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 krichel@openlib.org

– 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!