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Reviews why it is important to search blogs for competitive intelligence, reputation management, and brand image management. Describes the structure of blogs and how to format searches in several search engines to effectively retrieve this information.

Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of MIS, University of Arizona / Information science researchers have recently turned to new artificial intelligence-based inductive learning techniques including neural networks, symbolic learning and genetic algorithms. An overview of the new techniques and their usage in information science research is provided. The algorithms adopted for a hybrid genetic algorithms and neural nets based system, called GANNET, are presented. GANNET performed concept (keyword) optimization for user-selected documents during information retrieval using the genetic algorithms. It then used the optimized concepts to perform concept exploration in a large network of related concepts through the Hopfield net parallel relaxation procedure. Based on a test collection of about 3,000 articles from DIALOG and an automatically created thesaurus, and using Jaccard's score as a performance measure, the experiment showed that GANNET improved the Jaccard's scores by about 50% and helped identify the underlying concepts that best describe the user-selected documents.

Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of MIS, University of Arizona / Crime and police report information is rapidly migrating from paper records to automated records management databases. Most mid and large sized police agencies have such systems that provide access to information by their own personnel, but lack any efficient manner by which to provide that information to other agencies. Criminals show no regard for jurisdictional boundaries and in fact take advantage of the lack of communication across jurisdictions. Federal standards initiatives such as the National Incident Based Reporting System (NIBRS, US Department of Justice 1998), are attempting to provide reporting standards to police agencies to facilitate future reporting and information sharing among agencies as these electronic reporting systems become more widespread. We integrated platform-independence, stability, scalability, and an intuitive graphical user interface to develop the COPLINK system, which is currently being deployed at Tucson Police Department (TPD). User evaluations of the application allowed us to study the impact of COPLINK on law enforcement personnel as well as to identify requirements for improving the system and extending the project. We are currently in the process of extending the functionality of COPLINK in several areas. These include textual analysis, collaboration, visualization and geo-mapping.

Poster paper / The latest developments in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have made the concept "Libraries without walls" into a practical reality. This has posed several challenges to the information work force and the information users. At the same time, we have noticed the issues related to the information overload and information quality. At this juncture, efforts are strengthening to develop means to persuade and equip the users and information specialists to achieve maximum efficiency in information services. It was observed that one of the important reasons for the under utilization of electronic information is the lack of requisite level of working knowledge and consumption skills among customers and information intermediaries (Sridhar, 1997). To improve the situation, the conventional user education programmes need be redefined and reengineered, to be it more technology oriented. It should be designed in such a way to provide confidence to the user in locating desired information (Francis, 2005).

Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of MIS, University of Arizona / As in many other applications, the rapid proliferation and unrestricted Web-based publishing of health-related content have made finding pertinent and useful healthcare information increasingly difficult. Although the development of healthcare information retrieval systems such as medical search engines and peer-reviewed medical Web directories has helped alleviate this information and cognitive overload problem, the effectiveness of these systems has been limited by low search precision, poor presentation of search results, and the required user search effort. To address these challenges, we have developed a domain-specific meta-search tool called Cancer Spider. By leveraging post-retrieval document clustering techniques, this system aids users in querying multiple medical data sources to gain an overview of the retrieved documents and locating answers of high quality to a wide spectrum of health questions. The system presents the retrieved documents to users in two different views: (1) Web pages organized by a list of key phrases, and (2) Web pages clustered into regions discussing different topics on a two-dimensional map (self-organizing map). In this paper, we present the major components of the Cancer Spider system and a user evaluation study designed to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach. Initial results comparing Cancer Spider with NLM Gateway, a premium medical search site, have shown that they achieved comparable performances measured by precision, recall, and F-measure. Cancer Spider required less user searching time, fewer documents that need to be browsed, and less user effort.

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The Institute for Scientific Information's (ISI) citation databases have been used for decades as a starting point and often as the only tools for locating citations and/or conducting citation analyses. ISI databases (or Web of Science [WoS]), however, may no longer be sufficient because new databases and tools that allow citation searching are now available. Using citations to the work of 25 library and information science faculty members as a case study, this paper examines the effects of using Scopus and Google Scholar (GS) on the citation counts and rankings of scholars as measured by WoS. Overall, more than 10,000 citing and purportedly citing documents were examined. Results show that Scopus significantly alters the relative ranking of those scholars that appear in the middle of the rankings and that GS stands out in its coverage of conference proceedings as well as international, non-English language journals. The use of Scopus and GS, in addition to WoS, helps reveal a more accurate and comprehensive picture of the scholarly impact of authors. WoS data took about 100 hours of collecting and processing time, Scopus consumed 200 hours, and GS a grueling 3,000 hours.

This is an ALISE juried paper presented on Thursday, January 13, 2005 in Session 5.3, LIS Course Content & Instructional Issues (Juried Papers), of the 2005 ALISE Conference, Boston, MA. The goal of this study was to gain an understanding of the literature used in generalist search education in LIS programs.