Library and Information Science Commons^™

Skos And The Semantic Web: Knowledge Organization, Metadata, And Interoperability, Eric A. Robinson

Other Topics

The Simplified Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) is a Semantic Web framework, based on the Resource Description Framework (RDF) for thesauri, classification schemes and simple ontologies. It allows for machine-actionable description of the structure of these knowledge organization systems (KOS) and provides an excellent tool for addressing interoperability and vocabulary control problems inherent to the rapidly expanding information environment of the Web. This paper discusses the foundations of the SKOS framework and reviews the literature on a variety of SKOS implementations. The limitations of SKOS that have been revealed through its broad application are addressed with brief attention to the proposed …

Beyond Description: Converting Web Site Usage Statistics Into Concrete Site Improvement Ideas, Julie Arendt, Cassie Wagner

VCU Libraries Faculty and Staff Publications

Web site usage statistics are a widely used tool for Web site development, but libraries are still learning how to use them successfully. This case study summarizes how Morris Library at Southern Illinois University Carbondale implemented Google Analytics on its Web site and used the reports to inform a site redesign. As the main campus library at a research university with about 20,000 undergraduate and graduate students, the library included resources from multiple library departments on a single site. In planning the redesign, Morris Library's Virtual Library Group combined usage reports with information from other sources, such as usability tests …

Save Gas Using Your Office Computer From Home, Steve Duckworth, Damon Armour, Jeff Heck

Georgia Library Quarterly

The article discusses the protocols used to establish remote computer connections from home. The Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) used in Windows 7 connecting to a Windows 2008 server reportedly allows the playing of high-definition video using Media Player. It is stated that commercial product connections which may bypass security infrastructure are risky because of the home computer's possible insecurity and that home devices used for business purposes may be legally searched by the state.

Toward A Theory-Based Natural Language Capability In Robots And Other Embodied Agents : Evaluating Hausser's Slim Theory And Database Semantics, Robin Kowalchuk Burk

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Computational natural language understanding and generation have been a goal of artificial intelligence since McCarthy, Minsky, Rochester and Shannon first proposed to spend the summer of 1956 studying this and related problems. Although statistical approaches dominate current natural language applications, two current research trends bring renewed focus on this goal. The nascent field of artificial general intelligence (AGI) seeks to evolve intelligent agents whose multi-subagent architectures are motivated by neuroscience insights into the modular functional structure of the brain and by cognitive science insights into human learning processes. Rapid advances in cognitive robotics also entail multi-agent software architectures that attempt …

Website Accessibility Issues In Western Australian Public Libraries, Vivienne L. Conway

Theses : Honours

Website accessibility is a very real and pressing issue for public libraries internationally. Tim Berners-Lee credited with founding the Web, states "The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect." (Henry & McGee, 2010). There is wide-spread support for adherence to the Web Content Advisory Guidelines Version 1.0 and 2.0 (WCAG) throughout Federal, State and Local levels of government in Australia. The Guidelines have also been affirmed by the Australian Human Rights Commission, disability advocacy groups such as Vision Australia, and the Australian Library and Information Association. The Australian Government …

Eliciting User Requirements Using Appreciative Inquiry, Carol Kernitzki Gonzales

CGU Theses & Dissertations

Many software development projects fail because they do not meet the needs of users, are over-budget, and abandoned. To address this problem, the user requirements elicitation process was modified based on principles of Appreciative Inquiry. Appreciative Inquiry, commonly used in organizational development, aims to build organizations, processes, or systems based on success stories using a hopeful vision for an ideal future. Spanning five studies, Appreciative Inquiry was evaluated for its effectiveness with eliciting user requirements. In the first two cases, it was compared with traditional approaches with end-users and proxy-users. The third study was a quasi-experiment comparing the use of …

A Primer On Digital Object Identifiers For Law Librarians, Benjamin J. Keele

Library Staff Publications

No abstract provided.

An Investigation Of Multiple Integration Techniques For Information Systems: A Model For Integrating Data Warehousing, Erp, And Soa In Practice, Jessie Burns

CCAC Theses and Dissertations

This study addressed issues associated with implementing multiple data integrators. The process included implementing the same data integrator multiple times or implementing multiple different data integrators. It was shown that single data integrators implementations were failing at high rates. Environments were complicated because there were more acquisitions and mergers now than in the past, companies were required to be competitive while implementations were taking place, and possibly had short implementation time frames.

