Macroappraisal in the Netherlands. The First Ten Years, 1991–2001, and Beyond

A new appraisal method for national government records introduced in the 1990s aimed at reducing backlogs in the transfer of pre-1976 records to the National Archives of the Netherlands. Since then, appraisal and disposition decisions are based on macro analysis. Preventing new backlogs from occurring was a second goal. The socalled project PIVOT (1991–2001 and after) coordinated the introduction, development, and implementation of the new appraisal method. This article describes the objectives, method, and appraisal criteria, as well as the criticism and laborious progress of this ongoing story. This article is a revised and enlarged version of an earlier publication, “Makrohindamine Hollandis. Eskimesed kümme aanstat: 1991–2001”, TUNA Ajalookultuuri ajakiri 4 (2003): 150–154.     

Specifying the Bradford ratio from the analysis of large arrays of scientific periodicals

This paper analyzes the content of large (40000–80000 doc./year) and average (20000–30 000 doc./year) databases on physico-mathematical and some technical sciences for 1996–2010 that are in the databank of the VINITI RAS. This research on arrays with large coverage of periodicals (from 2500 to 9000 sources in different thematic fragments) permits one to draw the conclusion that the record in the form 1 : x : x ³, where x is the Bradford parameter, is suitable for the Bradford rule as the ratio of the number of sources in three zones with a similar documental content. The subsequent specification of this ratio requires the standardization of all sources by their average monthly content and maximum supplementation of the zones of nuclear and profile journals with omitted articles.     

Geography in the VINITI of the RAS: from reference journal to database. A history of development. Statistical characteristics during 1954–2008

The history of the creation and development of the VINITI RAS “Geography” reference journal from 1954 to 2008 is considered. The changes in retrofunds and dynamics of the distribution of the overall quantity of documents in the reference journal/database have been followed in relation to the changes in the content contained in the issues during the period of time under consideration. The document information flow of the “ Geography ” database during 1991–2008 was analyzed statistically.     

Hierarchical clustering of a Finnish newspaper article collection with graded relevance assessments

Search facilitated with agglomerative hierarchical clustering methods was studied in a collection of Finnish newspaper articles (N = 53,893). To allow quick experiments, clustering was applied to a sample (N = 5,000) that was reduced with principal components analysis. The dendrograms were heuristically cut to find an optimal partition, whose clusters were compared with each of the 30 queries to retrieve the best-matching cluster. The four-level relevance assessment was collapsed into a binary one by (A) considering all the relevant and (B) only the highly relevant documents relevant, respectively. Single linkage (SL) was the worst method. It created many tiny clusters, and, consequently, searches enabled with it had high precision and low recall. The complete linkage (CL), average linkage (AL), and Ward's methods (WM) returned reasonably-sized clusters typically of 18–32 documents. Their recall (A: 27–52%, B: 50–82%) and precision (A: 83–90%, B: 18–21%) was higher than and comparable to those of the SL clusters, respectively. The AL and WM clustering had 1–8% better effectiveness than nearest neighbor searching (NN), and SL and CL were 1–9% less efficient that NN. However, the differences were statistically insignificant. When evaluated with the liberal assessment A, the results suggest that the AL and WM clustering offer better retrieval ability than NN. Assessment B renders the AL and WM clustering better than NN, when recall is considered more important than precision. The results imply that collections in the highly inflectional and agglutinative languages, such as Finnish, may be clustered as the collections in English, provided that documents are appropriately preprocessed.     

Adaptive Erkennung von Software-Entwurfsm?ngeln

Zusammenfassung Die Qualit?t von Software kann je nach Anwendungsgebiet an unterschiedlichen Kriterien gemessen werden. Für grosse Software-Systeme spielen u. a. Kriterien wie Wartbarkeit, Verst?ndlichkeit und Erweiterbarkeit eine wichtige Rolle. Mein Ziel ist es, Entwurfsm?ngel in Software-Systemen zu erkennen und somit „‘schlechte“’ – unverst?ndliche, schwer erweiter- und ?nderbare – Programmstrukturen zu vermeiden. Prominente Entwurfsm?ngel sind z. B. die von Fowler eingeführten Bad Smells in objektorientierten Programmen. Entwurfsm?ngel werden abh?ngig von der Sichtweise und dem Erfahrungsschatz des Suchenden unterschiedlich interpretiert. Ich kombiniere daher bekannte Verfahren zur Erkennung von Entwurfsm?ngeln auf der Basis von Metriken mit maschinellen Lernverfahren. Damit kann Entwurfsmangelerkennung individuellen Sichtweisen angepasst werden. Ich pr?sentiere ein Werkzeug für Java-Programme und zeige die Ergebnisse einer ersten Fallstudie.

