67th IFLA Council and General Conference August 16-25, 2001 Code...
67th IFLA Council and General
Conference
August 16-25, 2001
Code Number:
058-98-E
Division Number:
V
Professional Group:
Reference Work
Joint Meeting with:
-
Meeting Number:
98
Simultaneous Interpretation:
-
Collaborative E-Reference: A Research Agenda
Zorana Ercegovac
InfoEN, UCLA
E-mail:
zercegov@ucla.edu
Introduction
Throughout the history of our profession, information-related activities have been often seen as
diametrically opposing forces. Such have been pulling relationships between technical
processing and public services, between library catalogs, periodical indexes, and finding aids,
books and non-books, printed and born-digital carriers, between "fixed" objects and others that
are dynamic, between librarianship and education, between libraries, archives, museums, and
other information agencies. Recently, the notion of digital libraries has introduced a new
competitor, computer scientists and engineers (see, for instance, Communications of the ACM
May issue 2001), and threatened to displace or alter some of the professional library skills.
Examples include skills in question negotiation, analytical bibliography, knowledge of gaps,
crossovers, and resources, expertise in collection development, discipline-specific seeking
behaviors, scholarly communication, and many other types of skills and expertise that I will be
discussing at the IFLA Conference. While it is difficult to gain and maintain expertise in multiple
tracks in parallel, joint workshops would help convene people together to discuss how we can as
a group of professionals achieve the common goal: to organize collective knowledge and human
memory for exploration and discovery.
Today, we need again to take a fresh and holistic look at what we are trying to do, to examine the
nature of all types of resources that we acquire, describe, organize, arrange, preserve, access,
select, and use. We need to understand characteristics of users, their abilities, inquiries, and
2
information tasks, retrieval models, and operational standards. Finally, we need to educate
current and future professionals about the evolving nature of virtual public service components.
We all read papers on important issues of digital libraries, on declining uses of cumbersome
traditional reference services, on sharply increased uses of convenient search engines, on early
experiences of collaborative digital reference services, and on uses of various chat technologies
(e.g., Apple VideoPhone Kit, CU-SeeMee, LivePerson, E-gain, MOO). (e.g., Morgan)
In contrast, I will outline several research areas that need to be investigated if we are to close the
gap between seemingly inconvenient "reference desk" access to answers and those that are
obtained relatively easy over the Internet. The selected areas are based on studies from diverse
body of literature as well as from my own research, experience and affinity.
Keywords:
Knowledge maps, Models of E-reference, Neutral question answering, Representation of
realities, Research in E-reference, Search vocabularies, Skills of reference librarians,
Task allocation, User studies
Research agenda: Unanswered questions
In the time that I have here, three inter-related areas will be introduced, each about 5 minutes in
length, and each will be viewed at the intersection between traditionally different sides on the
information plane. Each intersection is a moment of truth between users’ behaviors and the
following areas:
½
How finely do we need to represent the reality
(the IFLA FRBR Study and our call for a
"Bibliographic Genome Project")?
½
How well do we communicate the reality
(interoperability between and among (controlled-
>search) vocabularies)?
½
How well do we divide labor between human reference experts and mass collaborative
Internet-based programs
? Identifying those reference tasks that humans can consistently
outperform machine intelligence can help us design optimal interfaces between people and
machines in collaborative digital real-time reference services.
1.
The FRBR (IFLA) entity relationship model for works, expressions, manifestations, and
items ought to be examined with an eye of a reference provider and from the point of view of
the consumer. Consumers will be increasingly remote rather than in-house, diverse in their
capabilities and needs, and will have high expectations from 24/7 real-time virtual reference
(similar to the ones in banking, automated gas stations, food services, and other self-help
industries). For different populations of customers, can we start thinking of what would be
optimal (good enough) display elements and relationships between the different entity
groups? (Bibliographic Genome proposed by Ercegovac, 2001a; also see this author’s
keynote paper at
http://www.cs.ucla.edu/Leap/zer/maribor.htm)
. This area has been mainly
studied by the cataloging community and at a generic level only. In addition, we need better
linkages between different types of resources. For example, at one level, there is the 856
field, electronic location and access, between a MARC catalogue record and networked
documents. It links a bibliographic record that is displayed on WebOpacs with full text
documents. Other issues will be related to attaching tags for quality assurance, especially to
fluid digital-born documents. Examples include authenticity, provenance, permanency,
3
methodological integrity--reliability and validity. Other variables relate to the concept of
genre in digital libraries (Beghtol; Kwasnik et al.; Toms), to education (Sutton), access
(Lawrence and Giles), and the host of legal issues such as intellectual property, security, and
use.
2.
