IRLIST Digest ISSN 1064-6965 January 22, 1996 Volume XIII, Number 4 Issue 291 ********************************************************** This issue is nearly 1,000 lines long. I got a little carried away with the many interesting submissions... ********************************************************** II. JOBS 1. Brown U.: Lead Research Programmer/Analyst 2. Strathclyde U.: Research Associate, Information Science III. NOTICES A. Publications 1. IP&M: Special Issue on Electronic News 2. Book: Scholarly Book Publishing: The Electronic Frontier 3. JASIS Table of Contents B. Meetings 1. AAAI '96 Workshop: Detecting & Preventing Miscommunications 2. AAAI '96 Workshop: Internet-Based Information Systems IV. PROJECTS A. Abstracts 1. IR-Related Dissertation Abstracts ********************************************************** II. JOBS II.1. Fr: Allen Renear Re: Brown U.: Lead Research Programmer/Analyst Lead Research Programmer/Analyst Scholarly Technology Group Brown University This is the lead technical position in an applied research, development, and service group that is pioneering new tools and methodologies for the application of advanced information technology to academic research, publishing, and instruction. Principal responsibilities include providing technical leadership, systems analysis, tool development, and project management. Requirements: Ability to provide innovative solutions to academic research problems, based on knowledge of emerging information technologies and research methodologies in academic disciplines. Expert knowledge of most of the following: object-oriented programming, client-server methodologies, advanced WWW technologies, relational or object-oriented databases, SGML, multimedia data formats, information retrieval, hypermedia systems, computer-supported cooperative work, and research methods in the humanities and social sciences. Must be able to conduct relevant applied research and development in at least one of the preceding areas. Advanced degree and research or teaching experience in an academic discipline preferred. The Scholarly Technology Group, Computing and Information Services, supports the development and use of advanced information technology in academic research, teaching, and scholarly communication by exploring new technologies and practices, developing specialized tools and techniques, and providing consulting and project management services to academic projects. STG focuses on four related areas: hypermedia systems, SGML textbase development, interactive networked publishing, and computer-supported cooperative work. Most STG projects are grant funded. STG Director: Dr. Allen Renear; Lead Project Analyst: Elli Mylonas. To apply send a cover letter and current c.v. to Human Resources, Box 1879/B00207, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912 by February 1st. For further information contact: Allen Renear, Director, Scholarly Technology Group (401 863-7312 or Allen_Renear@Brown.Edu). ********** II.2. Fr: Monica Landoni Re: Strathclyde U., Glasgow, Scotland: Research Associate, IS A short term Research Associate is available at the Department of Information Science, Strathclyde University in Glasgow, Scotland, to undertake work in the application of Spanish morphology to Information Retrieval in general and to word stemming in particular. The successful applicant will work as part of a team of 4 researchers involved in developing prototype retrieval systems for English, Catalan and Spanish. This research is financed by the European Community under the ESPRIT programme until 31 August 1996 in the first instance, and we are seeking to fill this post as soon as possible. Applicants should have a background in linguistics, computational linguistics or related field, in the Spanish language. The salary will be in the range L14317 - L21519* according to age and experience. Further particulars are available from forbes@dis.strath.ac.uk, to whom a full CV indicating the names of two referees, should be sent before 16th February 1996. Informal inquires can also be addressed to: Francesca Guardiola, (frances@dis.strath.ac.uk ) or Ruben Leon, (ruben@dis.strath.ac.uk), telephone 44 141 552 44 00 (ext. 3705/3595). * The salaries came in garbled. I "translated" as I guessed it. [IR-L Moderator] ********************************************************** III. NOTICES III.A.1. Fr: Mike Shepherd Re: Information Processing & Management: Special Issue on Electronic News SECOND CALL FOR PAPERS Information Processing & Management Special Issue on Electronic News Broadcast news is information about recent events of general interest as reported by newspapers, radio, and television. Electronic news, however, has the potential to be interactive and personalized. While editors and algorithms may define the core content of electronic news, new communication technologies will enable users to have access to supplemental material from enormous archives in digital libraries and to continual streams of newly created data. Electronic news promises to deliver to the reader an "edited" collage of recent events from wide domains in a manner that is both comprehensive and personalized. The focus of this special issue will be on the research that is leading to the next generation of news