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Criteria for software quality measurement depend on the application area. In large software systems criteria like maintainability, comprehensibility and extensibility play an important role. My aim is to identify design flaws in software systems automatically and thus to avoid “bad” – incomprehensible, hardly expandable and changeable – program structures. Depending on the perception and experience of the searching engineer, design flaws are interpreted in a different way. I propose to combine known methods for finding design flaws on the basis of metrics with machine learning mechanisms, such that design flaw detection is adaptable to different views. This paper presents the underlying method, describes an analysis tool for Java programs and shows results of an initial case study.

CR Subject Classification D.1.5,D.2.2,D.2.5,D.2.7,D.2.8,I.2.6     

The scientometric analysis of publications based on the materials of the peer-reviewed journal <Emphasis Type="Italic">The Physics of Nanoobjects and Nanotechnologies</Emphasis> of the All-Union Institute for Scientific and Technical Information of the Russian Academy of Sciences (VINITI RAS): Graphene

A comparative analysis of the thematic scope of publications in the literature focusing on graphene in the period between 2010 and the first half of 2011 is conducted. The development patterns for physics of graphene are highlighted. Hotspots and emerging trends are outlined in this area, based on the analysis of publications in volumes 1–12 of the 2010 edition and volumes 1–6 of the 2011 edition of the peer-reviewed journal The Physics of Nanoobjects and Nanotechnologies published by the All Union Institute for Scientific and Technical Information of the Russian Academy of Sciences (VINITI RAS).     

Archival objects in motion: historians’ appropriation of sources in nineteenth-century Austria and Switzerland

This contribution examines the social, material, and epistemic practices of historians and their counterparts engaged in the textual and visual reproduction of historical sources in nineteenth-century Austria and Switzerland. The Schweizerische Urkundenregister (1863–1877), a Swiss register of medieval charters, and the Monumenta graphica medii aevi (1859–1883), an Austrian collection of photographic facsimiles of medieval sources, were both intended to make historical sources accessible outside the archives in the framework of national history. The article analyzes institutional collaborations and the social interactions among the actors involved and follows the trajectories of the mobilized archival objects. These projects for national source publications appear as a negotiated social practice, in which archival objects were dislocated conceptually as well as materially in order to be stabilized and reified again in new infrastructures of research. The conflicts surrounding the projects reveal disputes about authority over the archival records, their significance, and the techniques required to represent them properly, and show how the emergence of scholarly source publications accompanied a conscious erasure of older contexts of meaning.     

The archival sliver: Power, memory, and archives in South Africa

Far from being a simple reflection of reality, archives are constructed windows into personal and collective processes. They at once express and are instruments of prevailing relations of power. Verne Harris makes these arguments through an account of archives and archivists in the context of South Africa's transition from apartheid to democracy. The account is deliberately shaped around three themes — race, power, and public records. While he concedes that the constructedness of memory and the dimension of power are most obvious in the extreme circumstances of oppression and rapid transition to democracy, he argues that these are realities informing archives in all circumstances. He makes an appeal to archivists to enchant their work by engaging these realities and by turning always towards the call of and for justice. This essay draws heavily on four articles published previously by me: “Towards a Culture of Transparency: Public Rights of Access to Official Records in South Africa”,American Archivist 57.4 (1994); “Redefining Archives in South Africa: Public Archives and Society in Transition, 1990–1996”,Archivaria 42 (1996); “Transforming Discourse and Legislation: A Perspective on South Africa's New National Archives Act”,ACARM Newsletter 18 (1996); and “Claiming Less, Delivering More: A Critique of Positivist Formulations on Archives in South Africa”,Archivaria 44 (1997). I am grateful to Ethel Kriger (National Archives of South Africa) and Tim Nuttall (University of Natal) for offering sometimes tough comment on an early draft of the essay. I remain, of course, fully responsible for the final text. I presented a version of it in the “Refiguring the Archive” seminar series, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, October 1998. That version was published in revised form in Carolyn Hamilton et al.,Refiguring the Archive (Cape Town: David Philip, 2002).     

