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IRList Digest Volume 4 Number 51
IRList Digest Saturday, 12 November 1988 Volume 4 : Issue 51
Today's Topics:
Abstracts - Talk at ASIS 88
Announcements - Research opportunity at Rutgers
- Program for ACM Document Processing Systems Conf.
SIGIR - Corrections to info in recent FORUM
News addresses are
Internet: fox@vtopus.cs.vt.edu
BITNET: foxea@vtcc1.bitnet (replaces foxea@vtvax3)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Fri, 21 Oct 88 10:23 PDT
From: Christine Borgman <IIN4CLB@UCLAMVS.BITNET>
Subject: Abstract of talk at ASIS 88 (not in program)
...
Speaker: egan@WIND.BELLCORE.COM(Dennis Egan)
Title: SuperBook: Design And Behavioral Analysis
Of A Hypertext Browser
Abstract:
"SuperBook" is a hypertext browsing system
(see Remde, Gomez, and Landauer, 1987)
that is intended to improve the usability of conventional documents.
SuperBook takes documents in
computer readable form and presents them on a bit-mapped, multi-window
display with enhanced search, navigation, and other capabilities. The current
version of SuperBook has evolved through several cycles of design--implementatio
n--
experimentation with users--redesign, etc.
In an experiment with the current version of SuperBook, students searched
for information in a statistics text presented either in conventional printed
form or in SuperBook form. SuperBook enabled students to answer search
questions more accurately than they could with the conventional text. Students
also produced higher quality "open-book" essays using SuperBook than they did
with the conventional text. Subjective ratings of the documentation
also strongly favored SuperBook.
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 18 Oct 88 15:11:13 EDT
From: njb@flash.bellcore.com (nick belkin)
Subject: Research opportunity at Rutgers
[Note: I am forwarding this message directly - Ed.]
Friends
Tefko and I have received a grant to develop design principles
for third-generation OPACs, and we are now recruiting a
full-time researcher to run the project and do much of the
work associated with it. I am appending a description of
the position, and hope that you can bring it to the attention
of any persons you know who might be interested in it.
Thanks very much for your help.
Nick Belkin
RESEARCH ASSOCIATE/PROJECT MANAGER
DESIGN PRINCIPLES FOR THIRD GENERATION ONLINE PUBLIC ACCESS CATALOGS
Funded by the US Department of Education
N.J. Belkin & T. Saracevic, Principle Investigators
School of Communication, Information & Library Studies
Rutgers University
4 Huntington Street
New Brunswick NJ 08903
This project requires a full-time project manager from January
1989, for eighteen months. The successful applicant will manage
the research project, including: assisting in design of the
experiments and observations; organizing and supervising the
empirical study; conducting much of the data gathering; develop-
ing analysis methods and analyzing the data collected; and parti-
cipating in the writing of the final report. The project manager
will supervise the work of one full-time graduate research assis-
tant, and will be responsible for maintaining contacts with
libraries participating in the study.
Applicants must have at least a Master's degree in library or
information or computer science, and should preferably either
have a Ph.D. or be a Ph.D. candidate in one of these fields. One
to two years of experience in empirical research, preferably in a
library or information setting is highly desirable, as is
knowledge of online public access catalogs and/or information
retrieval systems. Programming knowledge of C or Pascal is
advantageous, as is experience of interface design, especially
for personal computers.
Salary is $28,000 per year, with Rutgers' normal faculty fringe
benefits in addition. This position has a great deal of respon-
sibility associated with it, and offers commensurate indepen-
dence. The successful applicant will be strongly encouraged to
publish the results of the research, and to apply the results to
any other research in which s/he is involved, for instance, a
Ph.D. dissertation. This may be a suitable position for someone
wishing to take a leave of absence or sabbatical for research
purposes.
To apply for this position, send a letter of application, two
copies of a curriculum vitae, and the names of two referees to
Nicholas Belkin or Tefko Saracevic at the address above. For
further information about this position, contact either of the
two by mail at the address above, by telephone at 201-932-8585 or
201-932-8017, respectively, or email at BELKIN@ZODIAC (bitnet) or
njb@flash.bellcore.com (internet).
Rutgers University is an Affirmative Action/ Equal Opportunity
Employer.