systems, i.e., systems that draw current news stories from a wide variety of sources and media and integrate these stories into personalized multimedia "editions" of the news. These systems will be based on switched, high bandwidth, two-way communications networks. Suggested topics within the context of electronic news may include but are not limited to the following: - information filtering - digital libraries - multimedia - agents - human-computer interaction - content analysis - hypermedia - indexing - user modelling - categorization The guest editors for this special issue are Michael Shepherd (shepherd@cs.dal.ca), Carolyn Watters (cwatters@dragon.acadiau.ca), and Forbes J. Burkowski (fjburkow@plg.waterloo.edu). Authors should submit 3 copies of their manuscript, double spaced, following the style as described in the IP&M instructions to contributors to: Professor Michael Shepherd Department of Mathematics, Statistics & Computing Science Dalhousie University Halifax, Nova Scotia Canada B3H 3J5 IMPORTANT DATES: Submission Date: March 15, 1996 Notification of Acceptance: June 15, 1996 Final Manuscript Due: September 15, 1996 ********** III.A.2. Fr: Richard Hill Re: Book: Scholarly Publishing Scholarly Publishing: The Electronic Frontier Edited by Robin P. Peek and Gregory B. Newby (c) 1996 American Society for Information Science (ASIS) A new monograph from the American Society for Information Science published by MIT Press. Table of Contents Foreword, James E. Rush page vii Introduction, Gregory B, Newby and Robin P. Peek page xv I The Impact of Electronic Publishing on Scholarly Life 1. Scholarly Publishing, Facing the New Frontiers; Robin P. Peek, page 3 2. Analyzing Alternate Visions of Electronic Publishing and Digital Libraries; Rob Kling and Roberta Lamb, page 17 3. The Impact of Electronic Publishing on the Academic Community; Robert J. Silverman, page 55 4. The Seminar, the Encyclopedia, and the Eco-Museum as Possible Future Forms of Electronic Publishing; Jean-Claude Guedon, page 71 5. Tragic Loss or Good Riddance? The Impending Demise of Traditional Scholarly Journals; Andrew M. Odlyzko, page 91 6. Implementing Peer Review on the Net: Scientific Quality Control in Scholarly Electronic Journals; Stevan Harnad, page 103 II. The New Challenges, Page 119 7. The Economic Quandary of the Network Publisher; Brian Hayes, page 121 8. Integrity Issues in Electronic Publishing; Clifford A. Lynch, page 133 9. The University Press in the Electronic Future; Lisa Freeman, page 147 10. Networked Information Is Not Free; Ira H. Fuchs, page 165 11. University Libraries and Scholarly Communication; Ann Okerson, page 181 12. A Consortium for Refereed Electronic Journals; Larry W. Hurtado, page 201 13. Revolutionary or Regressive? The Politics of Electronic Collection Development; Marlene Manoff, page 215 14. Traditional Publishers and Electronic Journals; Janet Fisher, page 231 15. The Need for Management of Electronic Journals; Fytton Rowland, page 243 16. The Challenges of Electronic Texts in the Library: Bibliographic Control and Access; Rebecca S. Guenther, page 251 17. Scholarly Communication in the Networked Environment: Issues of Principle, Policy and Practice; Brian Kahin, page 277 18. Where Electronic Publications and Television Programs Are Really Computer Programs: Some Copyright Implications; Patrice A. Lyons, page 299 19. TeleRead: A Virtual Central Database without Big Brother; David H. Rothman, page 313 Contributors, page 341 Index, page 343 ----------------------------------------------------------------- Trim Size: 6x9 Pages: 365 3 Illustrations Price: $35.00 ISBN: 0-262-16157-5 ASIS members ordering through ASIS: $27.50 plus $4.00 shipping and handling for the first item and $3.50 for each additional item. VISA, MasterCard, American Express charges accepted. Address orders to: American Society for Information Science 8720 Georgia Avenue, Suite 501 Silver Spring, MD 20910 (301) 495-0900 FAX: (301) 495-0810 Internet: asis@cni.org Richard Hill Executive Director, American Society for Information Science 8720 Georgia Avenue, Suite 501 Silver Spring, MD 20910 (301) 495-0900 FAX: (301) 495-0810 rhill@cni.org ********** III.A.3. Fr: Richard Hill Re: JASIS TOC JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE (JASIS) VOLUME 47, NUMBER 2, FEBRUARY 1996 p.107: In this Issue, Bert R. Boyce (Table of Contents) p.108: In Memoriam Gerald Salton, March 8, 1927 -- August 28, 1995; Carolyn Crouch, Mike McGill, Michael Lesk, Karen Sparck Jones, Edward A. Fox, Donna Harman, and Donald H. Kraft. We begin with a series of memorials to Gerry Salton. My fondest memory of Gerry was of a personal incident that occurred in 1989. I was waiting in line to congratulate him on his receipt of the ASIS Award of Merit, when he stepped over to congratulate me for receiving that year's Teacher Award which he said was "a really significant one." I didn't believe him, but I sure didn't forget he said it. RESEARCH p.116: Toward Discovery Support Systems: A Replication, Re-Examination, and Extension of Swanson's Work on Literature-Based Discovery of a Connection between Raynaud's and Fish Oil; Michael D. Gordon and Robert K. Lindsay. Gordon and Lindsay, using statistical analysis of the words in documents on Raynaud's