Beyond the Google search bar: Evaluating source credibility in contemporary research

Courses: Research Methods, Public Speaking, Communication Theory, any other course that requires college students to engage in a formal research process. Can be conducted in traditional, online, or hybrid courses.

Objectives: In this original single-class activity, students will be able to evaluate source credibility for resources that extend beyond peer-reviewed, published journal articles and books. Through the use of Internet searches and social media outlets, students will engage in an evaluation process that will promote more effective research habits.     

Beyond Tomorrow:

Libraries have made progress toward the development of the electronic library as defined by Pat Battin in 1984. As the electronic library presently exists it closely resembles an automated version of traditional library services. Before the development of the electronic library is concluded questions need to be posed and answered regarding the use of this tool. It must be ascertained whether scholars in different disciplines use automated tools in profoundly different ways in order that the electronic library meets the needs of those whom we intend to serve.     

Citizen-generated open data: An explorative analysis of 25 cases

Citizen-generated open data is the data that individuals consciously generate and that are openly available for use in the public domain. The promise of citizen-generated data is that it generates a basis for public governance. We conducted an explorative comparative case study research of 25 cases in different countries to enhance our understanding of this multi-actor collaboration and mapped the variation in (1) citizen motivations to generate data, (2) the organization of data intermediaries and (3) influence on public governance. We found that citizen-generated data can indeed provide better information for public governance but, at the same time, citizen-generated data can also be used to challenge current positions and power structures. The contribution of citizen-generated data to public governance should thus be understood in terms of both collaboration and contestation.     

1992 and Beyond:

No abstract available for this article.     

Learning from Museums with Indigenous Collections: Beyond Repatriation

As indigenous voices become stronger through legislation or other means, museums with indigenous collections must reexamine their approaches to collection, exhibition, and preservation. Traditional approaches to collection management are undergoing change as participation from indigenous and tribal groups increases. This article summarizes these trends and describes the post-modern charters of two museums: the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC, and Te Papa Tongarewa/The Museum of New Zealand, in Wellington.     

Beyond Our Walls:

No abstract available for this article.     

Interactivity: Moving Beyond Terminology

Abstract Museum professionals strive to provide meaningful experiences for visitors. Meaningful experiences are those that provide choice and control in the exploration of ideas, concepts, and objects. In many cases, these experiences occur through an interactive component. Although a number of studies have focused on interactives in museums, the field would benefit from an intensive look at how visitors perceive of and learn from these experiences. Discussion about this topic has been sidetracked by conversations about the terminology that describes this type of experience. Drawing upon studies conducted in this area, this paper looks at the role of interactives in museums by exploring three broad themes: clarity of purpose and underlying assumptions; design factors; and social engagement and learning. In conclusion, suggestions are offered for ways that these studies might inform the development of interactive experiences.     

Beyond Postmodernism: An Introduction

News coverage of “doomsday” asteroids and comets offers a telling insight into tensions surrounding the reportage of many modern risks. This study of press coverage in the U.S. and Britain discusses differing concepts of uncertainty held by journalists and scientists, and explores the defensive maneuvers that failure of prediction prompts in both communities—strategies that have a significant effect on the news of global threats consumed on both sides of the Atlantic.     

网络信息资源检索策略与方法

国内外众多网站都开辟了有关于检索策略与方法的专栏，本汇集一些具有代表性的网站，以使网络用户系统地学习到网络信息检索方法和技巧。     

Global informetric impact: A description and definition using bundles

Inspired by the Lorenz curve for evenness or concentration, and the corresponding axioms, we construct a theory leading to the notion of global impact. In this theory, we construct a relation that plays the role of the Lorenz dominance order for evenness or concentration theory. The notion of global impact that we obtain is such that well-known global impact bundles such as percentiles, the cumulative number of items produced by the x most productive sources, the average production of the x most productive sources, the generalized h- and g-indices, and the highest number of citations indeed measure impact in our sense of the word.     

Blog feed search with a post index

User generated content forms an important domain for mining knowledge. In this paper, we address the task of blog feed search: to find blogs that are principally devoted to a given topic, as opposed to blogs that merely happen to mention the topic in passing. The large number of blogs makes the blogosphere a challenging domain, both in terms of effectiveness and of storage and retrieval efficiency. We examine the effectiveness of an approach to blog feed search that is based on individual posts as indexing units (instead of full blogs). Working in the setting of a probabilistic language modeling approach to information retrieval, we model the blog feed search task by aggregating over a blogger’s posts to collect evidence of relevance to the topic and persistence of interest in the topic. This approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of effectiveness. We then introduce a two-stage model where a pre-selection of candidate blogs is followed by a ranking step. The model integrates aggressive pruning techniques as well as very lean representations of the contents of blog posts, resulting in substantial gains in efficiency while maintaining effectiveness at a very competitive level.     

Internet search approaches: The influence of age, search goals, and experience

This study analyzed observations and interviews of 31 participants, who were divided into six age groups, to understand the influence of end-user goals and experience on Internet search approaches. Users who lacked experience approached the Internet similarly no matter what the age group. Children and older adults were more likely to lack online search experience than other users. In addition, children and older adults were more homogeneous than other users in that they had a narrow range of situational goals, whereas users in other groups had a wide range of situational goals. The study has implications for user services and research in end-user searching. An understanding of the influence of age, experience, and goals on Internet search patterns might guide how, how much, and in what format information should be presented in the future. Knowledge gained from this study can also form the basis of hypotheses for larger studies.