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 07 Nov 88 13:31:54 PST
From: Beach.pa@Xerox.COM
Subject: Final program schedule for DocProc88 conference
ACM Conference on Document Processing Systems
Sante Fe, New Mexico
Final Papers Program
------------------------------
Tuesday, 6 December 1988"
8:30-10:00
DOCUMENT PROCESSING SYSTEMS
Chair: Brian Reid (DEC)
Hypertext Engineering: Practical Methods for Creating
A Compact Disk
Encyclopedia
Robert J. Glushko (Search Technology)
Mark D. Weaver (Search
Technology)
Thomas A. Coonan (Search Technology)
Janet E. Lincoln
(Stuyvesant, NY)
The LaserROM Project: A Case Study in Document Processing Systems
Mike Rafeld (Hewlett-Packard)
------------------------------
10:30-12:00
HYPERTEXT
Chair: Janet Walker (DEC)
Auto-Updating as a Technical Documentation Tool
George Towner (Apple Computer)
Conceptual Documents: A Mechanism for Specifying Active Views in Hypertext
J. Nanard (Centre de Recherche en Informatique de Montpellier)
M. Nanard (Centre de Recherche en Informatique de Montpellier)
H.
Richy (Centre de Recherche en Informatique de Montpellier)
Adding Browsing Semantics to the Hypertext Model
P. David Stotts (University of Maryland)
Richard Furuta
(University of Maryland)
------------------------------
2:00-3:30
EXPERIENCE WITH DOCUMENT STANDARDS
Chair: Vania Joloboff (INRIA, France)
Evolution of an SGML Application Generator
Lynne A. Price (Hewlett-Packard)
Joe Schneider (Hewlett-Packard)
Translating Among Processable Multi-media Document Formats Using ODA
Jonathan Rosenberg (Carnegie Mellon University)
Mark S. Sherman
(Carnegie Mellon University)
Ann Marks (Carnegie Mellon University)
Frank Giuffrida (University of Michigan)
------------------------------
4:00-5:30
DOCUMENT STANDARDS
Chair: Vania Joloboff (INRIA, France)
Difficulties in Parsing SGML
Jim Heath (National Bureau of Standards)
Larry Welsch (National
Bureau of Standards)
Expert Assistance for Manipulation of SGML Document Type Definitions
W. Timothy Polk (National Institute of Standards and Technology)
Lawrence E. Bassham, III (National Institute of Standards and Technology)
------------------------------
Wednesday, 7 December 1988"
8:30-10:00
INTERACTIVE DOCUMENT SYSTEMS
Chair: Rick Furuta (University of Maryland)
Interactive Effectivity Control: Design and Applications
Richard Ilson (Interleaf)
Incremental Document Formatting
Pehong Chen (University of California, Berkeley)
Michael A.
Harrison (University of California, Berkeley)
Ikuo Minakata
(University of California, Berkeley)
An Adaptation of Dataflow Methods for WYSIWYG Document Processing
Donald D. Chamberlin (IBM Almaden Research Center)
------------------------------
10:30-12:00
ELECTRONIC MANUALS
Chair: David Levy (Xerox PARC)
Why Switch from Paper to Electronic Manuals
Cheryl A. Ventura (Allied-Signal Aerospace)
PANEL:
The Issues of Producing Immense Technical Documentation
Chair: Robert
Morris (Interleaf and University of Massachusetts)
Wanda Avery (Lockheed)
Randy Ott (Syntex)
Cal Marlett
(Xerox)
------------------------------
3:00-4:30
WRITING SYSTEMS
Chair: Heather Brown (University of Kent, England)
The Role of Modularity in Document Authoring Systems
Janet H. Walker (Digital Equipment Corporation)
PANEL:
What Do Technical Writers Really Want?
Janet H. Walker (Digital Equipment Corporation)
Mary-Claire van
Leunen (Digital Equipment Corporation)
John Johnson (Tec-Ed)
Tom
Parmenter (Digital Equipment Corporation)
Robert Krull (Rensselear
Polytechnic Institute)
------------------------------
5:00-6:30
DOCUMENT ACCESS
Chair: Dario Lucarella (Universita di Milano, Italy)
The Design of a Document Database
Chris Clifton (Princeton University)
Hector Garcie-Molina
(Princeton University)
Robert Hagmann (Xerox PARC)
Automatic Text Indexing Using Complex Identifiers
Gerald Salton (Cornell University)
------------------------------
Thursday, 8 December 1988
8:30-10:00
DOCUMENTATION GRAPHICS
Chair: Dick Phillips (Los Alamos National Laboratory)
Formalizing the Figural: Aspects of a Foundation for Document
Manipulation
David M. Levy (Xerox PARC)
Daniel C. Brotsky (Xerox PARC)
Kenneth R. Olson (Xerox PARC)
A Library for Incremental Update of Bitmap Images
David Dobkin (Princeton University)
Eleftherios Koutsofios
(Princeton University)
Rob Pike (AT&T Bell Labs)
The Escher Document Imaging Model
S.N. Zilles (IBM Almaden Research Center)
P. Lucas (IBM Almaden
Research Center)
T.M. Linden (IBM Almaden Research Center)
J.B.