disease, demonstrate a strong connection to blood viscosity. A search of the blood viscosity literature excluding Raynaud's disease followed with the same terminology analysis strongly suggests fish oil and eicosapentaenoic acid. Swanson's findings in 1986 are thus replicated using semi-automated techniques which make the process of using the literature to determine undiscovered connections that suggest possible treatments far easier to carry out. p.129: Dissipative Structure Theory, Synergetics, and Their Implications for the Management of Information Systems; Ziming Liu. Liu attempts to show that dissipative structure theory, which suggests that the presence of instabilities in a system may in fact lead to ordered structure, may provide useful insights when applied to information systems. p.136: Periodicity in Academic Library Circulation: A Spectral Analysis; William E. McGrath. McGrath shows that an application of time series analysis in the frequency domain to library data can identify the cyclical periods that occur in library circulation operations. In an academic library, turnstile, journal circulation, faculty circulation, and student circulation data are subjected to spectral analysis. All show seven day periods. Strong evidence of an 182 day period occurs in journal and turnstile data. Some evidence of a 3.5 day period occurs in journals, student books, and in turnstile data. Pickup counts on reference books, non-reference books, periodical volumes, and unbound periodicals provide evidence of seven and 182 day cycles appearing in all, along with some evidence of a 3.5 day period. Of particular interest is the lack of a monthly period which can be attributed to the daily and weekly nature of the academic schedule. p.146: Factors That Influence the Use of Electronic Networks by Science and Engineering Faculty at Small Institutions. Part I. Queries; Eileen G. Abels, Peter Liebscher, and Daniel W. Denman. An identification of factors influencing the adoption and use of electronic networks is presented by Abels, Liebscher, and Denman. Using a mail survey and interview of faculty in six small colleges in the southeastern U.S., they found perceived accessibility and physical proximity of equipment influence adoption, but do not effect use once adoption has taken place. Perceived ease of use is related to accessibility and proximity. There were no differences by discipline for use of E-mail, discussion groups, or databases. However, social scientists made significantly lower use of file transfers and program runs at other sites. p.159: Statistics for Measuring the Efficiency of Electronic Information Retrieval; William Steve Lang and Mary Grigsby. In "Statistics for Measuring the Efficiency of Electronic Information Retrieval," the tetrachoric r, or some relatively easily computed estimates of it, is suggested as a measure of retrieval efficiency. This statistic, conceived for other purposes in 1901, requires the same underlying information as recall and precision. Lang and Grigsby point out that small relevant sets in large databases, a not unlikely case, are unlikely to result in detectable differences. BRIEF COMMUNICATIONS p.167: A Text Filter for the Automatic Identification of Empirical Articles; Stephanie W. Haas, Jeremy Sugarman, and Helen R. Tibbo. Hass, Sugarman, and Tibbo point out that papers reporting the use of systematic observation or experimentation constitute an other than topical class with retrieval value. By identifying words with the greatest difference in frequency of occurrence by paper count in a training set of 15 empirical and 15 other than empirical papers, a discrimination score for the terms was computed. The presence of either or both of the two highest scoring words successfully split the 30 document file. These words, table and sample, would appear to indicate that the method has general application beyond the test topic of bioethics. p.170: Scholarly Use of Referenced Information in Physics Journals; Bernard Bayer and Frederick G. Kilgour. Bayer and Kilgour point out that physicists do not use or cite direct quotations, but instead cite to discuss another's work, suggest background readings, indicate others who are doing similar work, add support for contentions, and give credit for ideas used. These results are based upon structured interviews with six physicists concerning their citation practices. p.173: Postscript on Program Rankings; Blaise Cronin and Kara Overfelt. Cronin and Overfelt investigate the relationship between rankings of library and information science programs by subjective preference (White's LQ survey) and productivity in referred journals (Pettigrew and Nicholls in Library and Information Science Research). Using Spearman's rho on votes and raw publication counts, the coefficient was .513 explaining 26% of the variance. Using ranks by vote and by mean productivity data the correlation fell to .213 explaining 4.5% of the variance. Total publication seems to influence perception more than publication normalized for faculty size. Both methods seem to pick the same leading schools with some exceptions, but the rankings of the two methods are not clearly related. BOOK REVIEWS p.177: In-Depth Review: The Jobless Future: Sci-Tech and the Dogma of Work, by Stanley