Another area that will be equally important to consider is the capability to use seamless
languages both by the reference provider and the consumer in various question negotiations
and answering settings. The word seamless here means that clients need a series of gentle
transformation of search languages on the Web, ranging from a pictorial representation of a
"thing" for the elementary school child, to conceptual maps and DDC for the high school
student. These would be linked to LCC for general population, and to domain specific
thesauri and codes (e.g., UMLS, IEEE, AAT, ULAN, TGN, SIC). (Ercegovac, 2001b). More
than ever before, we need a search language that would ensure consistency, accuracy,
precision, and negotiation power between the remote parties. Controlled languages typically
include subject headings, classifications, names (personal, corporate, genres, geographic),
and unified titles. This area has been traditionally studied by catalogers and classification
researchers; it has recently been studied by others and renamed into knowledge organization
tools, ontologies, and meta languages. Research is needed to investigate level of
compatibility between and among languages for different user groups. Here, we have not
touched upon communication languages that are needed for disadvantaged users if we are to
provide equitable CDRS for all potential clients.
3.
An estimated only 6 percent of the total number of Web documents contains scientific or
educational content; some 83 percent contains commercial pages. Search engines are likely
to index more popular (number of pages that link to a given page) and US sites (Lawrence
and Giles). With billions of digital documents out there, even with embedded tiny networked
sensors and actuators (’smart dust’), it will be mandatory to delineate reference tasks to be
performed by trained and experienced people and others to be computer mediated at different
levels of intervention. We need to address questions such as: (a) How to capture subtleties of
the face-to-face neutral question negotiation (Abels; Dervin and Dewdney)? (b) How to
design "dissolving" customized interfaces (van Dam)? (c) Which instructional / explanation
modalities are optimal for which users at the point-of-need? (d) How to provide "high-touch"
in evolving "high-tech" worlds? A model for different levels of human/computer
interventions will be discussed at the Conference.
References
Abels, Eileen G. (1996) "The email reference interview." RQ, 35(3): 345-358.
Beghtol, Clare. (Dec 2000/Jan 2001) "The concept of genre and its characteristics." Bulletin of
the American Society for Information Science, 27(2):17-19.
Dervin, Brenda and Patricia Dewdney. (Summer 1986) "Neutral questioning: A new approach to
the reference interview." RQ, 25: 506-513.
Ercegovac, Zorana (2000) "Toward a global access to bibliographic information: Converging
patterns, new paradigms." Invitational keynote presentation given at the COBISS/SICRIS Annual
4
Meeting. November 29
th
, Maribor, Slovenia. Obvestila, 5(4): 4-28. Also available in English at:
http://www.cs.ucla.edu/Leap/zer/maribor.htm
Ercegovac, Zorana (2001a) Accessing engineering global information for engineers: Phase 2.
Technical Report supported in part by the Engineering Information Foundation grant # EiF-99.8.
Department of Computer Science, Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science
(HSSEAS). The developmental part, Engineering Information Sources and Access (EISA) is at:
http://www.cs.ucla.edu/Leap/Eisa/
Ercegovac, Zorana (2001b) "Accessing engineering global information for engineers: Phase 2."
Proceedings of the 64
th
Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science and
Technology. Vol 38. Washington DC., Oct 31-Nov 4, 2001. Medford, NJ: Information Today,
published for the American Society for Information Science.
Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records: Final Report. IFLA Study Group on the
Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records. (1998). International Federation of Library
Associations and Institutions. IFLA Universal Bibliographic Control and International MARC
Programme, Deutsche Bibliothek, Frankfurt am Main. Approved by the Standing Committee of
the IFLA Section on Cataloguing. UBCIM Publications, New Series Vol. 19. Munich: K. G.
Saur.
Kwasnik, Barbara H., Kevin Crowston, Michael Nilan, and Dmitri Toussinov. (Dec 2000/Jan
2001) "Identifying document genre to improve Web search effectiveness." Bulletin of the
American Society for Information Science, 27(2): 23-26.
Lawrence, Steve and Lee Giles. (1998) "Accessibility and distribution of information on the
Web." Nature, 400: 107-109.
Morgan, E. L. (August 1999) See You See A Librarian Final Report. Available at:
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/~emorgan/see-a-librarian/
Sutton, Stuart A. (1999) "Conceptual design and deployment of a metadata framework for
educational resources on the Internet." Journal of the American Society for Information Science,
50(13) :1182 -1192. In: Ercegovac, Zorana, Guest ed., Special Topic Issue: Integrating Multiple
Overlapping Metadata Standards. 50
th
Anniversary of JASIS.
Toms, Elaine G. (Dec 2000/Jan 2001) "Recognizing digital genre." Bulletin of the American
Society for Information Science, 27(2): 20-22.
Van Dam, Andries. (March 2001) "User interfaces: Disappearing, dissolving, and evolving."
