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).

This is a presentation (15) slides at the 2005 ASIS&T Annual Meeting, Charlotte, N.C. on October 31, session on Collaboration in Digital Libraries: Luminous Ideas from Health Informatics, Academic Libraries, and Historical Archives (Organizer and Moderator: Deborah Swain).

A study of the properties of virtual laboratories to design interactivity metrics for an engineering digital library are described. An Interactive Checklist to help select the best resources for educational context and describe them objectively is demonstrated. Virtual laboratories are one important genre of interactive multimedia objects. Interactivities are complex objects and new digital genres or forms, with no print equivalent. A prototypical example of an interactive is the 3-d simulation virtual laboratory in GROW (Budhu & Coleman, 2002). This type of virtual laboratory provides links to prerequisite material, supplementary readings, uses multimedia formats, and different types of user interaction to motivate, engage, challenge, facilitate, and test learning. It has conceptual and physical components that can be objectively identified on which metrics for interactivity can be developed. Interactivity type and interactivity level are elements for resource description in educational metadata frameworks such as the IEEE LOM (2004). However, interactivity is hard to describe in a way that is useful as an access point or for making relevancy choices about resources in educational tasks such as teaching and learning and hence the need for objective measures. The currently available vocabularies for interactivity type are inadequate and include: active, expositive, mixed, and undefined. Similarly the values for interactivity level are equally limited and ambiguous: very low, low, medium, high, very high. The Interactive Checklist, tested with GROW, allows the metadata creator and the collection developer to easily and quantitatively measure interactivity and assign the corresponding level to learning resources of all types.

This presentation at the ASIST 2005 Annual Meeting had the following objectives: 1) Discuss methodologies and measures of effectiveness that, in our experience, mainly in the TREC Interactive track, have proven successful in painting an accurate picture of the user interaction when seeking information. Classify the measures and discuss the contexts when they can be used. 2) Attempt to provide guidelines as to which measures are appropriate in certain conditions.

This is a presentation (18 slides) at the 2005 ASIS&T Annual Meeting session on Collaboration in Digital Libraries: Luminous Ideas from Health Informatics, Academic Libraries, and Historical Archives.

Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of MIS, University of Arizona / Digital libraries serving multimedia information that may be accessed in terms of geographic content and relationships are creating special challenges and opportunities for networked information systems. An especially challenging research issue concerning collections of geo-referenced information relates to the development of techniques supporting geographic information retrieval (GIR) that is both fuzzy and concept-based. Viewing the meta-information environment of a digital library as a heterogeneous set of services that support users in terms of GIR, we define a geographic knowledge representation system (GKRS) in terms of a core set of services of the meta-information environment that is required in supporting concept-based access to collections of geospatial information. In this paper, we describe an architecture for a GKRS and its implementation in terms of a prototype system. Our GKRS architecture loosely couples a variety of multimedia knowledge sources that are in part represented in terms of the semantic network and neural network representations developed in artificial intelligence research. Both textual analysis and image processing techniques are employed in creating these textual and iconic geographcal knowledge structures. The GKRS also employs spreading activation algorithms in support of concept-based knowledge retrieval. The- paper describes implementational details of several of the components of the GKRS as well as discussing both the lessons learned from, and future directions of, our research.

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.

This 130-page guide is a primer (including tools and resources) for planning and evaluating health information programs. It was developed by the National Network of Libraries of Medicine, Pacific Northwest Region and the National Library of Medicine.

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.

This is a poster titled "DLIST: Opening LIS Research and Practice". It was presented at the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) Annual Meeting, Chicago, Illinois, November 2004. The Educational Impact and Evaluation Standing Committee (EIESC) of the NSDL is using DLIST to build an evaluation materials (evaluation of digital libraries) clearinghouse. The poster discusses the DLIST goal to connect LIS research, which is done by diverse disciplinary communities, with practice, both digital library developers as well as librarians. Techncal details about DLIST together with the processs of deposit and metadata creation are described.