Inventing book news, 1925–1935: “Publicity hypnosis” and the colophon

The Colophon, published from 1925 through 1935 for an audience of book collectors and connoisseurs, illuminates the debate over the basis of a book's value: genuine quality or artificial scarcity. It also illustrates the distinction between genuine news about the book industry and “publicity hypnosis”—today’s “hype.” The magazine’s authors, designers, typographers, printers, and illustrators were among the finest of their day. Claire Badaracco is an assistant professor at Marquette University, and is currently writing a series of articles about Anglo-American book publishing, journalism, and publicity trades between 1920 and 1940 with the support of The British Academy, the National Endowment, and the Bibliographical Society of America. Her work has been published inAmerican Literary Realism, Journalism Quarterly, Essays in Business and Economic History, and other journals. The Library of Congress, The Center for The Book, is publishing her monograph “The Lakeside Press Four American Books Campaign 1926–1930.”     

The English language in scientific publishing

Adapting to market changes after World War II, the German scientific publishing house Springer-Verlag decided to publish in the English language long before setting up offices in the United States. This material was adapted from Springer-Verlag: History of a Scientific Publishing House, Volume 2, 1945–1992, and appears with the permission of the publishers.     

MuSofT – Multimedia in der Softwaretechnik

Zusammenfassung.   Im Rahmen des F?rderprogramms Neue Medien in der Bildung f?rdert das BMBF das Vorhaben „MuSofT – Multimedia in der Softwaretechnik”. Dieses Vorhaben soll in den n?chsten drei Jahren multimediale Lehr- und Lerneinheiten in die softwaretechnische Lehre einführen und insbesondere drei Aspekte der Softwaretechnik-Ausbildung unterstützen. Im ersten Aspekt wird die objektorientierte Modellierung als eine Folge von Phasen betrachtet, innerhalb deren Software-Produkte schrittweise konstruiert werden. Hierzu geh?ren insbesondere die Analysephase mit dem Erfassen von Benutzeranforderungen und die anschlie?ende Entwurfsphase mit dem Umsetzen dieser Anforderungen in technische Modelle. Ein zweiter Aspekt ist die Auseinandersetzung mit dem Entwicklungsprozess selbst und den dazugeh?renden übergreifenden T?tigkeiten wie dem Projektmanagement und der Qualit?tssicherung. Ein dritter Aspekt ist die fachdidaktische Herangehensweise an die softwaretechnische Ausbildung, die insbesondere für die Informatiklehrerausbildung von gro?er Bedeutung ist.      

The Franco-American book trade in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries

The Franco-American book trade played a vital role in the struggle for mutual understanding during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. That trade is exemplified by the work of three colorful individuals: Joseph Nancrede (1761–1841), who left his native France and became a publisher in Boston; John Hurford Stone (1763–1818), English supporter of the French Revolution who set up his English Press in Paris, issuing works of American interest; and Nicholas Gouin Dufief (1776–1834), who fled the French Revolution and set up as bookseller in Philadelphia. Thanks to the efforts of Nancrede and Dufief, the writings of French thinkers were made available to American readers, and thanks to the presswork of John Hurford Stone, the writings of Barlow, Paine, Jefferson and others were circulated in France. As publisher, printer, and bookseller, these three bookpeople reflected the ups and downs of Franco-American relations and became instruments of international understanding. Madeleine B. Stern, partner in the rare book firm of Leona Rostenberg and Madeleine Stern, has written numerous books on publishing and bookselling history, includingImprints on History: Book Publishers and American Frontiers. She is the editor ofPublishers for Mass Entertainment in 19th-Century America and is currently completingStudies in the Franco-American Book Trade in the Late 18th and Early 19th Centuries     

Document collections,mobilized regulations,and the making of customary law at the end of the Middle Ages

Using late medieval examples from Switzerland, this paper argues that the emergence of formally organized archives around 1500 was part of an important shift in how documents could be deployed. However, this shift was not away from an oral and toward a literate culture, as argued in some earlier studies, but rather away from seeing documents as testimony that reminded a community about past authoritative actors, and toward relating the texts of documents to other texts, that is, to contexts. This shift took place largely through the appropriation of methods for using and organizing written material that had been developed in the realms of scholastic theology and liturgy, and applying them to secular lordship and administration. These methods provided new models for organizing collections of parchments and papers into connected archives and gave rise to new forms of text collection such as reorganized versions of law books (Spiegel, Coutumiers) containing new search tools such as tables of contents (capitulationes) and indices (abecedaria). Individual charters and scattered legal norms were also organized into textus–glossae structures in larger and smaller administrative units. In the Swiss case, the contextualization of legal texts was accompanied by an increased attribution of authority to ‘custom’ in general, because the community-oriented attribution of meaning found in earlier use was lost. Ultimately, recasting individual documents as part of larger textual contexts increased the power of rulers and ushered in an age of lawyers and of archives.     

