
    Dean AnnaLee SAXENIAN & Charis KASKIRIS: Report on the I-School Summit
. A report by two participants on the recent "First Conference of the i-School Community Bridging Disciplines to Confront Grand Challenges". Papers presented and discussion notes are available at http://iconference.ist.psu.edu/.
    Michael BUCKLAND & Linda-Cathryn MUEHLINGHAUS: Strategies for Recruitment to Masters Degree Programs. Millions of dollars are being invested annually to subsidize improved recruitment and education of librarians and of faculty capable of teaching them. A description, analysis, and discussion of the traditional methods used. An alterative approach would be to examine in the undergraduate arena the implications of an emerging information society. Background reading: http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~buckland/libarts.html.

Oct 28: James DALZIEL, Macquarie University, Australia: MAMS and LAMS: Innovations in Secure Repository Access and Next Generation e-Learning.
    I will talk mainly about our work from the MAMS project on federated identity and access management for (open and) protected repositories (based on Shibboleth and SAML), including work on access control for repositories such as DSpace and Fedora (using XACML), and our authenticated federated search engine for searching across protected repositories. I can also talk about links to e-science if this is of interest (eg, GridShib).
    I'll also talk about LAMS (Learning Activity Management System), a next generation "Learning Design" e-learning system. In particular, LAMS allows sharing of "digital lesson plans". Note our recent release of the LAMS Community, a global website for sharing and adapting LAMS digital lesson plans, and discussing the use of LAMS. The LAMS Community is a new attempt at the dream of sharing and adapting learning resources - the principles for this are in slide 5/6 of www.cetis.ac.uk/members/pedagogy/files/Metadata200905/jamesdalziel
    James Dalziel is Professor of Learning Technology & Director, Macquarie University E-learning Centre of Excellence (MELCOE).

Nov 4: Jack McCREDIE, Chief Information Officer, UC Berkeley: IT in Higher Education: An Eye to the Future with a Brief Look at the Past.
    Looking back over 35 years of working with information technologies in higher education, Jack will discuss some of the things that went very well, and some that did not. From this base he will highlight some of the future challenges we face at UC Berkeley and throughout higher education as we continue to explore ways of using IT to build better environments for teaching, learning, and research.
    Jack McCredie is the Associate Vice Chancellor, Information Systems and the Chief Information Officer for the University of California, Berkeley. He is responsible for leading all central computing and communication activities including the campus data and voice network and support for academic and administrative programs. Previously he directed the External Research Program at Digital Equipment Corporation, and before that he served as president of EDUCOM and vice provost for computing and planning at Carnegie Mellon University.

Nov 11: No seminar. Veterans Day holiday.

Nov 18: Katherine NEWMAN: Comprehension Assessment for Multimedia Information.
    Should the everyday information-documenteur take a more pedagogical approach to documentation? And how?
    I will introduce a preliminary set of design considerations for the `scaffolding' of multimedia information -- or the cognizant structuring of multimedia information for improved comprehension. These design considerations have been synthesized from research in the fields of education, information science, cognitive science, engineering and design.
    This presentation is an opportunity for me to introduce my initial inquiry into the scaffolding of information for improved comprehension. For group discussion I will present a first-draft rubric for the assessment and profiling of multimedia documentation ‘scaffolded’ for improved comprehension.
    Also R. David Lankes, Syracuse University: Evolving Digital Reference in Reference Authoring.
    Digital reference to this point has been focused on one to one reference interactions between an expert and a user. Current work at Syracuse University is looking at both expanding this model to reference as a community activity, and looking at transforming reference interactions into new products and services like reference based search engines. For more see http://iis.syr.edu

Nov 25: No seminar. Thanksgiving Holiday.

Dec 2: Dan GREENSTEIN, University Librarian and Executive Director, California Digital Library: Stewardship of Digital Resources
.
    Issues and institutional options involved in a systemwide program to capture and manage its digital scholarly information assets.

Dec 9: Sachi ARAFAT: Quantum Retrieval: A Theoretical Framework for Information Retrieval Influenced by Physics.
    This work was initially an attempt at unifying the vector space, logical, and probabilistic matching models in information retrieval using mathematical formalisms employed in quantum mechanics. It now seems that the same formalism can be used to describe a wider range of retrieval concepts. On the practical side, formalization in this manner suggests a method of simulation as a way of evaluating search systems. In this talk I will briefly discuss these relations between information retrieval, quantum physics, and simulation.
    Also Clifford LYNCH: Interesting Things & Reports.
    A report on recent developments, especially highlights of the Coalition for Networked Information Fall Task Force Meeting in Phoenix Dec 5-6. www.cni.org/tfms/2005b.fall/. A major topic was the Open Open Content Alliance (OCA) a collaborative effort of a group of cultural, technology, nonprofit, and governmental organizations from around the world that will help build a permanent archive of multilingual digitized text and multimedia content. www.opencontentalliance.org.


    The seminar will continue in the Spring 2006 semester, startin Jan 20.
Fall 2005 schedule.   Spring 2005 schedule and summaries.