Library and Information Science Commons^™

Storage Of Architectural Materials At The Syracuse University Library, Peter D. Verheyen, Carolyn Davis, Debra Olson

Librarian Publications

When the Department of Special Collections at the Syracuse University Library acquired the papers of Werner Seligmann, an architect and former Dean of the Syracuse University School of Architecture, the opportunity presented itself to develop a model storage system that could be applied to the other architectural drawings in the Department. While not large in comparison to these other collections, the Seligmann Papers were sizable enough to give us a better understanding of the storage issues involved if we decided to undertake the task of re-housing our other drawings. If such a task were to be undertaken, a new storage …

Global Changes In Scholarly Communication, Suzanne E. Thorin

Librarian Publications

For more than a decade, the cost of print and electronic journals, particularly in the sciences, has increased rapidly at the same time that the amount of research being reported via published articles has grown exponentially. With academic libraries being less and less able to purchase the journals needed for their communities, the use of the term scholarly communication has evolved to illustrate the breakdown of the process of traditional scholarly publication; that is, as a means to disseminate research results, the present system of scholarly communication can no longer meet the needs of the scholarly community at large.

When …

Transformation Based Learning For Specialization Of Generic Event Extractions, Mary D. Taffet, Nancy Mccracken, Eileen Allen, Elizabeth D. Liddy

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

As part of our Evidence Extraction and Link Discovery (EELD) project, we proposed to use Transformation Based Learning (TBL) to learn domain-specific specializations for generic event extractions. The primary goal of our learning task was to reduce the amount of human effort required for specializing generic event extractions to domains that are new and specific. Three initial annotation cycles and one annotation review and correction cycle involving a total of 70 documents were completed, with slightly over 32 hours required for the entire annotation effort; where possible, the annotation cycles started with bootstrapped files resulting from the application of TBL …

Concept Tree Based Clustering Visualization With Shaded Similarity Matrices, Bei Yu, Jun Wang, Les Gasser

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

One of the problems with existing clustering methods is that the interpretation of clusters may be difficult. Two different approaches have been used to solve this problem: conceptual clustering in machine learning and clustering visualization in statistics and graphics. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the benefits of combining clustering visualization and conceptual clustering to obtain better cluster interpretations. In our research we have combined concept trees for conceptual clustering with shaded similarity matrices for visualization. Experimentation shows that the two interpretation approaches can complement each other to help us understand data better.

Commercial Websites And The Use Of Classification Schemes: The Case Of Amazon.Com. In Lopez-Huertas, Maria J. Challenges In Knowledge Represantation An Organization For The 21st Century: Intergration Of Knowledge Across Boundaries., Barbara H. Kwasnik

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

The structure and use of the classification for books on the Amazon.com website are described and analyzed. The contents of this large website are changing constantly and the access mechanisms have the main purpose of enabling searchers to find books for purchase. This includes finding books the searcher knows about at the start of the research, as well as those that might present themselves in the course of searching and that are related in some way. Underlying the many access paths to books is a classification scheme comprising a rich network of terms in an enumerative and multihierarchical structure.

Search And Rescue: Repair Strategies Of Remote Users Searching The Online Catalog, Nancy B. Turner, Susan E. Beck

Librarian Publications

No abstract provided.

Information Literacy Instruction In Higher Education: Trends And Issues, Abby Kasowitz-Scheer, Michael Pasqualoni

Librarian Publications

Students today face a daily explosion of information resources and the challenge of using these resources effectively and responsibly. Information literacy instruction (ILI) requires a shift in focus from teaching specific information resources to a set of critical thinking skills involving the use of information. ILI in an academic setting includes a variety of instructional approaches, such as course-related library instruction sessions, course-integrated projects, online tutorials, and stand-alone courses. Those running formal ILI programs consider curricular objectives, invoking combinations of instructional solutions over a period of time. This ERIC Digest examines characteristics of successful programs, presents specific examples of approaches …

Behavioral Information Security Item Ratings, Jeffrey M. Stanton

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

Item rating data from behavioral information security project.

Ontological Representation Of Learning Objects, Jian Qin, Christina Finneran

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

Many of the existing metadata standards use content metadata elements that are coarse-grained representations of learning resources. These metadata standards limit users ’ access to learning objects that may be at the component level. The authors discuss the need for component level access to learning resources and provide a conceptual framework of the knowledge representation of learning objects that would enable such access.

A Breadth Of Nlp Applications, Elizabeth D. Liddy

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

The Center for Natural Language Processing (CNLP) was founded in September 1999 in the School of Information Studies, the “Original Information School”, at Syracuse University. CNLP’s mission is to advance the development of human-like, language understanding software capabilities for government, commercial, and consumer applications. The Center conducts both basic and applied research, building on its recognized capabilities in Natural Language Processing. The Center’s seventeen employees are a mix of doctoral students in information science or computer engineering, software engineers, linguistic analysts, and research engineers.