The main goal of this study was to develop an agile, sturdy, and rigorous model that addressed the needs of companies that found themselves in situations where they …

Evaluating Models Of Latent Document Semantics In The Presence Of Ocr Errors, Daniel D. Walker, William B. Lund, Eric K. Ringger

Faculty Publications

Models of latent document semantics such as the mixture of multinomials model and Latent Dirichlet Allocation have received substantial attention for their ability to discover topical semantics in large collections of text. In an effort to apply such models to noisy optical character recognition (OCR) text output, we endeavor to understand the effect that character-level noise can have on unsupervised topic modeling. We show the effects both with document-level topic analysis (document clustering) and with word-level topic analysis (LDA) on both synthetic and real-world OCR data. As expected, experimental results show that performance declines as word error rates increase. Common …

(Re-) Discovering Lost Web Pages, Martin Klein, Michael L. Nelson

Computer Science Presentations

PDF of a powerpoint presentation from a Mathematics & Computer Science Seminar at Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, October 2, 2009. Also available on Slideshare.

Second Life Complements The Internet For Reference Librarians, Florence Tang

Georgia Library Quarterly

The article describes the Second Life culture as an interactive virtual environment from the perspective of a reference librarian. The cited advantages of using Second Life are synchronous interaction with other people, clearer appearance of chat text messages, incorporation of social norms, and accessibility. Among the noted obstacles to using Second Life are its price, intentional distress of other avatars, empty virtual public places, less hierarchy among participants, chatting via rapid typing, and quick change of landscapes and avatars.

Open Forum: The Future Of Library Systems, Maria Collins, Andrée J. Rathemacher

Technical Services Faculty Publications

Moderated by Maria Collins of North Carolina State University, discussion at this open forum on the future of library systems touched on open-source library systems, cloud computing, new initiatives by the Open Library Environment (OLE) Project and OCLC, and desired characteristics of future integrated library systems. Most participants had limited experience with next-generation library systems and attended the open forum with the desire to broaden their understanding, although some were exposed to or had worked with the open-source discovery tool VuFind, the OLE Project, WorldCat Local, and the OCLC Web-scale service. A strong desire to customize library systems to meet …

A Sophisticated Library Search Strategy Using Folksonomies And Similarity Matching, William Lund, Yiu-Kai D. Ng, Maria Soledad Pera

Faculty Publications

Libraries, private and public, offer valuable resources to library patrons. As of today the only way to locate information archived exclusively in libraries is through their catalogs. Library patrons, however, often find it difficult to formulate a proper query, which requires using specific keywords assigned to different fields of desired library catalog records, to obtain relevant results. These improperly formulated queries often yield irrelevant results or no results at all. This negative experience in dealing with existing library systems turn library patrons away from library catalogs; instead, they rely on Web search engines to perform their searches first and upon …

Synchronicity: Just-In-Time Discovery Of Lost Web Pages, Martin Klein, Michael L. Nelson

Computer Science Presentations

PDF of a powerpoint presentation from the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) Partners Meeting, Washington D.C., June 24-25, 2009. Also available on Slideshare.

Using Timed-Release Cryptography To Mitigate The Preservation Risk Of Embargo Periods, Rabia Haq, Michael L. Nelson

Computer Science Presentations

PDF of a powerpoint presentation from the 2009 ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, Austin, Texas, June 15-19, 2009. Also available on Slideshare.

Quantum Computing: Selected Internet Resources For Librarians, Researchers, And The Casually Curious, Jill Cirasella

Publications and Research

This article is an annotated selection of the most important and informative Internet resources for learning about quantum computing, finding quantum computing literature, and tracking quantum computing news.

Can't Find Your 404s?, Martin Klein, Frank Mccown, Joan Smith, Michael L. Nelson

Computer Science Presentations

PDF of a powerpoint presentation at the Santa Fe Complex, Santa Fe, New Mexico, March 13, 2009. Also available on Slideshare.

Location, Location, Location: A Transaction Comparison Of Catalog Searches Originating From The Library Homepage And Aleph, Jimmy Ghaphery, Thomas Mcnulty, Susan Teague Rector

VCU Libraries Faculty and Staff Presentations

Jimmy Ghaphery, Head, Library Information Systems, Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU); Thomas McNulty, Integrated Library Systems Librarian, VCU; Susan Teague-Rector, Web Applications Manager, VCU. We will analyze several weeks of search terms from February 2009 in order to determine how different points of entry impact user searches. Specifically we will compare user searches originating from a search tool on the library homepage and searches originating directly from Aleph. This session should be of interest to those who are involved with usability and OPAC design as well as system administrators tasked with measuring OPAC activity.

A Fuzzy Hierarchical Decision Model And Its Application In Networking Datacenters And In Infrastructure Acquisitions And Design, Michael Khader

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

According to several studies, an inordinate number of major business decisions to acquire, design, plan, and implement networking infrastructures fail. A networking infrastructure is a collaborative group of telecommunications systems providing services needed for a firm's operations and business growth. The analytical hierarchy process (AHP) is a well established decision-making process used to analyze decisions related to networking infrastructures. AHP is concerned with decomposing complex decisions into a set of factors and solutions. However, AHP has difficulties in handling uncertainty in decision information. This study addressed the research question of solutions to AHP deficiencies. The solutions were accomplished through the …

Quirky, Not Quacky: Quantum Computing For Librarians, Jill Cirasella

Publications and Research

This slideshow introduces librarians and non-scientists to the relatively young field of quantum computing.

