Week Ten Readings...

This week I examined the following three readings: Chapter 8 from Digital Libraries, by William Arms, (c) 2000 M.I.T. Press. Rob Kling and Margaret Elliott "Digital Library Design for Usability" and Tefko Saracevic, “Evaluation of digital libraries:An overview".

This week's focus is on interaction and evaluation of Digital Libraries. First up, William Arms Chapter 8: User interfaces and usability. This chapter discusses computer system's usability in terms of interface, components and design. Arms points out that all components of computer systems should effectively run together so that a user can properly search and use a digital library. The article also discusses the conceptual model of interface design, browsers and mobile code as well as functional design of interfaces. Interface is discussed at length.
Prior to reading this chapter, I never realized the importance of interface design or that it can be viewed as an art. As a user, I think that interfaces can be taken for granted. Users may not always realize how revolutionary interfaces are and how much they have changed the way we use and view digital libraries.

Next up, Rob Kling and Margaret Elliott "Digital Library Design for Usability". This paper discusses two forms of Digital Libraries usability. The two forms are, interface usability and organizational usability. Kling and Elliot state, " Organizational usability refers to the ways that computer systems can be effectively integrated into work practices of specific organizations." Five models of computer system design are examined: the traditional functional life-cycle model, the user interface model, and the usability engineering model, medical Informatics Model,and highly Automated Model of DL Design as well as the Organizationally Sensitive Model of "Design for Usability".
I found this article to be informative, clear and concise. The authors did a really great job of explaining their ideas for organizational usability as well as describing the typical models of computer systems. I also found their suggestions to be thoughtful and intelligent, I agree that now is a great time for the Digital Library community to "appreciate the importance of "design for organizational usability" to develop significantly more effective systems."
Now for my notes on Tefko Saracevic's , “Evaluation of digital libraries:An overview".
This report is a data filled evaluation on works of digital libraries. The introduction discusses the explosive growth of digital libraries in the last decade except in the area of evaluation. This reading basically breaks down corpus, approach, construct, context, criteria, methodology of dl lit. I really enjoyed this article, I think it is a very helpful breaking down and explaining evaluation of digital libraries.

Muddiest Point

Are the week ten readings due today, 10/24 or next friday 10/31? I am muddled.

Muddiest PointS

This week, I have a few....

Just to double check:
As stated in the syllabus...
1. Our exam is Monday, November 3?
2. We are not having class on Monday, October 27?


Concerning lectures

I do not understand vector space models, probabilistic models, statistical language models, i am just really confused about that.

Week 8 Readings---Retrieving Information.

This week I am commenting on Todd Miller's Federated Searching: Put It in Its Place, Webfest's The Truth About Federated Searching and Norbert Lossau's “Search Engine Technology and Digital Libraries: Libraries Need to Discover the Academic Internet”.

Federated Searching: Put It in Its Place
"Knowledge is power. This is true not only for the library patron but for the library as well. The more that libraries enable and fully engage their information, the more central they become in the lives of their constituency."

~As someone who sees myself more from a library user's perspective, I found myself agreeing tremendously with Todd Miller. I think he makes several good points, i.e. the need for a relationship between the library catalog and federated searching, the tendency for users to want to find answers and not particularly enjoying the search process, how maybe the model Google uses is not that bad of an idea. I found Todd Miller's article to concisely bring up good points and clearly state his opinion.
I also liked that he brings up the point that although something may be the best for the users, doesn't necessarily mean the users will use it and if the users do not use, well, it useless, right? When it comes to libraries and providing access to users, I think that this should always be taken into consideration, not only what is best for the user but what will be used best by users. We need to not only bring the information to the user but also bring the user to the information, in a way that is easy for them to understand and follow themselves.

