School of Information
 Previously School of Library & Information Studies

 Friday Afternoon Seminar: Summaries.
  296a-1 Seminar: Information Access, Spring 2011.

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

Friday, Jan 21: Clifford LYNCH: Introduction to the Seminar: The Ebook Wars, Part 1.
    Welcomes. Introduction to Seminar.
    The Ebook Wars, Part 1: About ten years ago I wrote a long essay titled "The Battle for the Future of the Book". In hindsight, this has turned from a battle to a complex series of multi-front wars with very wide-reaching implications, and in this seminar meeting and the next I'll examine these developments. For this session, I"ll focus on economic, social, and legal developments surrounding e-books with particular attention to how authors, booksellers, and libraries are encountering a very different world.

Friday, Jan 28: Clifford LYNCH: The Ebook Wars, Part 2.
    Continuing from the January 21 meeting, in this session I'll reflect on the future of the "book" as an intellectual and cultural construct within the broader context of our efforts to understand digital documents, or documents more broadly within a digital culture. While the focus of the first meeting was the impact of the distribution of what are recognizably traditional books using digital technologies, the issues here center on the multitude of evolutionary directions that take us beyond traditional books.

Friday, Feb 4: Ray LARSON: The Social Networks and Archival Context Project (SNAC).
    This week's Friday seminar is an update on the Social Networks and Archival Context Project, presented by Ray Larson along with Krishna Janakiraman, Sean Marimpietri and collaborators from the California Digital Library.
    Archivists have a long history of describing the people who, acting individually, in families, or in formally organized groups, create and collect primary sources. Archivists research and describe the artists, political leaders, scientists, government agencies, soldiers, universities, businesses, families, and others who create and are represented in the items that are now part of our shared cultural legacy. Because archivists have traditionally described records and their creators together, this information is tied to specific resources and institutions. Currently there is no system in place that aggregates and interrelates those descriptions.
    Leveraging the new standard Encoded Archival Context -- Corporate Bodies, Persons, and Families (EAC-CPF), the Social Networks and Archival Context Project (SNAC) will use digital technology to "unlock" descriptions of people from descriptions of their records and link them together in exciting new ways. It will create an efficient open-source tool that allows archivists to separate the process of describing people from that of records and will create an integrated portal to creator descriptions--linked to resource descriptions in archives, libraries and museums, online biographical and historical databases, and other diverse resources--thereby providing more effective access and robust historical context to a broad array of humanities materials. The prototype access system will demonstrate that descriptions of persons, families, and organizations can be used as access points to archive, library, and museum resources.

Friday, Feb 11: George OATES, Manager, The Open Library, Internet Archive: Open Library, Collections and Networks.
    George Oates will show the Open Library project, which is building a page on the web for every book ever published. There are interesting effects of having an open, editable bibliographic dataset available on the web. Discussion.
    George Oates has worked in the web since 1996, most recently as Director of the Internet Archive's Open Library project. Before that, she created the Flickr Commons program after four years as Flickr's lead designer. She's been cultivating an interest in the digital humanities for the past couple of years, wondering how to make it OK for the great unwashed to help sort everything out.

Friday, Feb 18: Jim PITMAN, Dept of Statistics: Open Bibliography.
    The Open Bibliographic Data Working Group of the Open Knowledge Foundation has published a set of principles for open bibliographic data: http://openbiblio.net/principles/. These principles express a philosophy of openness for bibliographic data in support of research and knowledge enhancement:   "For society to reap the full benefits from bibliographic endeavours, it is imperative that bibliographic data be made open - that is, available for anyone to use and re-use freely for any purpose."
    This presentation will address the social, technical, legal and economic issues involved in the management and dissemination of bibliographic data, the changes already taking place as the principles of open bibliography are being widely promoted, and the likely nature of further developments if the principles become widely accepted.

Friday, Feb 25: Niels Windfeld LUND, Univ. of Tromso & Stanford: The Development of Artistic Documents for the Global Village: The Development of Systems Tailored for the Global Village.
    The global village is no longer just a vision; it becomes more and more a reality for many people thanks to skype, twitter, facebook and smart phones. We can start talking about the global village as any other local community having its own shopping mall, newspapers, cafes, schools as well as its own local opera house or concert hall. You just have to comply with the physical, cultural and social characteristics of the village when you design and build, for instance, the local opera house/concert hall, as my current project, The World Opera, is all about. This means dealing with new media technology, networked systems, latency for audio and video, audio-video sync, different cultural traditions, different legal and financial systems in participating nations, etc. For more see www.theworldopera.org.
    Niels Windfeld Lund is Professor of Documentation Studies at the University of Tromso, Norway, and currently Visiting scholar at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics at Stanford University. He has twice been a Visiting Professor in South Hall (in 2001 and in 2005/06).

Friday, Mar 4: Clifford LYNCH: Developments in Personal Archiving.
    Last week Cliff Lynch & Ray Larsen attended a two day symposium on the future of personal archiving hosted at the Internet Archive in San Francisco. We will summarize highlights and reflect upon the meeting and the issues raised there; we will also be joined by Jeff Ubois, who organized the meeting.

