Roadkill on the electronic highway? The threat to the mathematical literature

This article begins with an analysis of reliability and usability in the mathematical literature. Mathematical practice is seen to be adapted to very high standards in these respects, and quite sensitive to even modest declines in quality. Unfortunately most scenarios for the transition to electronic publication suggest serious loss of quality. This is a problem special to mathematics: other sciences are adapted to lower standards, and should be much less sensitive to changes. Some ways to prevent this decline are suggested. A condensed version of this article appeared inNotices of the American Mathematical Society, 42, 1, January 1995. Published with permission of the American Mathematical Society.     

Can constrained relevance feedback and display strategies help users retrieve items on mobile devices?

Searching online information resources using mobile devices is affected by small screens which can display only a fraction of ranked search results. In this paper we investigate whether the search effort can be reduced by means of a simple user feedback: for a screenful of search results the user is encouraged to indicate a single most relevant document. In our approach we exploit the fact that, for small display sizes and limited user actions, we can construct a user decision tree representing all possible outcomes of the user interaction with the system. Examining the trees we can compute an upper limit on relevance feedback performance. In this study we consider three standard feedback algorithms: Rocchio, Robertson/Sparck-Jones (RSJ) and a Bayesian algorithm. We evaluate them in conjunction with two strategies for presenting search results: a document ranking that attempts to maximize information gain from the user’s choices and the top-D ranked documents. Experimental results indicate that for RSJ feedback which involves an explicit feature selection policy, the greedy top-D display is more appropriate. For the other two algorithms, the exploratory display that maximizes information gain produces better results. We conducted a user study to compare the performance of the relevance feedback methods with real users and compare the results with the findings from the tree analysis. This comparison between the simulations and real user behaviour indicates that the Bayesian algorithm, coupled with the sampled display, is the most effective. Extended version of “Evaluating Relevance Feedback Algorithms for Searching on Small Displays, ” Vishwa Vinay, Ingemar J. Cox, Natasa Milic-Frayling, Ken Wood published in the proceedings of ECIR 2005, David E. Losada, Juan M. Fernández-Luna (Eds.), Springer 2005, ISBN 3-540-25295-9     

Crowdfunding for Academic Libraries: Indiana Jones Meets Polka

Crowdfunding – or creatively presenting a case for funding to like-minded individuals – is becoming an effective development strategy for academic libraries. The crowdfunding projects described offer multiple approaches to consider, from an adventure-themed video to embracing polka music to entice donors to give. Social media, used in conjunction with the web and well-established email communication formed the basis of successful project promotion. Developing a robust communication plan ahead of campaign launch is critical for success. Thanking donors for their transformational gifts and follow up communication describing the impact of their participation six months later raises friends for the library potentially for many years to come. With proper planning, an active and enthusiastic committee and effective donor stewardship, crowdfunding campaigns will help libraries raise funds to support strategic initiatives.