Transcript Introduction

LIS618 lecture 0
Thomas Krichel
2003-01-22
Organization
• homepage
http://wotan.liu.edu/home/krichel/lis618p03s
• Contents to be discussed today.
• Send mail to [email protected]
– Your name
– Your secret word for grades delivery
• Interrupt me with as many questions as
possible!
• Ask for breaks!
Proposed Organization
• Normal lecture
• Quiz at the beginning of every lecture
– Remove two worst performances
– Average to form 50%
– No quiz next week!
• Search exercise 50%
• Formal syllabus to be made early next
week!
Enlargement of hours
• I would like to make the sessions longer
• To compensate, some weeks would not
have class
• Such weeks would be concentrated at the
end of the term
• Advantages for students
– Saves students time to travel
– Improves grades because of worst
performance discount.
• I will not be there some weeks, may have
to add extra out-of-class work.
Search exercise
• find victim of an information need
• conduct interview about an information
need experienced by the victim, write
down expectations
• search in Dialog and on web
• discuss results with the victim
• write essay, no longer than 7 pages.
About me
• Born 1965, in Völklingen (Germany)
• Studied economics and social sciences at
the Universities of Toulouse, Paris, Exeter
and Leiceister.
• PhD in theoretical macroeconomics
• Lecturer in Economics at the University of
Surrey 1993 and 2001
• Since 2001 assistant professor at the
Palmer School
Why?
• During research assistantship period,
(1990 to 1993) I was constantly frustrated
with difficult access to scientific literature.
• At the same time, I discovered easy
access to freely downloadable software
over the Internet.
• I decided to work towards downloadable
scientific documents. This lead to my
library career (eventually).
Steps taken I
• 1993 founded the NetEc project at
http://netec.mcc.ac.uk, later available at
http://netec.ier.hit-u.ac.jp as well as at
http://netec.wustl.edu.
• These are networking projects targeted to
the economics community. The bulk is
– Information about working papers
– Downloadable working papers
– Journal articles were added later
Steps taken II
• Set up RePEc, a digital library for
economics research. Catalogs
– Research documents
– Collections of research documents
– Researchers themselves
– Organizations that are important to the
research process
• Decentralized collection, model for the
open archives initiative
Steps taken III
• Co-founder of Open Archives Initiative
• Work on the Academic Metadata Format
• Co-founded rclis, a RePEc clone for
(Research in Computing, Library and
Information Science)
Interest in databases
• From my point of view I have two interests
in database searching
– As a provider, I must understand how people
search in order to provide some data that they
can use and will use.
– As an economist, I have a strong interest in
information as a commodity. The database
market is an important market place.
Database searching (DS)
• subset of the subject of information
retrieval (IR)
• DS mainly thought as applicable to the set
of large structured databases as opposed
to do web searching
• for those, a general knowledge of what
databases are seems useful
• Concentrate on textual databases
traditional social model
• user goes to a library
• describes problem to the librarian
• librarian does the search
– without the user present
– with the user present
• hands over the result to the user
• user fetches full-text or asks a librarian to
fetch the full text.
economic rational for traditional
model
• In olden days the cost of
telecommunication was high.
• database use costs
– cost of communication
– cost of access time to the database
• the traditional model controls an upper
bound on costs
disintermediation
• with access cost time gone, the traditional
model is under threat
• there is disintermediation where the
librarian looses her role
• but that may not be good news for
information retrieval results
– user knows subject matter best
– librarian knows searching best
Web searching
• IR has received a lot of impetus through
the web, which poses unprecedented
search challenges.
• with more and more data appearing on the
web DS may be a subject in decline
– it is primarily concerned with non-web
databases
– There is more and more web-based methods
of searching
http://openlib.org/home/krichel
Thank you for your attention!