information retrieval
sb admin | July 21, 2010So there I was, try all kinds of librarian ninja tricks on the fanciest, most expensive research databases money can buy (SciFinder, Reaxys, Inspec...) and no joy. Couldn't find what I needed. I'm perfectly willing to admit that I don't know all that much chemistry, but usually I do ok since I work with one chemist quite a bit. Finally I gave up and googled it. After a few tries, I found way down in the results an article about something else (like I needed a chemical in an aqueous solution and it had the chemical in alcohol), but the snippet drew my eye. Sure enough - had a table with my…
cpikas | July 21, 2010So there I was, try all kinds of librarian ninja tricks on the fanciest, most expensive research databases money can buy (SciFinder, Reaxys, Inspec...) and no joy. Couldn't find what I needed. I'm perfectly willing to admit that I don't know all that much chemistry, but usually I do ok since I work with one chemist quite a bit. Finally I gave up and googled it. After a few tries, I found way down in the results an article about something else (like I needed a chemical in an aqueous solution and it had the chemical in alcohol), but the snippet drew my eye. Sure enough - had a table with my…
cpikas | July 21, 2010in Geneva. This is the ACM Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval. Besides the academic types, this huge conference pulls a lot from the search engine industry and thereâs a lot of interesting stuff.
The twitter tag is #sigir2010 and thereâs some bloggy coverage. (heh, todayâs keynote â is the Cranfield paradigm outdated â um, yes, if it was ever dated!). Danield Tunkelang is blogging (I think heâs at Google now). A search on Google blog search yields a few more.
sb admin | July 15, 2010And why we should care. Gary Price of the Resource Shelf pointed to a news story today, that Ebsco has acquired two more research databases: Criminal Justice Abstracts and Communications Abstracts. For those of you who haven't been following, Ebsco has recently acquired Ageline (it is now not available for free), NetLibrary, research databases from OCLC, The Music Index Online, World Textiles, ExPub (ChemExpert)... oh and exclusive rights to some magazines.
What we can expect from this is that those other databases will no longer be available on multiple platforms. Folks who aren't librarians…
cpikas | April 16, 2010I was happy to see that the authors published this article in PlosOne. I was following their work a while ago, but had lost track (plus, when asked, the last author implied that they had moved on to new projects). So here's the citation and then I'll summarize and comment.
Divoli, A., Wooldridge, M., & Hearst, M. (2010). Full Text and Figure Display Improves Bioscience Literature Search PLoS ONE, 5 (4) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0009619
The authors created a prototype information system that used Lucene to index the metadata for open access biomed articles, the full text, and the captions…
cpikas | April 1, 2010I'm still on this kick on recommender systems. I'm further encouraged by happening on a report on "discoverability" by the Minnesota librarians when looking for something else on JR's blog. The report agrees that recommender systems are a more important trend.
In standard information retrieval stuff, you're going from whatever query the person puts in (which can be very, very different from their information need see Taylor [1]) and you're computing similarity between those terms and what ever representation you have of information in the system. Smarter systems do a lot more than that, but…
cpikas | March 24, 2010I'm on a sub-sub committee to evaluate evaluation of consideration of adding a new recommender system to our discovery tools across my parent institution's libraries. The system costs money and programmer time (which we're very short on), but more importantly, there's a real estate issue, we already offer some similar tools, and even if the recommendations are perfect we don't know if or where we could/should surface them, they'd be noticed and used. I'm trying to get my arms around at least the questions we should ask or things we should consider. I'm using this post to work through some…
cpikas | February 21, 2010I ran across this piece again just now after having read it when it first came out in 20056:
Foster, I. (2005). Service-Oriented Science. Science, 308(5723), 814-817. doi:10.1126/science.1110411
It's a good piece and quite helpful. Google Scholar says it's been cited 209 times, so that's not terribly surprising. But here are some things that are at least mildly surprising.
The widget that uses the Web of Science api to provide number of citations directly on the HTML page for the article shows that the piece has been cited 23 times. When you click through that to Web of Science - if your…
cpikas | February 8, 2010A brief note. Remember when I told you about free to you research databases? Remember when some other librarians told you about a certain company negotiating for exclusive access to certain popular magazines, choking out other aggregators? Well, now these two things have something in common. Ebsco.
cpikas | October 17, 2009Cross-language information retrieval is an important research area with lots of activity. There are all kinds of elaborate algorithms and ways of doing it. There's a lot of domain specificity and connotation kind of things that have been really improved in the past decade.