Object Reuse And Exchange, Michael L. Nelson, Carl Lagoze, Herbert Van De Sompel, Pete Johnston, Robert Sanderson, Simeon Warner, Jürgen Sieck (Ed.), Michael A. Herzog (Ed.)

Computer Science Faculty Publications

The Open Archives Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE) project defines standards for the description and exchange of aggregations of Web resources. The OAI-ORE abstract data model is conformant with the Architecture of the World Wide Web and leverages concepts from the Semantic Web, including RDF descriptions and Linked Data. In this paper we provide a brief review of a motivating example and its serialization in Atom.

Everyone Is A Curator: Human-Assisted Preservation For Ore Aggregations, Frank Mccown, Michael L. Nelson, Herbert Van De Sompel

Computer Science Faculty Publications

The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) has recently created the Object Reuse and Exchange (ORE) project that defines Resource Maps (ReMs) for describing aggregations of web resources. These aggregations are susceptible to many of the same preservation challenges that face other web resources. In this paper, we investigate how the aggregations of web resources can be preserved outside of the typical repository environment and instead rely on the thousands of interactive users in the web community and the Web Infrastructure (the collection of web archives, search engines, and personal archiving services) to facilitate preservation. Inspired by Web 2.0 services such as …

What A User Wants: Redesigning A Library's Web Site Based On A Card-Sort Analysis, Laura Pope Robbins, Lisa Esposito, Christ Kretz, Michael Aloi

Publications

Web site usability concerns anyone with a web site to maintain. Libraries, however, are often the biggest offenders in terms of usability. In our efforts to provide users with everything they need to do research, we often overwhelm them with sites that are confusing in structure, difficult to navigate, and weighed down with jargon. Dowling College Library recently completed a redesign of its web site based upon the concept of usability. For smaller libraries in particular, this can be a challenge. The web site is often maintained by one or two people and finding the time and resources to conduct …

Keeping Abreast Of Quantum News: Quantum Computing On The Web And In The Literature, Jill Cirasella

Publications and Research

This appendix describes tools that can help you track developments in quantum computing.

Historical Bibliography Of Quantum Computing, Jill Cirasella

Publications and Research

This bibliographic essay reviews seminal papers in quantum computing. Although quantum computing is a young science, its researchers have already published thousands of noteworthy articles, far too many to list here. Therefore, this appendix is not a comprehensive chronicle of the emergence and evolution of the field but rather a guided tour of some of the papers that spurred, formalized, and furthered its study.

Tools For A Preservation-Ready Web, Joan A. Smith, Michael L. Nelson

Computer Science Presentations

PDF of a powerpoint presentation from the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) Partners Meeting, Washington D.C., July 9, 2008. Also available on Slideshare.

After The System Upgrade Or Migration: A Cataloging Checklist, Sheryl Stump, Rick Torgerson

The Southeastern Librarian

At present. integrated library system (ILS) upgrades and migrations seem to be coming faster and more frequently. The reasons for this trend are many. among them being: 1) hardware upgrades are common due to the need for more memory to run the software; 2) software upgrades and migrations are desired because of the promise of new or improved features; 3) changes in system vendor ownership can affect changes in their software; 4) software and hardware upgrades are needed due to the advanced age of either or both; and 5) system upgrades on a yearly basis may be necessary to prevent …

Designing Search: Effective Search Interfaces For Academic Library Websites, Susan Teague Rector, Jimmy Ghaphery

VCU Libraries Faculty and Staff Publications

Academic libraries customize, support and provide access to myriad information systems, each with complex graphical user interfaces (GUIs). The number of possible information entry points on an academic library Web site is both daunting to the end user and consistently challenging to library Web site designers. Faced with the challenges inherent in designing online search interfaces and the ever-growing amount of resources available online, VCU Libraries sought to explore how to build effective search interfaces that, at the same time, support a wide variety of computer users and provide comprehensive access to assorted collections of electronic resources. Over a 9 …

The State Of Public Access To Federal Government Databases Detailed In Recommended New Book, Jennifer L. Behrens

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Librarian As Hacker, Getting More From Google, R Philip Reynolds

Librarian and Staff Publications

This paper will cover four areas. First it will discuss the research habits of search engine users and some of the problems with these habits. Then it will discuss librarians' use of search engines. Here we encounter the real question: Do we do much better? Can we use a search engines to their full potential? When needed, can we hack an engine to make it perform beyond its intended function? Can we use a clever workaround to solve a problem? Or are we on a level playing field with our patrons once we get outside traditional database searching? Google currently …