Lotspiech (IBM Almaden Research Center)
A.R. Harbury (IBM Almaden
Research Center)
------------------------------
10:30-12:00
DOCUMENT RECOGNITION AND ANALYSIS
Chair: Robert Morris (Interleaf and University of Massachusetts)
Two Complementary Techniques for Digitized Document Analysis
George Nagy (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute)
Junichi Kanai
(Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute)
Mukkai Krishnamoorthy (Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute)
Mathews Thomas (Rensselaer Polytechnic
Institute)
Mahesh Viswanathan (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute)
Tracking Text in Mixed-Mode Documents
J. Patrick Bixler (Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University)
------------------------------
2:00-3:30
PANEL: ELECTRONIC PUBLISHING
Chair: Richard Beach (Xerox PARC)
Edward Fox (Virginia Polytechnic)
William Woolf (Mathematical
Reviews)
Daniel Atkin (Carnegie Mellon University)
Esther Dyson
(EDVenture Holdings)
------------------------------
4:00-5:30
DOCUMENT PROCESSING RESEARCH
Chair: Brian Reid (DEC)
Topics in Document Research
David M. Levy (Xerox PARC)
.PANEL:
Where do we go from here?
Members of the Program Committee
------------------------------
Date: Sun, 30 Oct 88 09:01:15 EST
From: "Susanne M. HUMPHREY" <humphrey@MCS.NLM.NIH.GOV>
Subject: dissertations in sigir forum
Ed, the listing in Forum is partically missing: p. 51 is missing last
few lines of the last abstract and ends with
"Rest of message missing". I think the appended is what's missing;
I repeated the STERN citation. The last citation is not exactly on
information retrieval, but sometimes I take the liberty of including
tangential things that I think are somewhat interesting.
...
--Susanne
.[
AN University Microfilms Order Number ADG88-03517.
AU STERN, RICHARD ELLIOT.
IN Rutgers University The State U. of New Jersey (New Brunswick)
Ph.D 1987, 129 pages.
TI UNCITEDNESS IN THE BIOMEDICAL LITERATURE: AN EXPLORATION OF
BIBLIOGRAPHIC CORRELATES.
DE Information Science.
AB The purpose of the study was to determine if selected
bibliographic characteristics of biomedical journal papers are
associated with the subsequent uncitedness of the papers. Two
characteristics specific to the biomedical literature and seven
general characteristics were examined. The biomedical
characteristics include whether or not the research was funded by
the National Institutes of Health and the biomedical research
level which is a four level classification of journals according
to their research orientation: Level 1, Clinical Observation;
Level 2, Clinical Mix, Level 3, Clinical Investigation, and Level
4, Basic Research. The general characteristics include the number
of authors, title words, key title words, and references; also,
the age, price, and circulation of the journal in which the paper
was published. The rate of uncitedness, using the 275 source
journal set as the citing set is 13.3%. The rate of uncitedness
using the Science Citation Index as the citing set is estimated to
be 4.4%.
Research support and biomedical research level are significantly
associated with uncitedness. Uncitedness is lower for
NIH-supported papers. Uncitedness decreases with biomedical
research level, with uncitedness lowest among papers published in
basic research journals.
A discriminant analysis function with the general bibliographic
characteristics correctly predicted cited and uncited papers with
70% accuracy. Uncited papers alone were predicted with 75%
accuracy. In partitioning the components of the discriminant
model, the number of references accounted for 76.4% of
variability, and the number of authors accounted for an additional
9.7% of the variability. This reinforces the finding that the
number of references and authors are significantly related to
uncitedness. Uncitedness papers have fewer references and authors
compared to cited papers.
Future studies of uncitedness should proceed in two directions.
One, additional bibliographic characteristics such as author
affiliation and length of paper ought to be tested. Second,
further study of the significantly associated characteristics
ought to be examined more closely to determine whether their
numbers differentiate between levels of quality in papers or
whether there is some other mechanism at work that accounts for
the significant differences in rates of uncitedness.
.]
.[
AN University Microfilms Order Number ADG88-03222.
AU THORNBURG, GAIL ELLEN.
IN University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Ph.D 1987, 111
pages.
TI LOOK: IMPLEMENTATION OF AN EXPERT SYSTEM IN INFORMATION RETRIEVAL
FOR DATABASE SELECTION.
DE Information Science.
AB This project was designed to construct an advisory or expert
system in one area of online information retrieval, specifically,
choice of online database. Problems of this domain include
proliferation of potentially expensive databases, and the
difficulty of predicting the specific database(s) most likely to
yield optimum results in the climate of extreme "information
compartmentalization." This implementation made use of an
integrated set of software tools developed in the Artificial
Intelligence Lab of the Department of Computer Science at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The system was
designed to reflect as closely as possible the decision-making
expertise of academic online searchers in life sciences.