Friday, Mar 11: Phyllis REUTHER, CTO, Sprint.

Friday, Mar 18: Joint Session with the Kyoto University Conference at the I School.

    Mayumi UEDA, Researcher, Kyoto University: Estimating the user's food preferences for recipe recommendation.
    Yoshiyuki TSUCHIDA and Saori SAWADA (ASTEM): iTouch Lecture: A New Lecture Review and Follow Tool for iPhone.
    Osami KAGAWA, Professor, Osaka Gakuin University: Time Warp Learning in Distance Education.
    Kazutoshi SUMIYA, Professor, University of Hyogo: Extracting Intention and Analyzing Credibility in Geographical Information Retrieval.

Friday, Mar 25: Spring break. No Seminar meeting.

Friday, Apr 1: Clifford LYNCH: Three Brief Topics
.
    1. Reports on Recent Meetings. Open Annotation Collaboration, Chicago. Knowledge Discovery Meeting, Board on Research Data & Information, National Academies, Washington DC. Other reports welcome.
    2. Some speculations and questions on software life cycles. Some recent developments in the consumer computing market have raised questions about designed obsolesence cycles and their implications, particularly for research, productivity, needs for ongoing investment, software-based cultural products, and interactions with preservation strategies.
    3. Time permitting: Some brief thoughts on research prospects for large scale social simulations, in the context of a recent NSF workshop on Frontiers and Foundations of Emerging Information Professions.

Friday, April 8: Clifford LYNCH: Highlights and Reflections from the Coalition for Networked Information Spring Membership Meeting held in San Diego April 4-5.
    Along with others who attended the meeting, I'll discuss highlights and emerging themes from the CNI spring meeting held earlier this week.
Friday, Apr 15: Marcia BATES: How Humans Do It: Searching and IR by People.
    Within this very large topic area, I plan to draw attention to three areas that I believe are under-recognized in IR system design: (1). Browsing: How people really do it in contrast to the build-in assumptions of most information system designs. (2). The role of browsing, directed searching, and linking over the Bradford-distributed information resource space. (3). How people think about and use search vocabulary, or, what is right and wrong with tag clouds.
    Marcia Bates is Professor Emerita in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA, and has been there since 1981. She received her Ph.D. from the School of Library and Information Studies at UC Berkeley. She is widely published on information seeking behavior and user-centered design of information systems, and is one of the most highly cited authors in information science.

Friday, April 22: Ed O'NEILL, Senior Research Scientist, OCLC: OCLC's Research Program and FAST - Faceted Application of Subject Terminology.
    After a short overview of OCLC Research and I will briefly talk about some of our major activates: VIAF (the Virtual International Authority File), FRBR (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records), the OhioLINK circulation study, and others, followed by a more detailed discussion of FAST: Faceted Application of Subject Headings.
    The Library of Congress Subject Headings schema (LCSH) is by far the most commonly used and widely accepted subject vocabulary for general application. It is the de facto universal controlled vocabulary and has been a model for developing subject heading systems by many countries. The purpose of adapting the LCSH with a simplified syntax to create FAST is to retain the very rich vocabulary of LCSH while making the schema easier to understand, control, apply, and use.
    More at www.oclc.org/research/ and www.oclc.org/research/activities/fast/.
    Ed ONeill did his undergraduate work at Albion College and his doctorate at Purdue University on the application of operations research techniques to libraries. In 1968, he accepted a joint appointment in the Department on Industrial and the School of Information and Library Studies at the University at Buffalo. In 1978-1979, he spent a sabbatical year as OCLC's first Visiting Distinguished Scholar. In 1980 he became Dean of the School of Library and Information Science at Case Western Reserve University and in i983 returned to OCLC in 1983 as Research Scientist. His research interests include authority control, subject analysis, database quality, collection management, and bibliographic relationships. He is active in IFLA and is a member of the IFLA Standing Committee of the Classification and Indexing Section.

Friday, April 29: Michael BUCKLAND and Clifford LYNCH: Data Management Plans and Data Re-use Issues.
    Research is expected to proceed by correcting, extending, and adapting prior work. Historically, the record was primarily in the form of published textual accounts (books, articles, reports, etc.) made accessible by an infrastructure of writing practices, peer review, publishers, libraries and bibliography. The use of computers in research results in a larger, fuller digital record (data sets, simulations, etc.) that remains largely unusable for lack of a comparable infrastructure of descriptive practices, data curation, repositories, and access services. This situation is finally getting attention. NSF, NIH, and other research funders are now mandating data management plans.
    How extensive are these problems? How wasteful is it? What needs to be done? -- by whom? -- and how? Should there be explicit curricular components to prepare future scholars better for these challenges?
Michael Buckland and Clifford Lynch will lead a discussion of these issues. Join us!
The Seminar will resume on August 26.

Spring 2011 schedule.   Fall 2010 schedule and summaries.   Fall 2011 schedule and summaries.