Paper presented in ICoLIS 2007 at Malaysia / The paper discusses the concept of intellectual repository (IR) its need, importance,benefits, critical issues, major problems in establishment & maintenance of IR, role of librarians, intellectual society, academic institutions and the government. It also gives an overview of Intellectual Repository (IR) initiatives taken in the institutions of higher learning in Indian scenario.

This is a forthcoming panel at ASIS&T AM 2006, Nov. 6, 2006 (1:30 - 3:30 pm). Presenters: Donald Kraft, Louisiana State University & Editor, JASIST; Edie Rasmussen, University of British Columbia, Samantha Hastings, University of South Carolina & Editor, ASIS&T Monograph Series; and Anita Coleman, University of Arizona and Editor, dLIST. Sponsor: SIG DL. The goal of the panel is to explore the concept of the commons by framing it in the context of scholarly communication while also honing our understandings about digital libraries and repositories as technologies and socio-cultural artifacts. Panel members will uncover the pros and cons of the commons for LIS research and scholarly communication by describing the cognate and competing extant information realities. Edie Rasmussen will discuss the role of digital libraries in the commons. Anita Coleman, dLIST editor, the first open access archive for the information sciences will present her latest research about open access archives and the commons. Donald Kraft, Editor-in-chief of JASIST, will share his experiences editing a peer-reviewed ISI-ranked journal. Samantha Hastings, editor of ASIS&T monographs will share book publishing plans and concerns. This document contains brief overviews of the panel presentations together with the questions of each presenter for the audience/other panelists.

Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of MIS, University of Arizona / In this paper we describe MedTextus, an online medical search portal with dynamic search and browse tools. To search for information, MedTextus lets users request synonyms and related terms specifically tailored to their query. A mapping algorithm dynamically builds the query context based on the UMLS ontology and then selects thesaurus terms that fit this context. Users can add these terms to their query and meta-search five medical databases. To facilitate browsing, the search results can be reviewed as a list of documents per database, as a set of folders into which all the documents are automatically categorized based on their content, and as a map that is built on the fly. We designed a user study to compare these dynamic support tools with the static query support of NLM Gateway and report on initial results for the search task. The users used NLM Gateway more effectively, but used MedTextus more efficiently and preferred its query formation tools.

National Science Digital Library (NSDL) projects were briefly surveyed to find out if they were submitting metadata records to OCLC. The responses of the projects are given in this report. iLumina is the only library sending item-level records for all resources to both NSDL and OCLC; although, it appears that the Alsos Digital Library for Nuclear Issues and the Animal Diversity Web have entered a single Collection Record into OCLC.

Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of MIS, University of Arizona / Research shows that recommendations comprise a valuable service for users of a digital library [11]. While most existing recommender systems rely either on a content-based approach or a collaborative approach to make recommendations, there is potential to improve recommendation quality by using a combination of both approaches (a hybrid approach). In this paper, we report how we tested the idea of using a graph-based recommender system that naturally combines the content-based and collaborative approaches. Due to the similarity between our problem and a concept retrieval task, a Hopfield net algorithm was used to exploit high-degree book-book, useruser and book-user associations. Sample hold-out testing and preliminary subject testing were conducted to evaluate the system, by which it was found that the system gained improvement with respect to both precision and recall by combining content-based and collaborative approaches. However, no significant improvement was observed by exploiting high-degree associations.

Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of MIS, University of Arizona / The Digital Libraries Initiative (DLI) project at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) was one of six sponsored by the NSF, DARPA, and NASA from 1994 through 1998. Our goal was to develop widely usable Web technology to effectively search technical documents on the Internet. We concentrated on building the experimental Illinois DLI Testbed with tens of thousands of full-text journal articles from physics, engineering, and computer science, and on making these articles available over the Internet before they are available in print. Our DLI Testbed used document structure to provide federated search across publisher collections, by merging diverse tags from multiple publishers into a single uniform collection. Our sociology research evaluated the usage of the DLI Testbed by more than a thousand UIUC faculty and students. Our technology research moved beyond document structure to document semantics, testing contextual indexing of document content on millions of documents.

The metadata elements needed to allow specialist users to find, identify, select, and obtain the resources they need and to navigate the web of relationships among them do not necessarily match the elements and rules for bibliographic cataloging of materials traditionally held by libraries. This paper will draw on experience gathering together metadata from heterogeneous sources for American Memory, particularly for the collections digitized and cataloged at other institutions through the LC/Ameritech competition. It will also reflect on several initiatives to develop rich structured metadata schemes for specific domains and others to find simple approaches to support resource discovery across domains. Trends and commonalities will be identified and influences among metadata schemes highlighted.

This is a presentation (25 slides) at the ASIS&T Annual Meeting in Charlotte, NC in the session on Progress and Design in the Evaluation of Digital Libraries: Implications for Research and Education (session moderator: Kyung-Sun Kim).

Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of MIS, University of Arizona / As part of the ongoing Illinois Digital Library Initiative project, this paper presents the Java Search Agent Workshop (JSAW), a testbed designed for Java-based information searching. Based on artificial intelligence, neural networks, and G-Search, we implemented several search methods in Java to demonstrate their feasibility in various database, Internet, Intranet, and digital library search tasks. In addition to detailing our design rationale and implementation status, we present several sample Java implementations including a best first search spider and G-Search spider for Internet searching, and a Hopfield neural network based visualizer for database searching. Lessons learned and future directions are also presented.

The scenario planning method is used to explore several possible futures for digital reference services. Using two dimensions - funding sources and automation - four different scenarios are developed. Common needs across all four scenarios drive a discussion of both current and future research needs, and are used to position all components from this digital reference research agenda book in a common context.