A nordic archival tradition

This paper reviews the historical roots of the Danish-Norwegian and the Swedish-Finnish archival traditions, which form a basis for the cooperation between the archives in the Nordic countries. Reprinted from F. Daelemans (ed.),Miscellanea in honorem Caroli Kecskeméti (Bruxelles-Brussel 1998) (=Archives et bibliothèques de Belgique, numéro special 54) pp. 357–370.     

Archival theory in Italy today

Archival theory in Italy has a long tradition, going back as far as the second half of the nineteenth century, and with roots in the 17th and 18th centuries. Central theme in the theory is themetodo storico, the principle of provenance, for the first time expressed in the late 19th century by Bonaini and Bongi. In the following decades archivists like Casanova and Cencetti were among the leading authors. Elio Lodolini assigned himself the task to synthesize ideas and notions, within a clear distinctions between records (registratura) and archives. One of the overall characteristics of the rich Italian literature is the stressing of the cultural value of archives. I have twice treated before the theme of archival theory in Italy from the fifties up to the nineties. The first time on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of theScuola speciale per Archivisti e Bibliotecari dell'Università degli Studi “La Sapienza” di Roma in 1989, when there was an international round table on archival science in the State Archives of Rome. My essay,Italian archival science today, has been published in the proceedings of the meeting (cfr. Donato Tamblé,L'archivistica in Italia oggi, inStudi sull'archivistica, by Roma: Elio Lodolini, 1992). Some years later, in 1993, I published a book on contemporary Italian archival theory (Donato Tamblé,La teoria archivistica italiana contemporanea (1950–1990). Profilo storico-critico (Roma, 1993) which was the sequel to the volume of Elio Lodolini on Italian archival history — (Lineamenti di storia dell'archivistica italiana (Roma, 1991). The purpose of my book was that of locating and identifying the scientific object of archival science as it developed and was clarified in the thinking and in the lucubration of the contemporary Italian Archivists.     

From work to text to document

The defining trope for the humanities in the last 30 years has been typified by the move from “work” to “text.” The signature text defining this move has been Roland Barthes seminal essay, “From Work to Text.” But the current move in library, archival and information studies toward the “document” as the key term offers challenges for contemporary humanities research. In making our own movement from work to text to document, we can explicate fully the complexity of conducting archival humanistic research within disciplinary and institutional contexts in the twenty-first century. This essay calls for a complex perspective, one that demands that we understand the raw materials of scholarship are processed by disciplines, by institutions, and by the work of the scholar. When we understand our materials as constrained by disciplines, we understand them as “works.” When we understand them as constrained by the institutions of memory that preserve and grant access to them, we understand them as “documents.” And when we understand them as the ground for our own interpretive activity, we understand them as “texts.” When we understand that humanistic scholarship requires an awareness of all three perspectives simultaneously (an understanding demonstrated by case studies in historical studies of the discipline of rhetoric), we will be ready for a richer historical scholarship as well as a richer collaboration between humanists and archivists.     

