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IRList Digest Volume 5 Number 07
IRList Digest Saturday, 7 January 1989 Volume 5 : Issue 7
Today's Topics:
Abstracts - More dissertations selected by S. Humphrey
News addresses are
Internet: fox@vtopus.cs.vt.edu
BITNET: foxea@vtcc1.bitnet (replaces foxea@vtvax3)
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Date: Mon, 12 Dec 88 07:54:33 EST
From: "Susanne M. HUMPHREY" <humphrey@MCS.NLM.NIH.GOV>
Subject: another batch of abstracts relating to IR
AN University Microfilms Order Number ADG88-09547.
AU BOUAZZA, ABDELMAJID.
IN University of Pittsburgh Ph.D 1986, 154 pages.
TI USE OF INFORMATION SOURCES BY PHYSICAL SCIENTISTS, SOCIAL
SCIENTISTS, AND HUMANITIES SCHOLARS AT CARNEGIE-MELLON UNIVERSITY.
DE Information Science.
AB This study investigated the frequency of use of information
sources in general and for research and teaching purposes in
particular by physical scientists, social scientists, and
humanities scholars at Carnegie-Mellon University. Out of 390
subjects, 240 answered the questionnaire, making the response rate
61.53 percent.
Data were collected by means of a questionnaire and analyzed using
descriptive (Means, standard of deviation, and proportions) and
inferential (One-way ANOVA, Two-way ANOVA, and the Scheffe Test)
statistics. The null of the three hypotheses of the study were
tested at the.05 level of significance. The results obtained in
this study showed that the three hypotheses were partially
supported. It was found that physical scientists, social
scientists, and humanists differed only in their use of informal
sources of information in general, in data collection phase, and
when developing a new course. No difference was registered in
their use of formal sources of information for the same purposes.
The impact of the variables tenure and experience on the use of
information sources by the subjects has been investigated as an
auxiliary factor and found nonsignificant.
The findings of this study pointed to the importance of
exhibitions, concerts, performances, A.V. materials, and the
library resources to humanists. The same information sources were
found of negligible importance to both physical scientists and
social scientists when conducting a research project. The
importance of using personal files by the three groups was
observed. It was found that journals were especially important to
physical scientists and social scientists. Also, it was found that
the use of information sources by respondents varied from one
phase of a research project to another. Thus, physical scientists,
social scientists, and humanists tended to rely heavily on
personal contact in the proposal phase and data analysis and
interpretation phase, whereas this reliance appeared to decline in
the data collection phase. Other findings were: the importance to
respondents of personal contact and personal files as a stimulus
for ideas in research; physical scientists and social scientists
rated the use of journals for obtaining new ideas in research
higher than that of textbooks; similarly, physical scientists and
social scientists rated the use of textbooks as sources of new
ideas in teaching higher than that of journals.
AN University Microfilms Order Number ADGDX-82159.
AU DANIELS, PENNY JANE.
IN The City University (London) (United Kingdom) Ph.D 1987, 167
pages.
TI DEVELOPING THE USER MODELLING FUNCTION OF AN INTELLIGENT INTERFACE
FOR DOCUMENT RETRIEVAL SYSTEMS.
DE Information Science.
AB Available from UMI in association with The British Library.
This research forms part of a larger project, the eventual aim of
which is the design and implementation of an intelligent interface
for document retrieval systems. A number of functions which must
be performed by the human intermediary in order to successfully
interact with the user have been identified. The research
presented here is concerned with one function in particular: the
user modelling function, which aims to describe and model various
aspects of the user's background, personal characteristics, goals
and knowledge. An assumption underlying this research is that an
intelligent interface should simulate the functional behaviour of
a competent human intermediary. Therefore the ways in which human
intermediaries carry out user modelling and employ these models,
have been investigated.
The primary method was to make audiorecordings of seven human
user/human intermediary interviews in online search service
settings, and to subject the transcripts to detailed functional
discourse analysis. This analysis produced a specification for the
User Model, and identified its components and the knowledge
resources that are needed by the intermediary, whether human or
automatic, to carry out the function of user modelling. This
analysis was supplemented by the examination of a number of users'
problem statements, together with their accompanying recordings,
which had been collected for another project, and by interviews
with three intermediaries. The discourse analysis revealed that
the User Model interacts with the other interface functions, and
this interaction was also investigated.
The results showed that the User Model comprises a number of
subfunctions, requires extensive knowledge resources, and
interacts with the other functions, in particular providing
information necessary for the other functions' own processing. A
formalism for representing the User Model in a computer system is
suggested, and an attempt is made to validate the User Model by
applying it to a new dialogue. The results of the validation
suggested that the User Model is independent of the data on which
it is based, and that the formalism can adequately handle a new
interaction. The implications of these findings for the design and
implementation of the user modelling function in an intelligent
interface, and for the design and implementation of the interface
as a whole, are outlined.
