Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of MIS, University of Arizona / This research presents preliminary results generated from the semantic retrieval research component of the Illinois Digital Library Initiative (DLI) project. Using a variation of the automatic thesaurus generation techniques, to which we refer as the concept space approach, we aimed to create graphs of domain-specific concepts (terms) and their weighted co-occurrence relationships for all major engineering domains. Merging these concept spaces and providing traversal paths across different concept spaces could potentially help alleviate the vocabulary (difference) problem evident in large-scale information retrieval. We have experimented previously with such a technique for a smaller molecular biology domain (Worm Community System, with 10+ MBs of document collection) with encouraging results.

Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of MIS, University of Arizona / Public awareness of the Net as a critical infrastructure in the 1990s has spurred a new revolution in the technologies for information retrieval in digital libraries.

Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of MIS, University of Arizona / This chapter will focus on digital libraries, starting with a discussion of the historical visionaries, definitions, driving forces and enabling technologies and some key research issues. Also discussed will be some of the US and international digital library projects and research initiatives. Some of the emerging techniques for building large-scale digital libraries, including semantic interoperability, will be described. Finally, the conclusion will offer some future directions for digital libraries.

Poster paper / The advent of Information and communication technology has revolutionized the way information was accessed and disseminated; one of the most visible changes came in the arena of librarianship. Suddenly, the idea of easy, fingertip access to information became widely prevalent and phrases like "virtual library," "electronic library," "library without walls" and, most recently, "digital library," very popular. However, this produced a new and confusing bog of electronic "stuff" that is hard to find, hard to use, buried in restrictions, unreliable in content, and useless to researchers baffled by bad choices of material for expensive digitisation investments? Now, the question is sustaining digital libraries will require overcoming substantial uncertainties about long-term preservation, institutional commitments, and financing. AND here lies the challenge for the digital librarian!!!! Playing the balancing act between management, fast changing needs of the user community and ever changing information storage media and technologies.

This abstract is an excerpt from the Executive Summary of the Report: "The general goals for this summative evaluation study are twofold. One goal is to inform our understanding about the impact that use of project support materials (e.g., lesson plans) has on teaching. Consequently, research efforts were made to assess teachersâ use of the site and changes in their instructional strategies, if any, as the result of having the project support materials available for lesson planning and instruction. A second goal is to determine the impact of the Teachersâ Domain: Physical Science features and resource material on student learning of science as described in the National Science Education Standards in the areas of physical science content and process. Toward these ends, both descriptive and explanatory findings are reported. The researcher looked for patterns in the quantitative and qualitative data to explain the effective and ineffective aspects of the Web site. Credibility of findings were established through triangulation of methods. Communication between the evaluator and project staff took place at the outset of research in order to review developments and agree upon specific evaluation issues." The comprehensive evaluation is 111 (88 numbered) pages long and besides a summary of results also contains respondents actual comments.

This article describes a Delphi study conducted to determine factors that affect the process of routing and assigning reference questions received electronically by digital reference services, both to experts within the service and between services. Fifteen factors were determined, by expert consensus, to be important at the conclusion of this study. These fifteen factors are divided into three groups: 1) general factors, 2) factors in routing the question to an individual, and 3) factors when routing the question to another service. These factors were ranked in order of importance and grouped according to the recipient of the question. These fifteen factors need to be taken into account when automating the triage process. This article has laid out a methodology for investigating other digital reference processes so that those processes amenable to automation may be automated, and expertsâ talents and time may be best used.

Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of MIS, University of Arizona / This paper describes a content-based image retrieval digital library that supports geographical image retrieval over a testbed of 800 aerial photographs, each 25 megabytes in size. In addition, this paper also introduces a methodology to evaluate the performance of the algorithms in the prototype system. The major contributions of this paper are two. 1) We suggest an approach that incorporates various image processing techniques including Gabor filters, image enhancement, and image compression, as well as information analysis technique such as self-organizing map (SOM) into an effective large-scale geographical image retrieval system. 2) We present two experiments that evaluate the performance of the Gaborfilter- extracted features along with the corresponding similarity measure against that of human perception, addressing the lack of studies in assessing the consistency between an image representation algorithm or an image categorization method and human mental model.

This Microsoft PowerPoint presentation of 25 slides includes several pictures and quotations about and from the "Code for Classifiers: Principles governing the consistent placing of books in a system of classification" by William Stetson Merrill. Coleman briefly explores the problems of classification presented in the Code, the model of collaboration that was used to develop the principles documented in the various editions of the Code, and how the Code can be used to develop a federated classification (classifying) model for digital library organization. The discussion also makes it clear that early American library classification was not just a "mark and park" strategy for book shelving. Librarians and library educators of the time (early 1900s) were deeply interested in bibliographic classification as a solution to the many problems of knowledge organization for information retrieval.

The primary objective and functions of libraries have not changed due to computerization. Only, the tools and techniques to achieve these objectives with ease and accuracy have. In the present day the focus is on Electronic Information. Thus it is not only acquiring, sources of information but providing access to information and sharing also. With the Internet, WWW and Information explosion, identification and extraction of information resources is an essential function of all libraries and information centers. The Electronic information sources are rapidly growing and with a wide variety in form and content it takes a lot of time to get the required information. There is thus a need to organize and classify this wide spectrum of information. With this as background, the author has created a web page providing information to not only the internal sources at the Central Library, I.I.T Bombay but also links to external electronic information sources in the field Materials Science.

Research has been studied to evaluate the reliability of storage media and the reliability of a computer backup system. In this paper, we use the Continuous Time Markov Chain to model and analyze the reliability of a computer backup system. We propose a modified model from that of the Constantopoulos, Doerr and Petraki [1]. We analyze the difference, show computational results, and propose new input parameters (e.g. time to repair) for the model from our experience. Further we developed a four-copy data model to test if it fulfills the sample reliability rate set by the RLG-NARA. The modeling process can be applied to construct models for computer preservation systems using different storage media. The reliability of constructed models can be calculated so that preservation institutions can have quantitative data to decide their preservation strategies.