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.

In recent years, evolutionary order has been used as the favored mode of determining class sequence by classificationists using integrative levels as a theoretical framework for classification design. Although current advocates of evolutionary order are based in Europe, use of the concept in library and information science (LIS) can be traced back to two North American pioneers in classification theory, C. A. Cutter (1837â 1903) and E. C. Richardson (1860â 1939). Working in the heyday of evolutionism and influenced by the developmental classifications of the sciences of Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer, Cutter and Richardson introduced evolutionary order as an explicit principle into LIS classification theory, defining it as encompassing a conceptual progression from the general to the specific, the simple to the complex, and the past to the present. This idea proved influential, being appropriated by later theoreticians like H. E. Bliss; it also reinforced the realist tendency of early LIS classification theory. However, for Cutter and Richardson, application of evolutionary order to bibliothecal classifications proved problematic. Cutter applied the concept inconsistently; Richardson viewed it as theoretically ideal, but subject to so many exceptions for pragmatic reasons that it could not be attained in practice. Cutterâ s and Richardsonâ s use of evolutionary order reveals the tension between enunciating a principle of classificatory ordering in theory and applying it in practice.

A National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC) has been established in India for quality and excellence in higher education. NAAC has developed set of objective indicators for the library, as it is the fulcrum of support for the community of academic and research pursuits. This has resulted in a general consensus for rising demands for evaluation and accountability of academic and research librar-ies to develop performance evaluation and measure service quality. For this study, a total of 1200 questionnaires were distributed to the user community of ten university libraries of Karnataka, India, of which 768 (64%) were duly received from students, research scholars and faculty members. The quality dimensions in the light of SERVQUAL viz., Reliability, Responsiveness, Assurance, Access, Communication, Tangibles, Empathy and Security have been applied and the results indicate that the service quality dimensions of reliability, responsiveness, assurance, access, communication and tangibles applied to university libraries in Karnataka are found to be satisfactory to a little extent based on the scale techniques. The study suggests several areas for future research and for collaboration among li-brary managers, educational administrators, scholars and measurement theorists towards improving the performance of library and information system in India to meet the high standards of service quality in libraries to serve the users with utmost care and diligence.

This paper outlines three information organization frameworks: library classification, social tagging, and boundary infrastructures. It then outlines functionality of these frameworks. The paper takes a neo-pragmatic approach. The paper finds that these frameworks are complementary, and by understanding the differences and similarities that obtain between them, researchers and developers can begin to craft a vocabulary of evaluation. |||| Cet article présente trois cadres dâ organisation de lâ information : la classification des bibliothèques, lâ étiquetage social et les infrastructures frontières. Cet article souligne les différentes fonctionnalités de ces trois cadres. Une approche néo-pragmatique est utilisée. Les résultats indiquent que ces cadres sont complémentaires et que par la compréhension des différences et des similarités qui existent entre eux, les chercheurs et les développeurs peuvent commencer à créer un vocabulaire pour lâ évaluation.

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.

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 study evaluates the level of adherence to professional guidelines by virtual (e-mail) reference services. These professional guidelines are set up as standards to assure service quality; however, studies of virtual reference effectiveness rarely utilize these standards to measure reference success. This study evaluates and compares the level of adherence to two sets of professional guidelines that have been published by the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA) and the American Library Association (ALA) Reference and User Services Association (RUSA). Analysis of 324 transactions from 54 libraries showed: 1) low levels of adherence to both sets of guidelines; 2) varied levels of adherence based on request types and user names on both sets of guidelines; 3) variation in institutional rank when different sets of guidelines were utilized; 4) no correlation between user satisfaction and adherence to either set of guidelines. The implications of this study for future research and practice lie not only in its provision of a systematic way to analyze transactions in light of the ideal professional standards, but also in providing an empirical benchmark for virtual reference services evaluation.

Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of MIS, University of Arizona / In this era of the Internet and the World Wide Web, the long-time topic of digital libraries has suddenly become white hot. As the Internet expands, particularly the WWW, more people are recognizing the need to search indexed collections. Digital library research projects thus have a common theme of bringing search to the Net. This is why the US government made digital libraries the flagship research effort for the National Information Infrastructure (NII), which seeks to bring the highways of knowledge to every American. As a result, the four-year, multiagency DLI was funded with roughly $1 million per year for each project (see the "Agency perspectives" sidebar). Six projects (chosen from 73 proposals) are involved in the DLI, which is sponsored by the National Science Foundation, Advanced Research Projects Agency, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. This issue of Computer includes project reports from these six university sites: Carnegie Mellon University, University of California at Berkeley, University of California at Santa Barbara, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of Michigan, and Stanford University.

Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of MIS, University of Arizona / The NSF/DARPA/NASA Digital Libraries Initiative (DLI) project at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), 1994-1998, had the goal of developing widely usable Web technology to effectively search technical documents on the Internet. The DLI testbed focused on using the document structure to provide federated searches across publisher collections. Our sociology research included the evaluation of its effectiveness under use by over 1,000 UIUC faculty and students, a user community an order of magnitude bigger than the last generation of research projects centered on searching scientific literature. Our technology research developed indexing of the contents of text documents to enable a federated search across multiple sources, testing this on millions of documents for semantic federation. This article will discuss the achievements and difficulties we experienced over the past four years.

This conceptual piece presents a framework to aid libraries in gaining a more thorough and holistic understanding of their users and services. Through a presentation of the history of library evaluation, a measurement matrix is developed that demonstrates the relationship between the topics and perspectives of measurement. These measurements are then combined through evaluation criteria, and then different participants in the library system view those criteria for decision-making. By implementing this framework for holistic measurement and cumulative evaluation, library evaluators can gain a more holistic knowledge of the library system and library administrators can be better informed for their decision-making processes.