Archival theory in Italy today

Archival theory in Italy has a long tradition, going back as far as the second half of the nineteenth century, and with roots in the 17th and 18th centuries. Central theme in the theory is themetodo storico, the principle of provenance, for the first time expressed in the late 19th century by Bonaini and Bongi. In the following decades archivists like Casanova and Cencetti were among the leading authors. Elio Lodolini assigned himself the task to synthesize ideas and notions, within a clear distinctions between records (registratura) and archives. One of the overall characteristics of the rich Italian literature is the stressing of the cultural value of archives. I have twice treated before the theme of archival theory in Italy from the fifties up to the nineties. The first time on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of theScuola speciale per Archivisti e Bibliotecari dell'Università degli Studi “La Sapienza” di Roma in 1989, when there was an international round table on archival science in the State Archives of Rome. My essay,Italian archival science today, has been published in the proceedings of the meeting (cfr. Donato Tamblé,L'archivistica in Italia oggi, inStudi sull'archivistica, by Roma: Elio Lodolini, 1992). Some years later, in 1993, I published a book on contemporary Italian archival theory (Donato Tamblé,La teoria archivistica italiana contemporanea (1950–1990). Profilo storico-critico (Roma, 1993) which was the sequel to the volume of Elio Lodolini on Italian archival history — (Lineamenti di storia dell'archivistica italiana (Roma, 1991). The purpose of my book was that of locating and identifying the scientific object of archival science as it developed and was clarified in the thinking and in the lucubration of the contemporary Italian Archivists.     

What is Program Evaluation? Generating Knowledge for Improvement

In this introductory article, we discuss the nature of Program Evaluation, describing the concepts that underlie our formal and informal evaluative efforts. Program Evaluation, like any deliberate inquiry process, is about learning. The process explicates program purposes, activities, and outcomes and generates knowledge about their merit and worth. This knowledge can inform planning and lead to program improvement. We present and discuss various definitions of Program Evaluation, focussing on its purposes and uses. We also provide an overview of the inquiry process, grounding the search for merit and worth in the American Evaluation Association's Guiding Principles for Evaluators. Because program evaluations are typically conducted to inform decision makers, we discuss aspects of professional practise that contribute to the use of an evaluation. This chapter draws heavily on previous work by Sharon Rallis and Gretchen Rossman; see the following references. Rallis, S.F. and Rossman, G.B., “Mixed Methods in Evaluation Contexts: A Pragmatic framework”, in A. Tashakkori and C. Teddlie (eds.),Handbook of Mixed Methods in the Social and Behavioral Sciences (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2002). Rallis, S.F. and Rossman, G.B., “Communicating Quality and Qualities: The Role of the Evaluator as Critical Friend”, in A.P. Benson, D.M. Hinn and C. Lloyd (eds.),Visions of Quality: How Evaluators Define, Understand, and Represent Program Quality (Oxford: JAI Press, 2001), pp. 107–120. Rallis, S.F. and Rossman, G.B. “Dialogue for Learning: Evaluator as Critical Friend”, in R. Hopson and M.Q. Patton (eds.),How and Why Language Matters in Evaluation, New Directions for Evaluation, 86 (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000). Rossman, G.B. and Rallis, S.F.,Learning in the Field: An Introduction to Qualitive Research, 2nd edition (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2003). Rossman, G.B. and Rallis, S.F., “Evaluation as Learning: Critical Inquiry and Use as Action”, in V.J. Caracelli and H. Preskill (eds.),The Expanding Scope of Evaluation Use, New Directions in Evaluation 88 (San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 2000).     

Writing from the archive: Henry Garnet’s powder-plot letters and archival communication

Through a reading of the archived letters of Henry Garnet (1555–1606), Superior of the Jesuit order in England and suspected Gunpowder plotter, this article investigates the nature of the archive in relation to narrative theory. Figuring the archive as one of the number of narrating voices accrued by the individual record, I argue that models of communication such as those put forward by Roman Jakobson, Wayne C. Booth and Seymour Chatman afford useful insights into the ways in which power is inscribed and reinscribed in the record through successive acts of reading and rewriting.

Efficient algorithms for pattern matching with general gaps, character classes, and transposition invariance

We develop efficient dynamic programming algorithms for pattern matching with general gaps and character classes. We consider patterns of the form p ₀ g(a ₀,b ₀)p ₁ g(a ₁,b ₁)…p _m−1, where p _i ⊂ Σ, Σ is some finite alphabet, and g(a _i ,b _i ) denotes a gap of length a _i …b _i between symbols p _i and p _i+1. The text symbol t _j matches p _i iff t _j  ∈ p _i . Moreover, we require that if p _i matches t _j , then p _i+1 should match one of the text symbols Either or both of a _i and b _i can be negative. We also consider transposition invariant matching, i.e., the matching condition becomes t _j  ∈ p _i + τ, for some constant τ determined by the algorithms. We give algorithms that have efficient average and worst case running times. The algorithms have important applications in music information retrieval and computational biology. We give experimental results showing that the algorithms work well in practice.