Question Answering: Cnlp At The Trec-2002 Question Answering Track, Anne R. Diekema, Jiangping Chen, Nancy Mccracken, Necati Ercan Ozgencil, Mary D. Taffet

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

This paper describes the retrieval experiments for the main task and list task of the TREC-2002 question-answering track. The question answering system described automatically finds answers to questions in a large document collection. The system uses a two-stage retrieval approach to answer finding based on matching of named entities, linguistic patterns, keywords, and the use of a new inference module. In answering a question, the system carries out a detailed query analysis that produces a logical query representation, an indication of the question focus, and answer clue words.

The Digital Library: A Biography, Suzanne E. Thorin, Daniel Greenstein

Librarian Publications

The idea for the study took shape in a New York City steakhouse where four DLF directors met to reflect on the new roles and responsibilities that were emerging for their libraries as they entered an increasingly networked digital age.1 Realizing that lessons from the past were easier and perhaps more predictive than prognostications about the future, they suggested that a study of DLF member programs would reveal the history, aims, organization, and immediate challenges in their libraries The study progressed quickly, following the development of a lengthy (104-question) survey that was received and completed without complaint at DLF member …

2002 Program, University Of Rochester

Upstate New York Science Librarians Conference

No abstract provided.

Visual Displays Of Information: A Conceptual Taxonomy, Scott Warren

Librarian Publications

This paper creates a taxonomic model for visual information displays looking at three levels: information design (based on Edward Tufte’s work), information architecture, and information spaces. Special attention is paid to the use of spatial and navigational metaphors in visual systems as they affect the user’s experience. Especially interesting is how a user creates an “information space” – a mental model of what he has seen, how she keeps track of where she is within a system, and how these activities fit together with the data that is being sought. Mathematics is one area that holds promise for better understanding …

Manuscripts Processing At Syracuse: An Insider's View, Kathleen Manwaring

The Courier

After explaining the specialness of special collections, Manwaring compares the processing of books and serials, with their preselected, pre-organized content, to the processing of manuscripts, which "reflect the chaos inherent in real life." The latter requires "total immersion" in order to "discover and reflect the underlying structure of the individual's life experience" while making his or her papers accessible to scholars.

News Of The Library And The Library Associates, From Courier, Vol. Xxxiii, 1998-2001, Syracuse University Library Associates

The Courier

Post-Standard Award Citation, 1998, for David H. Starn

Post-Standard Award Citation, 1999, for Dorothea P. Nelson

Post-Standard Award Citation, 2000, for Katleen W. Rossman

Recent Acquisitions:

-Thomas Moore Papers

-Kat Ran Press (Michael Russem)

-Margaret Bourke-White Photographs

-The Werner Seligmann Papers

Library Associates Programs for 1998-99, 1999-00, and 2000-01

In Memoriam

Converting A Controlled Vocabulary Into An Ontology: The Case Of Gem, Jian Qin, Stephen Paling

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

The prevalance of digital information raised issues regarding the suitability of conventional library tools for organizing information. The multi-dimensionality of digital resources requires a more versatile and flexible representation to accommodate intelligent information representation and retrieval. Ontologies are used as a solution to such issues in many application domains, mainly due to their ability explicitly to specify the semantics and relations and to express them in a computer understandable language. Conventional knowledge organization tools such as classifications and thesauri resemble ontologies in a way that they define concepts and relationships in a systematic manner, but they are less expressive than …

Genre-Based Navigation On The Web, Barbara H. Kwasnik, Kevin Crowston, Mike Nilan, X. Liu, J. Cai

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

We report on our ongoing study of using the genre of Web pages to facilitate information exploration. By genre, we mean socially recognized regularities of form and purpose in documents (e.g., a letter, a memo, a research paper). Our study had three phases. First, through a user study, we identified genres which most/least frequently meet searchers' information needs. We found that certain genres are better suited for certain types of needs. We identified five (5) major groups of document genres that might be used in an interactive search tool that would allow genrebased navigation. We tried to balance the following …

Natural Language Processing, Elizabeth D. Liddy

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is the computerized approach to analyzing text that is based on both a set of theories and a set of technologies. And, being a very active area of research and development, there is not a single agreed-upon definition that would satisfy everyone, but there are some aspects, which would be part of any knowledgeable person’s definition.

Investigating The Interplay Between Structure And Information And Communications Technology In The Real Estate Industry, Kevin Crowston, Steve Sawyer, Rolf Wigand

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are reshaping many industries, often by reshaping how information is shared. Information intensive industries, by their nature, show the greatest impacts due to ICTs that enable information sharing and the bypassing of traditional information intermediaries. However, while the effects and uses of ICT are often associated with organizations (and industries), their use occurs at the individual level. In other words, it is changes to individual work related to the use of ICTs that reshape both organization and industry structures, and vice versa. To explore the relationships between individual uses of ICT and changes to organization …

E-Tables: Non-Specialist Use And Understanding Of Statistical Data, Gary Marchionini, Carol Hert, Ben Shneiderman, Liz Liddy

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

This paper provides a progress report on a project that aims to understand how people think about and understand statistical data presented in tables. The focus is on people who are not statistical specialists. To this end, studies of various user populations were conducted, underlying data enrichment and explanation was investigated, and interactive user interface prototypes were developed and tested.

