The Internet Public Library

1
The Internet Public Library

• and SILS membership therein

2
Refresher

• In Sept 2007 the SILS faculty voted to join the
  IPL Consortium on a trial basis.
• The IPL gave us a ½-year membership Jan-June for
  ½-price, 2500.
• I agreed to train faculty students in IPL use,
  evaluate our membership.
• The IRB has determined that this submission does
  not constitute human subjects research as defined
  under federal regulations 45 CFR 46.102 (d or
  f) and does not require IRB approval.

3
Evaluation criteria

1. Number of courses teaching with the IPL
2. Number of research projects using IPL data
3. Publications by faculty students
4. Use of the IPL as a resource that may be
   leveraged to obtain grant funding

4
Membership has its privileges

• Support from IPL staff for integrating
  IPL-related projects into teaching
• Ask a Question service
• Collection development, Management, etc.
• Access to IPLs data
• Google Analytics
• Pre-GA webstats
• Archive of answered questions
• Access to the IPL Learning Community

5
Current teaching

• 501 training answering dig ref questions
• 740 DL evaluation assignment
• 513 in Fall? building IPL collections

6
Current research

• Lauren Perrys project
• Identifying Reusable Resources in Digital
  Reference Answers

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Laurens project

• RQ Are there socioeconomic trends in IPL usage
  stats?
• Data
• IPL stats from NC, 1/1/07 to 3/7/08
• 2000 Census
• 2006 SAT scores
• Hypothesis Users from more wealthy, educated
  areas would be the primary users of the IPL
  other online reference sites.
• Apparently is not the case
• Exploratory What are the characteristics of the
  IPLs user community? Compare IPL use to some
  other online tool (dictionary.com, some other
  online encyclopedia).

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Identifying Reusable Resources in Digital
Reference Answers

• RQs
• What resources are provided in answers to digital
  reference questions? With what frequency are
  these resources used in answers to different
  topics and types of questions?
• To what extent are the resources provided in
  answers reusable for future answers? What factors
  affect their reusability?
• What is the useful lifespan of a resource
  provided in an answer to a past digital reference
  question? To what extent is time a factor in a
  resources reusability?

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Work to date

• Eliah Hecht wrote a crawler to download all
  records in the QA archive as of Jan 2008
  (n60,393).
• We developed DC-based XML tags for fielded
  structural data in the records.
• Eliah wrote a parser to mark up all records.
• Im doing exploratory data analysis.
• Stephanie is contemplating how to apply NLP
  methods.

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What resources are provided?
Domain Provided in of answers
www.ipl.org 11.9
www.google.com 5.1
www.yahoo.com 1.1
www.altavista.com 1.0
www.amazon.com 1.0
www.hotbot.com 0.7
www.infoplease.com 0.7
en.wikipedia.org 0.6
www.geocities.com 0.6
www.britannica.com 0.5
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What resources are provided? IPL
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What resources are provided? IPL
15
Implications

• Reference expert systems are a pipe dream.
• Or, as Karen Spärck Jones would say, question
  answering is not a rational task.
• Teaching reference requires apprenticeship.

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Notes from 4/7 IPL Fellows Meeting

• Possible merger with LII
• Revision of mission vision statements to
  incorporate LII mission vision
• Revisions to Ask a Question webforms
• Tracking question traffic to better plan for
  assignments in Reference courses

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Agenda for 5/5 Fellows Meeting

• Mission/Vision Statement finalization
• Review by IPL Deans scheduled for May 1
• Review and feedback on IPL Ask a Question form
  drafts
• KidSpace Question Form
• Adult Question Form
• Library locator database or dataset for IPL site
• Timeline for IPL site

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Teaching opportunities

• 513 in Fall? building IPL collections
• 382 Systems Analysis
• 509 IR
• 510 NLP
• 534 Children Tech
• 585 Management
• 697 Emerging Topics
• 760 Web Databases
• 788 User Education
• 890-096 Evidence-based Librarianship
• Probably others
• Drexels FSUs IPL course

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Research opportunities

• Development of special collections how
  collections evolve over time
• Management of online services management of
  virtual organizations
• Webmetrics
• NLP, text mining
• How communities of interest can be developed
  sustained
• Professional development needs
• Probably others

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Evaluation criteria, redux

1. Number of courses teaching with the IPL
2. Number of research projects using IPL data
3. Publications by faculty students
4. Use of the IPL as a resource that may be
   leveraged to obtain grant funding

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The IPL as a resource for SILS

• Needs the IPL data can address
• Provides a data set with which to do pilot tests,
  test hypotheses, etc.
• Provides students a data set for Masters papers,
  other research projects.
• Revenue neutral

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Conclusion

• Evaluation of the usefulness of the IPLs
  resources for SILS will take gt1 semester.
• Breaking news University Research Council grant
  for 5000.