Aronowitz and William DiFazio; Bernd Frohmann. p.179: The Myth of the Electronic Library, by William F. Birdsall; Peter Liebscher. p.182: LETTER TO THE EDITOR Richard Hill Executive Director, American Society for Information Science 8720 Georgia Avenue, Suite 501 Silver Spring, MD 20910 (301) 495-0900 FAX: (301) 495-0810 rhill@cni.org ********** III.B.1. Fr: Dr. Susan McRoy Re: Detecting and Preventing Miscommunication DETECTING, REPAIRING, AND PREVENTING HUMAN--MACHINE MISCOMMUNICATION AAAI '96 Workshop---Portland, OR Any system that communicates must be able to cope with the possibility of miscommunication---including misunderstanding, non-understanding, and misinterpretation: o In misunderstanding, one participant obtains an interpretation that she believes is complete and correct, but which is, however, not the one that the other speaker intended her to obtain. o In non-understanding, a participant either fails to obtain any interpretation at all, or obtains more than one interpretation, with no way to choose among them. o In misinterpretation, the most likely interpretation of a participant's utterance suggests that their beliefs about the world are unexpectedly out of alignment with the other's. All three forms of miscommunication can eventually lead to repair in a dialogue; however, misinterpretations and non-understandings are typically recognized immediately, whereas a participant is not aware, at least initially, when a misunderstanding occurs. Additionally, misinterpretation can be a source of misunderstanding. Successful communication requires that participants share considerable knowledge. For example, they must share some knowledge about the state of their interaction and about the physical and social situation in which they are communicating. Knowledge of their interaction includes the current topic under discussion (often a shared task), the focus of attention, and the relevance of each utterance to the previous interaction. In practice, no two participants start with an identical understanding of their task or of the situation---nor can they take the time to identify and resolve discrepancies beforehand. As a result, participants must be prepared to handle miscommunication during dialogue. Research related to achieving robust interaction is an important subarea in Artificial Intelligence (AI). Early work concerned the correction of spelling or grammatical errors in a user's utterance so that the system could more easily match them against a fixed linguistic model; work has also been done in the area of speech recognition, attempting to find the best fit of a sound signal to legal sequences of linguistic objects. Other systems have attempted to detect misconceptions in the user's model of the domain of discourse. All of these approaches have assumed that the system's model is always correct. More recently, researchers have been looking at detecting and correcting errors in the system's model of an interaction. This work includes research on speech repairs, miscommunication, misunderstanding, non-understanding, and related work in planning, such as plan misrecognition and plan repair. The focus of this workshop is to bring together researchers interested in developing theoretical models of robust interaction or in designing robust systems. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following: o Theories that delineate what knowledge must be represented, how it will be obtained and updated, and how responsibility for achieving robustness might be distributed among the interactants. o Strategies for identifying POTENTIAL causes of breakdowns, such as ambiguities, misconceptions, and plan misrecognition, in order to avert miscommunication. o Strategies for identifying symptoms of ACTUAL breakdowns, such as deviations from expected behavior, unresolvable ambiguities, and speech errors. o Techniques for correcting errors in interpretation that have been used in other areas of AI, such as plan recognition and computer vision, and in related areas, such as human-computer interaction and multimedia. o Approaches to minimizing and correcting miscommunication in tutoring systems and education. o Empirical data regarding the occurrence of miscommunication and approaches to robust communication that derive from empirical methods. o Research in knowledge representation that would be useful in detecting, repairing, and preventing miscommunication. We solicit papers that explore these issues, and papers that discuss implementations of solutions to the problems of detecting, repairing, and preventing human--machine miscommunication. Papers submitted to the workshop should address these topics explicitly. As AAAI procedures require, participation will be limited to 65. COMMITTEE: Susan McRoy, chair University of Wisconsin--Milwaukee mcroy@cs.uwm.edu (414) 229--6695 (phone) (414) 229--6958 (fax) Brad Goodman Kathleen McCoy Mitre Corporation University of Delaware bgoodman@linus.mitre.org mccoy@louie.udel.edu Susan Haller Ronnie Smith University of Wisconsin--Parkside East Carolina University haller@cs.uwp.edu rws@math1.math.ecu.edu Graeme Hirst David Traum University of Toronto TECFA, Universite de Geneve gh@cs.toronto.edu David.Traum@tecfa.unige.ch SCHEDULE: Submission deadline: March 18, 1996 Author