In an article for First Monday, Scott J Simon summarises the current environment and challenges for digital libraries. He outlines the basic concepts of information architecture and explores how IA can enhance the provision of search and other online library services. [tip o' the blogging hat to Jonathan]
At the University of Minnesota a MyLibrary portal provides personalised content based on a user’s relationship with the university — their academic department and degree program or employment position. The personalisation is based on an ‘affinity string’ generated by the university’s enterprise authentication system. Librarians have access to anonymised data about users’ behavior online, allowing improved collection management and service delivery.
Stuart Weibel (OCLC) notes that “The MacArthur Foundation, among whose fundable ‘causes’ is credibility in online information, is funding the start up costs of the Reference Extract project, that the New York Times characterized as “Google if built by librarians”.” The project’s leaders are David Lankes (Syracuse University), Jeff Penka (OCLC) and Michael Eisenberg, emeritus Dean of the University of Washington’s Information School. (I *love* the photo on Eisenberg’s home page.)
Weibel describes the ‘research question’ that this project may be able to answer:
“Librarians have been known to turn up their collective noses at open search, impugning the quality of search results, and a plethora of online dross bolsters the position. But it is mostly good enough for most of us, most of the time. Will reference-librarian links improve that quality?
“It might be more useful to think of librarian-vetted links as another cut on relevance ranking… useful primarily in circumstances when ‘good enough’ is not quite good enough. Still, such results are more likely to live comfortably within existing search environments, rather than in competition with them.”
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References
Scott J Simon (2008) “Information Architecture for Digital Libraries” in First Monday, volume 13 number 12, 1 December 2008. Available at firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2183/2059
Cody Hanson, Shane Nackerud, and Kristi Jensen (2008) “Affinity Strings: Enterprise Data for Resource Recommendations” in The Code4Lib Journal, issue 5, 15 December 2008. Available at journal.code4lib.org/articles/501
Tags: search, SOA, library, authentication, portal, personalisation
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