AN University Microfilms Order Number ADGDX-82189.
AU REYNOLDS, JAMES E. F.
IN The City University (London) (United Kingdom) Ph.D 1987, 360
pages.
TI THE DEVELOPMENT AND EVALUATION OF A FULL-TEXT DRUGS DATABASE:
MARTINDALE ONLINE.
DE Information Science.
AB Available from UMI in association with The British Library.
Martindale Online is a full-text database on drugs produced from a
structured neutral database that is also used to produce a print
product. Special characheristics of the database include a
hierarchical record structure and a facility for linking records
within the same hierarchy. The development of this database is
described.
Investigation at the development stage indicated a need to index
the database and this was carried out using descriptors from a
specially designed thesaurus. To evaluate the effect of this
indexing, three information pharmacists selected 98 queries for an
assessment of retrieval effectiveness; they and the author
formulated sets of search statements that were used to search the
file in several different ways. It was found that searching the
indexed database via descriptors and free text (when appropriate)
produced significantly better results, as judged by scores that
incorporated precision and recall, than searching either the
indexed or the unindexed database solely in a free-text manner.
As there was evidence that searchers were slow to make use of the
descriptors, highly structured search statements were created for
each query using all the details from the relevant sections of the
thesaurus and these statements were tested on the unindexed
database. While this test produced some conflicting results, it
did suggest that as far as major relevance was concerned such a
method of searching might be effective with Martindale Online and
is worth exploring further, especially with a view to producing a
front-end system.
Detailed failure analysis was carried out on the searches
performed in the recommended manner. With the information
pharmacists' search statements the database was operating at a
recall ratio of 60.2 for all relevant records (69.3 for records of
major relevance); with the author's statements the recall ratio
was 65.4 (73.2 for major relevance). Corresponding precision
ratios were 63.5 (58.3 for major relevance) for the information
pharmacists and 67.5 (59.6) for the author.
The largest cause of both recall and precision failure was in
limitations of the search statements whether produced by the
information pharmacists who had varied experience of Martindale
Online, or by the author who has a detailed knowledge of the
system and the contents. Limitations in the indexing also
accounted for both types of failure; account has already been
taken of these limitations and modifications have been made to
some of the indexing guidelines.
AN University Microfilms Order Number ADG88-14221.
AU CHEN, TSUNG-TENG.
IN The University of Arizona Ph.D 1988, 279 pages.
TI INFORMATION MANAGEMENT IN INTEGRATED INFORMATION SYSTEM DEVELOPMENT
ENVIRONMENTS.
DE Information Science. Business Administration, General.
Computer Science.
AB Information System development involves various activities; the
process of developing information systems is considered to be the
production of a series of documents. The information derived from
the activities of the life cycle needs to be stored in a way that
will facilitate the carrying out of subsequent activities. That
is, information must be stored with a consistent, semantically
rich, flexible, and efficient structure that will make it
accessible for use by various tools employed in carrying out the
development process.
In this research, knowledge base management system (KBMS) to
manage the information created by the information system
development process was designed and implemented. Several
contemporary popular knowledge representation schemes can be
managed conveniently by this KBMS, which utilized efficient
database techniques to facilitate fast retrieval and traversal of
the underlying semantic inheritance net and frame knowledge
structure. Inference and logic deduction capability was made a
part of the static knowledge structure to further extend the
functionality of the KBMS. Furthermore, a specially designed
relational database management system was implemented and
interfaced with the KBMS to alleviate the possibility of a storage
saturation problem and to facilitate the storage of detailed
exclusive information of terms defined in the knowledge base.
Models that are applicable to various information system
development activities were identified and stored in the knowledge
base. The aggregation of those models is, in fact, a conceptual
non-procedural language that provides a concise descriptive
framework to help the user gather and manage information derived
from various activities during the information system development
process. The knowledge base, the language, and several
knowledge-base related tools were used by more than seventy
graduate students in a case study for a system analysis and design
course.
An information system methodology specifically tailored for this
knowledge base supported environment was proposed and applied in a
simplified case to illustrate the process of how a
database-centered information system can be derived from the
initial strategic planning phase. The methodology explored and
made use of the storage structure of the closely coupled knowledge
base and database. Finally, future research direction was
identified.
AN University Microfilms Order Number ADG88-09947.
AU SMITH, TIMOTHY WILLIAM.
IN The University of Arizona PH. 1988, 378 pages.
TI ASSESSING THE USABILITY OF USER INTERFACES: GUIDANCE AND ONLINE HELP
FEATURES.
