Research practices of humanities scholars in an online environment: The Getty online searching project report no. 3

Use of online databases by humanities scholars searching as end users was monitored in a 2-year project conducted by the Getty Art History Information Program. Visiting Scholars at the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities in Santa Monica, California, were offered the opportunity to do unlimited subsidized searching of DIALOG^® databases. This third report from the project presents results of interviews conducted with the scholars regarding their experiences with searching, the role the searching took in their broader research activities, and their attitudes about the future of online searching in the humanities. Scholars found the experience stimulating and novel, with comments ranging from its “addictive” properties to a “Sorcerer's Apprentice” quality to complaints about the “industrialization of scholarship.” Generally, the scholars saw DIALOG searching as supplementing their usual research methods, and not changing them in a fundamental way. Online searching was seen as particularly useful for interdisciplinary research, and as possibly setting a new standard for the extent of literature that should be reviewed. Identified problems were about equally divided between difficulties with the search interface and lack of desired types of resources. All foresaw online searching being used in the future by arts and humanities scholars.     

The Getty Square Library of the Yonkers Public Library:

No abstract available for this article.     

A metadata initiative for global information discovery

The Global Information Locator Service (GILS) encompasses a global vision framed by the fundamental values of open societies. Societal values such as a free flow of information impose certain requirements on the society’s information infrastructure. These requirements in turn shape the various laws, policies, standards, and technologies that determine the infrastructure design. A particular focus of GILS is the requirement to provide the means for people to discover sources of data and information. Information discovery in the GILS vision is designed to be decentralized yet coherent, and globally comprehensive yet useful for detailed data. This article introduces basic concepts and design issues, with emphasis on the techniques by which GILS supports interoperability. It explains the practical implications of GILS for the common roles of organizations involved in handling information, from content provider through system engineer and intermediary to searcher. The article provides examples of GILS initiatives in various types of communities: bibliographic, geographic, environmental, and government.     

A merging strategy proposal: The 2-step retrieval status value method

A usual strategy to implement CLIR (Cross-Language Information Retrieval) systems is the so-called query translation approach. The user query is translated for each language present in the multilingual collection in order to compute an independent monolingual information retrieval process per language. Thus, this approach divides documents according to language. In this way, we obtain as many different collections as languages. After searching in these corpora and obtaining a result list per language, we must merge them in order to provide a single list of retrieved articles. In this paper, we propose an approach to obtain a single list of relevant documents for CLIR systems driven by query translation. This approach, which we call 2-step RSV (RSV: Retrieval Status Value), is based on the re-indexing of the retrieval documents according to the query vocabulary, and it performs noticeably better than traditional methods. The proposed method requires query vocabulary alignment: given a word for a given query, we must know the translation or translations to the other languages. Because this is not always possible, we have researched on a mixed model. This mixed model is applied in order to deal with queries with partial word-level alignment. The results prove that even in this scenario, 2-step RSV performs better than traditional merging methods.     

The IAIMS initiative at the University of Maryland at Baltimore

With support from the National Library of Medicine, the University of Maryland at Baltimore is creating an Integrated Academic Information Management System (IAIMS) that will serve as a prototype for academic health centers. A campus-wide undertaking, the IAIMS initiative at Maryland is characterized by its functional comprehensiveness and its planning model. The resulting strategic plan is serving as a guide in the ongoing model development within an interdisciplinary Hypertension Center.     

The personal librarian program: an evaluation of a Cushing/Whitney Medical Library outreach initiative

The Cushing/Whitney Medical Library (CWML) at the Yale School of Medicine has offered a "Personal Librarian" (PL) program to medical center students since 1996. This outreach program matches students to a professional librarian as they matriculate, a relationship that is maintained until the student graduates. PLs offer individualized assistance for almost anything-from interpreting library policies and procedures to helping locate materials to assisting with thesis research. The program requires nominal effort on the part of the librarians, making it possible to expand the program to include other student groups. A recent survey revealed that students are extremely satisfied with the program and would generally welcome more contact from their PL.     

Preservation activities and needs in U.S. biomedical libraries: a status report

A national sample of health sciences and other types of libraries having significant holdings of biomedical literature was studied to determine the status of library preservation programs. Findings pertaining to 134 basic health sciences libraries and to ninety-seven resource libraries in the Regional Medical Library Program network are reported and discussed. Basic health sciences libraries participating in the study were primarily hospital libraries; resource libraries were primarily academic health sciences center libraries. Findings include information on topics perceived to be of greatest need for staff training and for informational or educational materials; on levels of preservation activity, staffing, and funding; and on capabilities for participating in a national cooperative preservation program. Efforts to identify general and special biomedical collections of potential importance to a national preservation program met with limited success.