LIS618 lecture 0

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LIS618 lecture 0

• Thomas Krichel
• 2003-01-22

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Organization

• homepage http//wotan.liu.edu/home/krichel/lis618p
  03s
• Contents to be discussed today.
• Send mail to krichel_at_openlib.org
• Your name
• Your secret word for grades delivery
• Interrupt me with as many questions as possible!
• Ask for breaks!

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Proposed Organization

• Normal lecture
• Quiz at the beginning of every lecture
• Remove two worst performances
• Average to form 50
• No quiz next week!
• Search exercise 50
• Formal syllabus to be made early next week!

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Enlargement of hours

• I would like to make the sessions longer
• To compensate, some weeks would not have class
• Such weeks would be concentrated at the end of
  the term
• Advantages for students
• Saves students time to travel
• Improves grades because of worst performance
  discount.
• I will not be there some weeks, may have to add
  extra out-of-class work.

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Search exercise

• find victim of an information need
• conduct interview about an information need
  experienced by the victim, write down
  expectations
• search in Dialog and on web
• discuss results with the victim
• write essay, no longer than 7 pages.

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About me

• Born 1965, in Völklingen (Germany)
• Studied economics and social sciences at the
  Universities of Toulouse, Paris, Exeter and
  Leiceister.
• PhD in theoretical macroeconomics
• Lecturer in Economics at the University of Surrey
  1993 and 2001
• Since 2001 assistant professor at the Palmer
  School

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Why?

• During research assistantship period, (1990 to
  1993) I was constantly frustrated with difficult
  access to scientific literature.
• At the same time, I discovered easy access to
  freely downloadable software over the Internet.
• I decided to work towards downloadable scientific
  documents. This lead to my library career
  (eventually).

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Steps taken I

• 1993 founded the NetEc project at
  http//netec.mcc.ac.uk, later available at
  http//netec.ier.hit-u.ac.jp as well as at
  http//netec.wustl.edu.
• These are networking projects targeted to the
  economics community. The bulk is
• Information about working papers
• Downloadable working papers
• Journal articles were added later

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Steps taken II

• Set up RePEc, a digital library for economics
  research. Catalogs
• Research documents
• Collections of research documents
• Researchers themselves
• Organizations that are important to the research
  process
• Decentralized collection, model for the open
  archives initiative

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Steps taken III

• Co-founder of Open Archives Initiative
• Work on the Academic Metadata Format
• Co-founded rclis, a RePEc clone for (Research in
  Computing, Library and Information Science)

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Interest in databases

• From my point of view I have two interests in
  database searching
• As a provider, I must understand how people
  search in order to provide some data that they
  can use and will use.
• As an economist, I have a strong interest in
  information as a commodity. The database market
  is an important market place.

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Database searching (DS)

• subset of the subject of information retrieval
  (IR)
• DS mainly thought as applicable to the set of
  large structured databases as opposed to do web
  searching
• for those, a general knowledge of what databases
  are seems useful
• Concentrate on textual databases

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traditional social model

• user goes to a library
• describes problem to the librarian
• librarian does the search
• without the user present
• with the user present
• hands over the result to the user
• user fetches full-text or asks a librarian to
  fetch the full text.

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economic rational for traditional model

• In olden days the cost of telecommunication was
  high.
• database use costs
• cost of communication
• cost of access time to the database
• the traditional model controls an upper bound on
  costs

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disintermediation

• with access cost time gone, the traditional model
  is under threat
• there is disintermediation where the librarian
  looses her role
• but that may not be good news for information
  retrieval results
• user knows subject matter best
• librarian knows searching best

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Web searching

• IR has received a lot of impetus through the web,
  which poses unprecedented search challenges.
• with more and more data appearing on the web DS
  may be a subject in decline
• it is primarily concerned with non-web databases
• There is more and more web-based methods of
  searching

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http//openlib.org/home/krichel

• Thank you for your attention!