Communications of the ACM, 44(3): 50-52.
Conference
August 16-25, 2001
Code Number:
058-98-E
Division Number:
V
Professional Group:
Reference Work
Joint Meeting with:
-
Meeting Number:
98
Simultaneous Interpretation:
-
Collaborative E-Reference: A Research Agenda
Zorana Ercegovac
InfoEN, UCLA
E-mail:
zercegov@ucla.edu
Introduction
Throughout the history of our profession, information-related activities have been often seen as
diametrically opposing forces. Such have been pulling relationships between technical
processing and public services, between library catalogs, periodical indexes, and finding aids,
books and non-books, printed and born-digital carriers, between "fixed" objects and others that
are dynamic, between librarianship and education, between libraries, archives, museums, and
other information agencies. Recently, the notion of digital libraries has introduced a new
competitor, computer scientists and engineers (see, for instance, Communications of the ACM
May issue 2001), and threatened to displace or alter some of the professional library skills.
Examples include skills in question negotiation, analytical bibliography, knowledge of gaps,
crossovers, and resources, expertise in collection development, discipline-specific seeking
behaviors, scholarly communication, and many other types of skills and expertise that I will be
discussing at the IFLA Conference. While it is difficult to gain and maintain expertise in multiple
tracks in parallel, joint workshops would help convene people together to discuss how we can as
a group of professionals achieve the common goal: to organize collective knowledge and human
memory for exploration and discovery.
Today, we need again to take a fresh and holistic look at what we are trying to do, to examine the
nature of all types of resources that we acquire, describe, organize, arrange, preserve, access,
select, and use. We need to understand characteristics of users, their abilities, inquiries, and
2
information tasks, retrieval models, and operational standards. Finally, we need to educate
current and future professionals about the evolving nature of virtual public service components.
We all read papers on important issues of digital libraries, on declining uses of cumbersome
traditional reference services, on sharply increased uses of convenient search engines, on early
experiences of collaborative digital reference services, and on uses of various chat technologies
(e.g., Apple VideoPhone Kit, CU-SeeMee, LivePerson, E-gain, MOO). (e.g., Morgan)
In contrast, I will outline several research areas that need to be investigated if we are to close the
gap between seemingly inconvenient "reference desk" access to answers and those that are
obtained relatively easy over the Internet. The selected areas are based on studies from diverse
body of literature as well as from my own research, experience and affinity.
Keywords:
Knowledge maps, Models of E-reference, Neutral question answering, Representation of
realities, Research in E-reference, Search vocabularies, Skills of reference librarians,
Task allocation, User studies
Research agenda: Unanswered questions
In the time that I have here, three inter-related areas will be introduced, each about 5 minutes in
length, and each will be viewed at the intersection between traditionally different sides on the
information plane. Each intersection is a moment of truth between users’ behaviors and the
following areas:
½
How finely do we need to represent the reality
(the IFLA FRBR Study and our call for a
"Bibliographic Genome Project")?
½
How well do we communicate the reality
(interoperability between and among (controlled-
>search) vocabularies)?
½
How well do we divide labor between human reference experts and mass collaborative
Internet-based programs
? Identifying those reference tasks that humans can consistently
outperform machine intelligence can help us design optimal interfaces between people and
machines in collaborative digital real-time reference services.
1.
The FRBR (IFLA) entity relationship model for works, expressions, manifestations, and
items ought to be examined with an eye of a reference provider and from the point of view of
the consumer. Consumers will be increasingly remote rather than in-house, diverse in their
capabilities and needs, and will have high expectations from 24/7 real-time virtual reference
(similar to the ones in banking, automated gas stations, food services, and other self-help
industries). For different populations of customers, can we start thinking of what would be
optimal (good enough) display elements and relationships between the different entity
groups? (Bibliographic Genome proposed by Ercegovac, 2001a; also see this author’s
keynote paper at
http://www.cs.ucla.edu/Leap/zer/maribor.htm)
. This area has been mainly
studied by the cataloging community and at a generic level only. In addition, we need better
linkages between different types of resources. For example, at one level, there is the 856
field, electronic location and access, between a MARC catalogue record and networked
documents. It links a bibliographic record that is displayed on WebOpacs with full text
documents. Other issues will be related to attaching tags for quality assurance, especially to
fluid digital-born documents. Examples include authenticity, provenance, permanency,
3
methodological integrity--reliability and validity. Other variables relate to the concept of
genre in digital libraries (Beghtol; Kwasnik et al.; Toms), to education (Sutton), access
(Lawrence and Giles), and the host of legal issues such as intellectual property, security, and
use.
2.
