INLS 180 Day 5 Notes

Feb. 20, 2006

 

Wiki project (guest, John Walker)

 

  1. One minute papers

Points

Needs assessment important and useful

Many techniques for assessing needs

Click stream analysis gives partial insight into search process

Today’s search engines have a long way to go to satisfy the Belkin or Taylor models of dialog-based search

Surprise that so many of us are self-helpers!!  Individual characteristics or temporal-social?

NLP won’t help if you don’t know vocabulary [QE, RF aim to address this]

 

Questions

What about access to the deep web (pay databases)?  [NC-Live only a partial solution]

Will next gen googles make ref librarian obsolete? [if you think you can be replaced by a machine, you should be]

Does LC have public-oriented services? [yes!, Thomas, AM]

How much to know about the requestor?  How much to assume? Ask?

What kind of q’s are faster/better in ftf or online?

Once the needs assessment is done, how to apply? [OV ff example]

Are all our needs compromised (ala Taylor) with today’s search engines?

Where do visceral needs fit it?

Shift from doc rep to user rep---did internet change this? Where are we now?

How to assess needs for new services; who should lead? The innovators or the mass users? Can users really help?

Do new DLs (LC, doc south, etc.) make more people aware of what info in available and lead to more use and critical thought?

 

 

 

  1. Discuss Asking Questions Assignment
    1. The length of questions:  adding details versus adding new facets; is there a diminishing return function?
    2. Cell phone text queries

                                                               i.      Typing limitations: short words, abbreviations, short queries, short/no iterations (see emoji)

                                                             ii.      Is concise best?  Short vs simple

                                                            iii.      How does it matter to respondent to know that questioner is on a cell phone?

                                                           iv.      What if we allowed speech questions and answers?

    1. Music lyrics and melodies

                                                               i.      Role of context (heard on radio? At a club?)

                                                             ii.      Lyric retrieval is simply full text retrieval (e.g., google lyric); the challenge of variants/synonyms

                                                            iii.      Hum, sing, whistle—the possibilities vs the realities

    1. Images

                                                               i.      What is a ‘style’??

                                                             ii.      Object search: the underlying indexing challenge; the query specification problem

                                                            iii.      Community tagging solutions?

                                                           iv.      More channels implies more filters/access points

 

  1. Reading discussions (whole group, with slides to introduce)

Marchionini, G. (1995). Information Seeking in Electronic Environments. pp 27-60. (Note: The book is located behind the reference desk.).

 

4. Read for next week

Harter, S. P. (1992). Psychological relevance and information science.  (JASIST online)

Schamber, L., Eisenberg, M. B., & Nilan, M. S. (1990). A re-examination of relevance: Toward a dynamic, situational definition. (SILS reserve)

Amento, B., Terveen, L., & Hill, W. (2000). Does ‘authority’ mean quality? Predicting expert quality ratings of web documents.  Proceedings of ACM SIGIR (Athens, July 24-28).  296-303. ( ACM Digital Library).

 

5. One-minute paper concept

What was the big point you learned in class today?

What is the main, unanswered question you leave class with today?