notification: April 15, 1996 Camera-ready copy due: May 13, 1996 Conference dates: August 4--8, 1996 SUBMISSIONS: Submit an extended abstract. Abstracts should not exceed 10 pages, exclusive of references, in 12 point, double-spaced text, with one-inch margins. We strongly encourage electronic submissions, either plain text or postscript. Emailed submissions should be emailed to mcroy@cs.uwm.edu with a subject heading ``ATTN: AAAI MNM''. In the event that electronic submission is not possible, send 6 copies to: Susan McRoy ATTN: AAAI MNM Workshop Computer Science, University of Wisconsin--Milwaukee 3200 North Cramer Street, EMS Room 503 Milwaukee, WI 53211 This cfp is on the WWW at http://www.cs.uwm.edu/faculty/mcroy/mnm.html ********** III.B.2. Fr: Alexander Franz Re: AAAI '96 Workshop on Internet-based Information Systems Call for Papers (brief version) AAAI-96 Workshop on Internet-based Information Systems August 4 or 5, Portland, Oregon The purpose of this workshop is to examine the state of the art, and explore the future, of network-based systems for browsing, searching, and sharing information in text and other forms. The focus will be on interactivity and Artificial Intelligence techniques. We solicit submissions relevant to these areas. Electronic submissions are due by March 18, 1996. For full details, please see the workshop home page: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~amf/iis96.html ********************************************************** IV. PROJECTS Selected IR-Related Dissertation Abstracts Compiled by: Susanne M. Humphrey The following are citations selected by title and abstract as being of potential interest to the Information Retrieval (IR) community, resulting from a computer search, using the CDP/Online system, of the Dissertation Abstracts International (DAI) database produced by University Microfilms International (UMI). Included are accession number (AN); author (AU); title (TI); degree, institution, year, number of pages (IN); UMI order number (DD); reference to the published DAI (SO); abstract (AB); one or more DAI subject descriptors chosen by the author (DE); thesis adviser (AR); and dates associated with the monthly update file (UP). Unless otherwise specified, paper or microform copies of dissertations may be ordered from University Microfilms International, Dissertation Copies, Post Office Box 1764, Ann Arbor, MI 48106; telephone for U.S. (except Michigan, Hawaii, Alaska): 1-800-521-3042, for Canada: 1-800-343-5299; fax: 313-973-1540. Price lists and other ordering and shipping information are in the introduction to the published DAI. An alternate source for copies is sometimes provided. Dissertation titles and abstracts contained here are published with permission of University Microfilms International, publishers of Dissertation Abstracts International (copyright by University Microfilms International), and may not be reproduced without their prior permission. AN AAI9504832 AU Hearst, Martha Alice. TI CONTEXT AND STRUCTURE IN AUTOMATED FULL-TEXT INFORMATION ACCESS. IN Thesis (PH.D.)--UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY, 1994, 168p. DD Order Number: AAI9504832. SO Dissertation Abstracts International. Volume: 55-09, Section: B, page: 3977. AB This dissertation investigates the role of contextual information in the automated retrieval and display of full-text documents, using robust natural language processing algorithms to automatically detect structure in and assign topic labels to texts. Many long texts are comprised of complex topic and subtopic structure, a fact ignored by existing information access methods. I present two algorithms which detect such structure, and two visual display paradigms which use the results of these algorithms to show the interactions of multiple main topics, multiple subtopics, and the relations between main topics and subtopics. The first algorithm, called TextTiling, recognizes the subtopic structure of texts as dictated by their content. It uses domain-independent lexical frequency and distribution information to partition texts into multi-paragraph passages. The results are found to correspond well to reader judgments of major subtopic boundaries. The second algorithm assigns multiple main topic labels to each text, where the labels are chosen from pre-defined, intuitive category sets; the algorithm is trained on unlabeled text. A new iconic representation, called TileBars uses TextTiles to simultaneously and compactly display query term frequency, query term distribution and relative document length. This representation provides an informative alternative to ranking long uxts according to their overall similarity to a query. For example, a user can choose to view those documents that have an extended discussion of one set of terms and a brief but overlapping discussion of a second set of terms. This representation also allows for relevance feedback on patterns of term distribution. TileBars display documents only in terms of words supplied in the user query. For a given retrieved text, if the query words do not correspond to its main topics, the user cannot discern in what context the query terms were used. For example, a query on contaminants may retrieve documents whose main topics relate to nuclear power, food, or oil spills. To address this issue, I describe a graphical interface, called Cougar, that displays retrieved documents in terms of interactions among their automatically-assigned main topics, thus allowing users to familiarize themselves with the topics and terminology of a text collection. DE Computer Science. Information Science. Language, Linguistics. AR Wilensky, Robert. UP 9502. Revised: 950224. AN AAI9504745 AU Berger, Michael George. TI INFORMATION-SEEKING IN THE ONLINE BIBLIOGRAPHIC SYSTEM: AN EXPLORATORY STUDY. IN Thesis (PH.D.)--UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY, 1994, 224p. DD Order Number: AAI9504745. SO Dissertation Abstracts International. Volume: 55-09, Section: A, page: 2617. AB The online bibliographic system has become the primary means of end-user access to library collections. This dissertation examines how users search the monograph and periodical databases of a large academic online bibliographic system, the University of California's MELVYL system. The analysis of user behavior and performance is based on a sample of 144 sessions extracted from the MELVYL system transaction logs for a typical week. The analysis divides user interactions into three levels: (1) the individual command issued by the user, (2) the search objective, which includes one or more searches for a single objective, such as a particular book, and (3) the session, which includes one or more search objectives. During the course of the study, it became evident that examining the search objective provided the best clues to the user's intentions and searching performance. By examining the series of user commands that constitute a search objective, it was possible to group search objectives into five search categories: (1) known item, (2) personal author, (3) periodical title, (4) topical, and (5) other, which included a small number of corporate author and series searches. An expert then reviewed each of the users' search objectives and assessed the users' performance. From the assessment of the 445 search objectives in the 144 sessions, performance was judged by the expert as successful (67%), suboptimal (17%), or unsuccessful (16%). The best performance was achieved for known item, personal author, and periodical title searches, and the poorest performance for topical searches. The results of this study suggested a number of conclusions that differ from those in the literature on online bibliographic systems. First, users are more successful than is usually reported in the literature. Secondly, searches that retrieve no results pose less of a problem than previously believed. Thirdly, searches can easily be grouped into a limited number of categories for analysis and improvement. The types of problems users encountered are described. Based on the conclusions of the study, a series of improvement strategies for the online bibliographic system are proposed, as well as suggestions for future work. DE Library Science. Information Science. AR Buckland, Michael K. UP 9502. Revised: 950224. AN AAI9503238 AU King, David Neale. TI CLINICAL SEARCH EFFECTIVENESS: AN ASSESSMENT OF THE CONTRIBUTION OF THE COMPUTER-ASSISTED INFORMATION SERVICES OF HOSPITAL LIBRARIES TO CLINICAL DECISION-MAKING BY PHYSICIANS. IN Thesis (PH.D.)--UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN, 1994, 201p. DD Order Number: AAI9503238. SO Dissertation Abstracts International. Volume: 55-09, Section: A, page: 2618. AB The contribution of libraries to health care is among the most important issues in medical librarianship. This study examined the contribution of the computer-assisted information services of hospital libraries to clinical decision making. Four lines of research intersect in this study: research on information transfer among health professionals, research on clinical problem solving and decision making, evaluation of information retrieval system performance, and evaluation of health sciences library information services. Four notions of effectiveness that emerge from these lines of research were identified and the perspective of situational effectiveness was selected as most appropriate for this study. A research design combining qualitative and quantitative methods was devised for the study. A random sample of hospital libraries was selected. Critical incident techniques were used to explore the circumstances of 132 physicians who requested the assistance of their library in locating information pertinent to the care of one of their patients. Incidents in which physicians obtained the information needed for clinical decision making and judged the information important for resolving the clinical problem that prompted their request were considered effective. Incidents in which important changes in patient care resulted were considered critical. Incidents in which, for any reason, the information provided to the physician failed to contribute to case-related decision making were considered ineffective. Physicians in twenty-nine medical specialties participated in the study. Their patient cases represented all National Library of Medicine disease classifications. More than three-quarters of the incidents examined in this study were effective and more than one-half were critical. The distribution of participating hospitals was representative of the regional distribution of hospitals which maintain libraries. Factors related to the collections, services, budget, and staffing of the libraries were not explanatory of ineffective incidents. Illustrative scenarios (i.e., case reports) of fifteen effective, critical, and ineffective incidents are presented. DE Library Science. Information Science. Health Sciences, Medicine and Surgery. AR Smith, Linda C. UP 9502. Revised: 950224. AN AAI9503185 AU Floren-Romero, Maria Soledad. TI THE IMPACT OF INFORMATION LOSS ON RESEARCH: A CASE STUDY IN THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC. IN Thesis (PH.D.)--UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN, 1994, 275p. DD Order Number: AAI9503185. SO Dissertation Abstracts International. Volume: 55-09, Section: A, page: 2617. AB The purpose of this study was to assess the impact of information loss in industry in a developing country. The assessment of information loss was accomplished by studying instances of information missed by scientists working in a pharmaceutical firm in the Dominican Republic and appraising the impact that this loss had on the research of the firm. Fourteen scientists working with the firm were interviewed. Ten research projects done between 1988 and 1993 were selected. Bibliographies were compiled on the topics of the research projects using databases accessible in the United States and the Dominican Republic covering information from the developed and developing countries. The study showed that all scientists missed information relevant to their research. Eighty percent of the literature retrieved in database searches was previously unknown to the scientists. Forty-one percent was relevant to their research topics and 15% of the items would have had an impact on the research if they had had them at the time the research was underway. Scientists identified potential impacts at three levels: at the user level (cognitive impacts); at the work level (changes in research); and at the firm level (effects on design and manufacturing of the drugs). The literature overlooked would have among other things increased their knowledge on the diseases and the drugs under study; it would have contributed knowledge on new laboratory techniques to diagnose diseases; it would have made possible a better and more in-depth research and better informed decision making. Access to information was associated with the information-seeking behavior of the scientists and obstacles to access to information. The study revealed that scientific research is not a national priority for development and scientists depend for access to information on their own network of information providers; their personal libraries and colleagues' resources inside or outside the country are the first choices for access to information. DE Library Science. Information Science. AR Lancaster, F W. UP 9502. Revised: 950224. AN AAI9503175 AU Dickerson, Randy Clay. TI A SYSTEMATIC APPROACH TO STANDARDIZED DOCUMENTATION OF MUSICAL INSTRUMENT CATALOGUES WITHIN THE MUSEUM SETTING. IN Thesis (ED.D.)--UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN, 1994, 129p. DD Order Number: AAI9503175. SO Dissertation Abstracts International. Volume: 55-09, Section: A, page: 2757. AB The purpose of this study was to develop a new system for documentation of musical instrument collections that would standardize the list of information that is kept on each instrument and generate a format for information storage and retrieval, making information more easily accessible to researchers. To survey current documentation procedures the investigator visited the musical instrument collections at the following museums: the Smithsonian Institute, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Yale University Collection of Musical Instruments, the Stearns Collection at the University of Michigan, and the Shrine to Music at the University of South Dakota. Based upon information obtained through interviews of curators and/or directors of these museums, a list of information schedules was compiled, as was an inventory of modes of data registry. Conclusions about documentation effectiveness and commonalties were drawn. The most effective modes of data registry were determined to be a paper document file and computer database. The investigator developed a working model of the system including a database that contained the consolidated information schedule. The system was implemented by entering statistical information on ten instruments of the University of Illinois Collection of Musical instruments into the database. The study defined a model for a recommended system of documentation, sample screens illustrating the format of the computer database program, and a definition of the complete program operations. DE Education, Music. Music. Information Science. AR Peters, G David. UP 9502. Revised: 950224. AN AAI9502815 AU Lopez-Ramirez, Elsa Maria. TI THE ADEQUACY OF THE STRUCTURE OF THE NATIONAL LIBRARY OF MEDICINE CLASSIFICATION SCHEME FOR ORGANIZING PHARMACY LITERATURE. IN Thesis (PH.D.)--THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY, 1994, 272p. DD Order Number: AAI9502815. SO Dissertation Abstracts International. Volume: 55-09, Section: A, page: 2618. AB The National Library of Medicine Classification Scheme (NLMC) was developed in 1946 utilizing basic ideas from Eileen Cunningham's Medical Library Classification, a classification scheme developed from the viewpoint of teaching medicine. Three classification schemes have been developed for the organization of pharmaceutical literature: (1) Eli Lilly Company, (2) Sheppard Library at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy, and (3) Lloyd Library, University of Cincinnati. There is no evidence in the literature that these classification schemes are kept up-to-date. Since the NLMC is the only up-to-date classification scheme available in the United States for the organization of health sciences literature, it would be an important contribution to determine how adequate the system is for organizing health sciences literature other than medicine. The purpose of this study was to examine how the structure of the NLMC accommodates pharmaceutical literature, to determine its adequacy in organizing this body of literature, and to contribute seminal knowledge on the history and development of this classification scheme. The basic tools used in the study were a list of disciplines of the pharmacy field published by the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy (AACP), the NLMC, the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), six bibliographies representing the recommended resources necessary to support the pharmacy discipline, and CATLINE. The six bibliographies were merged using the computer program Pro-Cite to generate a database named Asklepios. The study was limited to an analysis of the NLMC classification numbers assigned to bibliographic records of monographs representing the body of literature on pharmacy. The study population was 1,979 records. In the NLMC pharmacy literature is accommodated in subclass QV 701-835 Pharmacy and pharmaceutics. The research revealed five fundamental categories provided in the NLMC for pharmacy literature. Ten fundamental categories were identified in the published pharmacy literature. The analysis revealed that the structure of the NLMC brought together 42 percent of the literature, 41 percent was scattered throughout the classification scheme, and 17 percent was classified in the Library of Congress Classification. DE Library Science. Health Sciences, Pharmacy. AR Clack, Doris H. UP 9502. Revised: 950224. AN AAINN90568 AU Baron, Lisa. TI THE EFFECTIVENESS OF LABELLED, TYPED LINKS AS CUES IN HYPERTEXT SYSTEMS. IN Thesis (PH.D.)--THE UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN ONTARIO (CANADA), 1994, 211p. DD Order Number: AAINN90568. SO Dissertation Abstracts International. Volume: 55-09, Section: A, page: 2617. AB This research examines the classification of link types within hypertext databases. It is proposed that labelled links act as cues, enabling understanding of the structure and leading to more informed navigational choices. Although there is anecdotal evidence that indicating link types to readers is useful in hypertext systems, there is no experimental data to support this position. The goal of the proposed research is to provide a basis for the development of labels identifying link types, by focusing primarily on the hypertext readers' use of links. It addresses whether labelling the different types of links changes the effectiveness of searching a hypertext database by providing or enhancing a structure for readers of nonlinear texts. An experiment was run to determine which of the following 3 conditions serve users with better cues and lead to increases performance in both browsing and querying scenarios: (1) Providing only organizational links; (2) Adding unlabelled semantic, rhetorical, and pragmatic links in addition to the organizational links; and (3) Adding labelled semantic, rhetorical, and pragmatic links to the organizational links. The experiment used a between subject design. Thirty-six students from the University of Western Ontario, Graduate School of Library and Information Science volunteered for the experiment. All subjects had a minimum of one semester of cataloguing. The hypertext document was the OCLC (Online Computer Library Center) Cataloguing Utility manual and the hypertext platform was SuperBook. The results showed that there was no significant difference between the three conditions in the browsing task, however, subjects who had labelled content-based links performed significantly better on the query task. The case study analysis of a subset of the experimental subject population showed that in the query task, labelled links led to the correct answer more often than unlabelled links. It was also shown that while link usage was small, subjects who had labelled links used more rhetorical and pragmatic links. Subjects who performed well on the browsing and querying tasks exhibited similar navigational behaviours. DE Library Science. AR Tague-Sutcliffe, Jean. Kinnucan, Mark. IB 0-315-90568-9 UP 9502. Revised: 950224. ********************************************************** IRLIST Digest is distributed from the University of California, Division of Library Automation, 300 Lakeside Drive, Oakland, CA. 94612-3550. 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