The implemented system, LOOK (non-acronymic), represented general
features of 18 online databases, and its advice succeeded in
satisfying the experts involved in its development. The system
used a rule-based representation, and advisory sessions were
guided by an inference algorithm featuring three phases of
evaluation. Issues discussed here include the numbers of variables
and values required to represent the domain with any adequacy, the
levels of abstraction apparent in these variables, and the
difficulty of separating domain from world knowledge in
constructing an apt representation.
.]
.[
AN University Microfilms Order Number ADG88-03480.
AU GOODIN, M. ELSPETH.
IN Rutgers University The State U. of New Jersey (New Brunswick)
Ph.D 1987, 186 pages.
TI THE TRANSFERABILITY OF LIBRARY RESEARCH SKILLS FROM HIGH SCHOOL TO
COLLEGE.
DE Library Science.
AB The specific purpose of this research was to investigate three
interrelated questions: First, can a program of instruction be
developed to teach high school seniors efficient and effective
search strategies and information-gathering skills useful to them
as college freshmen? Second, can these skills be reflected in a
research paper? Third, how can these skills be measured for
transferability?
A program of instruction was developed and taught by the high
school librarian that included the responses and recommendations
of 62 college faculty members to a questionnaire on
library-related course requirements.
Participants in the study, 159 seniors from the college
preparatory English classes of two comparable high schools, were
divided into one control and one experimental group for a pilot
test (Study I) and for a second test (Study II).
Students in the experimental groups were given a pre-test on basic
college library information knowledge, followed by a series of
lessons on the research process, the assignment of a research
paper, a post-test on basic college Library information knowledge,
and the return of their graded papers, the grading being completed
by two college English professors.
Students in the control groups were given the pre-test, the
research paper assignment, the post-test and the return of the
graded papers.
A Likert-type attitude scale questionnaire was administered to all
high school students, and to the participants in Study I during
their first semester in college.
High school students receiving the instruction scored
significantly higher on the post-test than did students not
receiveing the instruction. These skills were reflected in a
research paper acceptable at the college freshmen level. College
students exposed to the program of instruction indicated they were
able to effectively utilize the research skills learned in high
school when conducting research to meet course requirements. There
were no significant differences between the groups on the attitude
scale questionnaire, indicating an inability of this questionnaire
to adequately measure the transferability of research skills from
high school to college.
Finally, the high school librarian became a linking agent between
the high school and college libraries, by making the librarian in
the research setting approachable.
.]
.[
AN University Microfilms Order Number ADG88-03160.
AU OLDEN, EDWARD ANTHONY.
IN University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Ph.D 1987, 175
pages.
TI THE BENEFICIARIES OF LIBRARY AND INFORMATION POLICY IN BRITISH AND
EX-BRITISH AFRICA: STEPS FROM THE WHITE WOMEN'S LEAGUE TO THE
ELECTRONIC LIBRARY.
DE Library Science.
AB This dissertation examines the beginnings and early years of five
libraries set up with the stated aim of serving the public in
British and ex-British Africa, and argues that the beneficiaries
of library and information policy have not been the public at all
but only a small minority: the elite and the would-be elite. It
suggests a pattern from the 1920s and 1930s to the present: from
the fee-charging whites-only leisure reading libraries of the
settler colonies to the computerized information services
recommended for the use of the black "policy-makers" and
"decision-makers" of today.
Five episodes from Kenya, the Gold Coast, and Nigeria are used to
support the argument: the fee-charging whites-only service that
the Carnegie Corporation of New York--the champion of the free
public library--sponsored in Kenya Colony in the 1930s; the
fee-charging service for the white and black educated elite of
Lagos, Nigeria, that Carnegie money helped bring into being around
the same time; the fee-charging service that the British Council
introduced for the white and black educated elite of the Gold
Coast and Nigeria in the mid-1940s; the Northern Nigeria Regional
Library, set up in 1952, which with time concentrated more and
more on the capital and less and less on the rest of the region;
and the National Library of Nigeria, established with Ford
Foundation help in the 1960s to assist in the "responsible conduct
of modern government." Accounts are based on Carnegie, Ford, and
British Council archives, and on published sources. South African,
Rhodesian, and other examples are also mentioned.
The dissertation attempts to show that librarianship and
information science are very much part of the political context in
which they operate; that only a small percentage of the African
population has benefitted from the western-style libraries and
information services that have been introduced; and that the study
of such matters adds one more dimension to what is known about
cultural and other forms of dependency.
.]
------------------------------
END OF IRList Digest
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