A Process Theory Of Competency Rallying In Engineering Projects, Bernhard R. Katzy, Kevin Crowston

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

Firms face an environment changing at an increasingly rapid pace. Market opportunities in particular can arise and disappear in a short time. Unfortunately, the speed with which organizations can adapt their strategies and competencies to meet these opportunities remains limited. We argue that firms can address these individual limitations by cooperating with others for access to market opportunities and needed competencies. In this paper, we present a process theory of how a network of firms can reliably engineering and deliver products in the face of rapid market changes. In this theory, the success of the network is predicated on 1) …

The Social Embeddedness Of Transactions: Evidence From The Residential Real Estate Industry, Steve Sawyer, Kevin Crowston, Rolf T. Wigand, Marcel Allbritton

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

Information and communications technologies (ICT) are becoming pervasive in the residential real estate industry and affecting the work lives of real estate agents. Drawing on data from a regional study of the residential real-estate industry in the United States, we focus on the disintermediation or, more accurately, the re-intermediation of real estate agents in the sales process. We examine how real estate agents are (1) taking advantage of new ICT in their work, and (2) protecting themselves from others wishing to displace their position in the real estate value chain. Our analysis draws on two contrasting theoretical approaches to better …

Information And Communication Technologies In The Real Estate Industry: Results Of A Pilot Survey, Rolf T. Wigand, Kevin Crowston, Steve Sawyer, Marcel Allbritton

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

We have been studying the growing use of information and communication technologies (ICT) in the residential real estate industry and the effects of this use on how realtors work. Earlier stages of our project involved qualitative research to develop a better understanding of the industry, the work of realtors and their use of ICT. In this paper we report on the results of qualitative research and a pilot of a survey intended to gather large-scale data on realtors and ICT use.

An Nlp Approach For Improving Access To Statistical Information For The Masses, Elizabeth D. Liddy, Jennifer H. Liddy

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

Naïve users need to access statistical information, but frequently do not have the sophisticated levels of understanding required in order to translate their information needs into the structure and vocabulary of sites which currently provide access to statistical information. However, these users can articulate quite straightforwardly in their own terms what they are looking for. One approach to satisfying the masses of citizens with needs for statistical information is to automatically map their natural language expressions of their information needs into the metadata structure and terminology that defines and describes the content of statistical tables. To accomplish this goal, we …

Franz Leopold Ranke, The Ranke Library At Syracuse And The Open Future Of Scientific History, Siegfried Baur

The Courier

"The recent purchase of the great historical library of Dr. Leopold von Ranke by an American suggests some reflections. There is no doubt that this library, which numbers many thousands of books, pamphlets, manuscripts and documents of all times and all languages, is the finest historical collection in the world.... But this great and invaluable collection, which should have gone to one of the large cities like New York, Boston, Philadelphia or Chicago, or to one of the university towns like Cambridge, New Haven, Ithaca or Ann Arbor, is going to Syracuse, which is neither a large city nor a …

On The Fly Bi: Reaching And Teaching From The Reference Desk, Nancy B. Turner, Susan E. Beck

Librarian Publications

Today’s reference librarians are constantly faced with the challenge of orienting users to the complex, ever changing world of the electronic library. A well-structured library instruction program is one important approach to the overall goal of educating users. But library instruction sessions cannot and do not reach all students. Studies indicate that students are most receptive to learning research techniques at the point of need, which most often occurs at the reference desk. Although many reference librarians are committed to ‘‘teaching students to fish,’’ they are frequently faced with students whose research needs require in-depth lessons that exceed the time …

Identifying Document Genre To Improve Web Search Effectiveness. The Bulletin Of The American Society For Information Science And Technology, Barbara H. Kwasnik, K. Crowston, Mike Nilan, D. Roussinov

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Virtual Factory: Discontinuous Work In A Virtual Organization, Kevin Crowston

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

The Virtual Factory is an organized network for regional cooperation in the manufacturing industry in the region around Lake Constance, on the border between Germany, Switzerland and Austria. The network was developed through a collaborative action research project started by the Institute for Technology Management, University of St. Gallen2. Project leadership (the core partners) came from entrepreneurs and senior managers from companies in the region and four researchers from the Institute.

"Classification Structures In The Changing Environment Of Active Commercial Websites: The Case Of Ebay.Com". In Beeghtol, Clare, Howarth Lynne C., And Williamson, Nancy J. (Eds.) Dynamism And Stability In Knowledge Organization., Barbara H. Kwasnik, Xiaoyong Liu

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

This paper reports on a portion of a larger ongoing project. We address the issues of information organization and retrieval in large, active commercial websites. More specifically, we address the use of classification for providing access to the contents of such sites. We approach this analysis by describing the functionality and structure of the classification scheme of one such representative, large, active, commercial websites: eBay.com, a web-based auction site for millions of users and items. We compare eBay’s classification scheme with the Art & Architecture thesaurus, which is a tool for describing and providing access to material culture.