Another area that will be equally important to consider is the capability to use seamless
languages both by the reference provider and the consumer in various question negotiations
and answering settings. The word seamless here means that clients need a series of gentle
transformation of search languages on the Web, ranging from a pictorial representation of a
"thing" for the elementary school child, to conceptual maps and DDC for the high school
student. These would be linked to LCC for general population, and to domain specific
thesauri and codes (e.g., UMLS, IEEE, AAT, ULAN, TGN, SIC). (Ercegovac, 2001b). More
than ever before, we need a search language that would ensure consistency, accuracy,
precision, and negotiation power between the remote parties. Controlled languages typically
include subject headings, classifications, names (personal, corporate, genres, geographic),
and unified titles. This area has been traditionally studied by catalogers and classification
researchers; it has recently been studied by others and renamed into knowledge organization
tools, ontologies, and meta languages. Research is needed to investigate level of
compatibility between and among languages for different user groups. Here, we have not
touched upon communication languages that are needed for disadvantaged users if we are to
provide equitable CDRS for all potential clients.
3.
An estimated only 6 percent of the total number of Web documents contains scientific or
educational content; some 83 percent contains commercial pages. Search engines are likely
to index more popular (number of pages that link to a given page) and US sites (Lawrence
and Giles). With billions of digital documents out there, even with embedded tiny networked
sensors and actuators (’smart dust’), it will be mandatory to delineate reference tasks to be
performed by trained and experienced people and others to be computer mediated at different
levels of intervention. We need to address questions such as: (a) How to capture subtleties of
the face-to-face neutral question negotiation (Abels; Dervin and Dewdney)? (b) How to
design "dissolving" customized interfaces (van Dam)? (c) Which instructional / explanation
modalities are optimal for which users at the point-of-need? (d) How to provide "high-touch"
in evolving "high-tech" worlds? A model for different levels of human/computer
interventions will be discussed at the Conference.
References
Abels, Eileen G. (1996) "The email reference interview." RQ, 35(3): 345-358.
Beghtol, Clare. (Dec 2000/Jan 2001) "The concept of genre and its characteristics." Bulletin of
the American Society for Information Science, 27(2):17-19.
Dervin, Brenda and Patricia Dewdney. (Summer 1986) "Neutral questioning: A new approach to
the reference interview." RQ, 25: 506-513.
Ercegovac, Zorana (2000) "Toward a global access to bibliographic information: Converging
patterns, new paradigms." Invitational keynote presentation given at the COBISS/SICRIS Annual
4
Meeting. November 29
th
, Maribor, Slovenia. Obvestila, 5(4): 4-28. Also available in English at:
http://www.cs.ucla.edu/Leap/zer/maribor.htm
Ercegovac, Zorana (2001a) Accessing engineering global information for engineers: Phase 2.
Technical Report supported in part by the Engineering Information Foundation grant # EiF-99.8.
Department of Computer Science, Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science
(HSSEAS). The developmental part, Engineering Information Sources and Access (EISA) is at:
http://www.cs.ucla.edu/Leap/Eisa/
Ercegovac, Zorana (2001b) "Accessing engineering global information for engineers: Phase 2."
Proceedings of the 64
th
Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science and
Technology. Vol 38. Washington DC., Oct 31-Nov 4, 2001. Medford, NJ: Information Today,
published for the American Society for Information Science.
Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records: Final Report. IFLA Study Group on the
Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records. (1998). International Federation of Library
Associations and Institutions. IFLA Universal Bibliographic Control and International MARC
Programme, Deutsche Bibliothek, Frankfurt am Main. Approved by the Standing Committee of
the IFLA Section on Cataloguing. UBCIM Publications, New Series Vol. 19. Munich: K. G.
Saur.
Kwasnik, Barbara H., Kevin Crowston, Michael Nilan, and Dmitri Toussinov. (Dec 2000/Jan
2001) "Identifying document genre to improve Web search effectiveness." Bulletin of the
American Society for Information Science, 27(2): 23-26.
Lawrence, Steve and Lee Giles. (1998) "Accessibility and distribution of information on the
Web." Nature, 400: 107-109.
Morgan, E. L. (August 1999) See You See A Librarian Final Report. Available at:
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/~emorgan/see-a-librarian/
Sutton, Stuart A. (1999) "Conceptual design and deployment of a metadata framework for
educational resources on the Internet." Journal of the American Society for Information Science,
50(13) :1182 -1192. In: Ercegovac, Zorana, Guest ed., Special Topic Issue: Integrating Multiple
Overlapping Metadata Standards. 50
th
Anniversary of JASIS.
Toms, Elaine G. (Dec 2000/Jan 2001) "Recognizing digital genre." Bulletin of the American
Society for Information Science, 27(2): 20-22.
Van Dam, Andries. (March 2001) "User interfaces: Disappearing, dissolving, and evolving."
Communications of the ACM, 44(3): 50-52.