DE Information Science. Business Administration, General.
Computer Science.
AB The purpose of this research was to provide evidence to support
specific features of a software user interface implementation. A 3
x 2 x 2 full factorial, between subjects design was employed, in a
laboratory experiment systematically varying existence or
non-existence of a user interface and media of help documentation
(either online or written), while blocking for varying levels of
user experience. Subjects completed a set of tasks using a
computer, so the experimenters could collect and evaluate various
performance and attitudinal measures. Several attitudinal measures
were developed and validated as part of this research.
Consistent with previous findings, this research found that a
user's previous level of experience in using a computer had a
significant impact on their performance measures. Specifically,
increased levels of user experience were associated with reduced
time to complete the tasks, fewer number of characters typed,
fewer references to help documentation, and fewer requests for
human assistance. In addition, increased levels of user experience
were generally associated with higher levels of attitudinal
measures (general attitude toward computers and satisfaction with
their experiment performance). The existence of a user interface
had a positive impact on task performance across all levels of
user experience. Although experienced users were not more
satisfied with the user interface than without it, their
performance was better. This contrasts with at least some previous
findings that suggest experienced users are more efficient without
a menu-driven user interface. The use of online documentation, as
opposed to written, had a significant negative impact on task
performance. Specifically, users required more time, made more
references to the help documentation, and required more human
assistance. However, these users generally indicated attitudinal
measures (satisfied) that were as high with online as written
documentation.
There was a strong interaction between the user interface and
online documentation for the task performance measures. This
research concludes that a set of tasks can be performed in
significantly less time when online documentation is facilitated
by the presence of a user interface. Written documentation users
seemed to perform equivalently with or without the user interface.
With online documentation the user interface became crucial to
task performance. Research implications are presented for
practitioners, designers and researchers.
AN University Microfilms Order Number ADG88-14115.
AU WHITLATCH, JO BELL.
IN University of California, Berkeley Ph.D 1987, 388 pages.
TI CLIENT/SERVICE PROVIDER PERCEPTIONS OF REFERENCE SERVICE OUTCOMES IN
ACADEMIC LIBRARIES: EFFECTS OF FEEDBACK AND UNCERTAINTY.
DE Library Science. Business Administration, General.
AB The principal focus of the research concerns client participation
in academic libraries. The study tests a model of the major
variables influencing academic library reference service outcomes.
This model is based primarily on boundary spanning theory.
Organizational boundaries can be expected to create perceptual
differences between clients and service providers in evaluating
information services. Additional theories from the field or
organizational behavior used in developing the model are:
communication, social exchange, socialization, feedback,
uncertainty and organizational effectiveness.
Independent variables included in the model are: client
socialization, service orientation, feedback, time constraints,
task uncertainty, size, discipline paradigm and type of
assistance. The dependent variables or service outcomes are:
librarian value of service outcomes, user value of service
outcomes and user success in locating needed materials. The survey
questionnaire is the primary method of data collection. The
results are based on data concerning 257 individual reference
transactions from five academic libraries in Northern California.
Major findings are that classes of variables related to feedback,
service orientation, time constraints and task uncertainty have
the most significant effects on service outcomes. Distinct but
overlapping combinations of independent variables in these various
classes explain more variance in librarian and user judgments of
service value than in user success in locating needed materials.
Findings also suggest that in the reference service desk setting,
users expect to be provided with quick, concise information.
The study also identifies user and reference librarian differences
in perceptions for the following service outcomes: general quality
of service, relevance of information and amount of information.
For approximately 83 percent of the reference transactions,
librarian judgments of service value are an adequate substitute
for user service value judgments because librarian ratings on all
aspects of service are identical to or lower than those of users.
AN University Microfilms Order Number ADG88-13022.
AU WHITNEY, GRETCHEN.
IN The University of Michigan Ph.D. 1988, 376 pages.
TI THE LANGUAGE DISTRIBUTION OF BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORDS IN SELECTED
ONLINE DATABASES.
DE Library Science. Information Science.
AB This study explores the language distribution of materials
included in on-line bibliographic databases between 1970-84. Eight
databases (BIOSIS, Chemical Abstracts, GeoRef, MEDLINE, Criminal
Justice, Oceanic Abstracts, PAIS, PsycInfo) on DIALOG were chosen
for their world-wide coverage of literature in their respective
fields. Trends are accounted for by examining database provider
policies and practices. The data are compared with book and serial
production statistics, to begin to assess the possible
relationship between the databases and the actual availability of
literature. The results describe the degree to which English has
increased, decreased, or remained stable in relation to other
languages, as reflected in the availability of bibliographic
records in these databases.
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END OF IRList Digest
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