Most people searching won't really have the support of the fancy specialized tools. I've approximated some of this searching for years using various basic search engine language tools. Luckily, recently they've added a lot more Chinese, Japanese, Persian, and Russian translation options in addition to the Western or…
cpikas | October 12, 2009Is it possible or even desirable to have one search interface that serves every need?
I have about 10 minutes to write this placeholder of a post. Hopefully, I'll get the opportunity to revisit this topic near and dear to my heart later.
I've often railed against naive librarians and administrators who insist we need "google boxes" as our only interface for every system, for every need, regardless of what is behind the box. In fact, we just fought this battle had this discussion with our enterprise search consultants, but anyhoo.
This particular post was prompted by Martin Fenner's discussion…
cpikas | August 9, 2009Now that I'm not scared to look at my responses... This one doesn't look so bad, so I'm sharing. Please do keep in mind that this was written in 2 hours, by a tired person, with tired fingers!
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Christina K. Pikas
Comps Information Retrieval (Minor)
July 20, 2009
Question F2: Design an information retrieval system for scientists that covers full-text peer-reviewed articles as well as blogs and wikis
0. Introduction
Today, scientists use more than just the peer-reviewed journal literature in their work, but our information retrieval systems such as our library research databases and…
cpikas | July 25, 2009Some of these are better than others. Some don't have nice controlled vocabularies and are a bit wonky in the free version. Nearly all of them you can get through another interface for a fee if you need more precision in searching or to export your results. (oh, as an aside - you've got the database producer who puts the whole thing together, and then you have options for interfaces. For example, for Inspec, you can pay for access via STN, DIALOG, Web of Knowledge, EbscoHost, Engineering Village - used to be FirstSearch and Ovid, too, but I don't remember if they're still offering it.…
cpikas | July 24, 2009Previously, I had a post about finding information in books using things like Google Book Search. This post talks about finding information on a topic, or more specifically, why you should start your search with a research database and more about what research databases are (like the real ones). In a post coming up, I'll give some information on some free to you research databases (the real ones).
You should start your search with a research database to be more comprehensive, to cover multiple sources and publishers, to have real searching power/precision, and because of the vocabulary…
cpikas | June 27, 2009Michael J. Kurtz of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics came to speak at MPOW at a gathering of librarians from across the larger institution (MPOW is a research lab affiliated with a large private institution). He's an astronomer but more recently he's been publishing in bibliometrics quite a bit using data from the ADS. You can review his publications using this search.
As an aside, folks outside of astro and planetary sciences might not be familiar with ADS, but it's an excellent and incredibly powerful research database. Sometimes librarians turn their nose up at it because…
cpikas | June 19, 2009I've talked about this a bit at sessions I taught at my library and also at Web Search University but it's still a favorite. Plus, you asked for posts on finding information. Oh, and one of the tools just released some updates so this is fairly timely.
This is not how to use the catalog to see if a book you want is available in your library and to get a shelf location! Also not about finding something good to read (frankly, I'm completely out of practice with reader's advisory, so can't help you there). Books are useful containers for information, data, and stuff you need to make new…
cpikas | June 16, 2009(came in late because the speaker I initially chose to see failed to show up)
A speaker from Serials Solutionâs Summon reviewed various pieces of research done recently both by LIS researchers and by big libraries. Summed up pretty well by Tenopir (he copied her graph), increasing costs, decreasing importance as a gateway for research creates a value gap for the library. Scholars view the library and its resources as reliable and authoritative, but painful to use. So they start with google, because itâs easy and then link out to our subscriptions and my never know theyâre using library…
cpikas | June 3, 2009This is the 5th of the test essays in preparation for comps.
This question was posed by my advisor. I opened it
and went, "wow." It's sort of like the perfect storm of question.
When I first finished it, I thought I did really well, but
now it seems less than completely satisfying. So here's the essay written in 2 hours, timer started prior to opening the question.
Question (IR 1)
Informal interpersonal communication is very important among
scientists. Describe a retrieval system to identify collaborators.
Include the following in your answer:
a. Knowledge representation to enhance…