The Truth about Federated Searching
On the flip side, this article is a compilation of the top five misconceptions about federated searching. Basically, the want those interested in federated searching that: "not all federated search engines can search all databases", that de-duplication is not possible, that a relevant relevancy ranking is impossible, that it better to use federated searching as a service, not a software and that you cannot receive better result using a federated search engine then a native database search.
I thought this article brought up valid points for an argument against using federated searching in database searching. However, I do not know if I agree but I don't know if I actually know enough to agree or disagree. Honestly, I don't understand why authentication is such a problem, why is it so difficult to manage for subscription databases? Everything I have heard about database subscriptions throughout library school has left be baffled. From the sound of things ( and I fully admit here, I could and probably completely wrong) database and e-journal subscriptions kinda suck, or at least, the vendors kinda suck. Why don't they provide better service? Also, can't something be created that actually enhances the search functions of a native database search through a federated search? Is it impossible, or technologically are we not there yet?

Search Engine Technology and Digital Libraries
This article brought up several good points about the need for the library community to provide quality search services to its users and the challenges libraries face. Personally, I agreed mostly with the fact brought up in the article that libraries need to view themselves more as an information gateway then just a depository of books. However, I do think that there is a push for this currently happening in academic libraries. I also thought this article brought up a great point when it mentioned that "future search services should be based on a collaboratively constructed, major shared data resource, but must come with a whole range of customizable search and browsing interfaces that can be seamlessly integrated into any local information portal, subject specific gateway or personal research and learning environment".
Overall, this article provide clear advocacy for reliable and easy search services as well as providing plenty of information about what exactly the needs are as well as what libraries can do about them.

What to know about Web search engines....Week 7 Readings

This weeks readings are:

David Hawking , Web Search Engines: Part 1 and Part 2 IEEE Computer, June 2006.

M. Henzinger et al. challenges in Web Search Engines. ACM SIGIR 2002.

First up, David Hawking's Web Search Engines Part 1:

Crawling, what a name to describe a computer function! This reading is basically a clear and concise bare bones description of web search engines infrastructure and explains the process and function of 'crawling'. Honestly, it blows my mind that things that take mere milliseconds on the user end, is actually a fairly involved process that involves queues, fetching, sifting through URLs, organizing among other things. But really, these things happen so fast!
Besides being amazed at the speed of which these things happen, I was also wondering what exactly happened to make people (computer scientists?) think that the web could never be indexed to that of which, it is indexed, with much more information and at a far greater speed then probably ever imagined. I wonder, if I had to do with the fact that someone had the foresight to see that web search engines could and would be hugely profitable and thus, indexing would be possible? Also, this reading also struck me as making search engines sound much more capable then the actually are. Okay, not capable but maybe accurate? I guess, ideally web search engines always link to useful information but depending on the search engine, in my experience, it is not always the most useful information.

PART 2
Oh Indexing! What makes googling terms and phrases so much easier for us! This reading breaks down the processes behind search engines and explains the functions and algorithms that make searching for things on the Internet via search engines so easy and quick.
I found this reading very useful in the explanation of how things are indexed and how search results are generated.
I just wonder about the development of algorithms and functions that make searching and indexing even more accurate and useful. Have computer scientists and programmers done or is the technology constantly changing? Are their any standards involved? Are companies required to share new algorithms or process they come up with, or are the allowed to keep the technology to themselves?


Challenges in Web Search Engines~ Monika R. Henzinger, Rajeev Motwani and Craig Silverstein
This reading provide a much more in-depth discussion of the processes and issues involved with web search engines' information retrieval. The article covered issues such as spam, quality of content, web conventions, duplications , etc.
I found this article to be informative but my questions are more based around quality evaluation...commercial search engines use user-behavior data to evaluate ranking, thus (hopefully) providing more quality information. However, when reading this I wonder do commercial search engines really just use this to help users? My experiences with searching, left me wondering about this and how much true quality really counts to search engine companies.
Also, spam=so annoying.

Overall, each of these readings did a wonderful job of explaining processes, functions and algorithms associated with web search engines. I don't believe it is possible to read about everything that is involved with algorithms, quality of content, indexing and organizing and not be blown away.

Muddiest Point

For personal reasons I missed class on Monday so this may have been covered but don't we have some sort of XML assignment due and why wasn't it posted in the assignment are of courseweb?