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Off the Beaten Track:
Information Science and Technology in the Third Millennium

Association for Information Science
Pacific Northwest Chapter
Fall Meeting
Sept. 15-16, 2000

Intel Jones Farm Campus, Hillsboro, Oregon

[Questions?] -- [Accommodations and Local Information] -- [Registration Form]

Connecting users to resources in an environment of wide-reaching and rapid change is a daunting task, particularly when the means to make the connections are themselves changing rapidly. In addition, newly emerging resources and/or established resources are available in new and interesting ways (visual, audio, hybrid, etc.). Necessity breeds invention and these times call for leadership and innovation, which takes our thinking outside established norms and delivers effective solutions to difficult problems.

Friday, September 15

Introduction to XML and related W3C standards

This workshop is designed to provide an introduction to XML and the related suite of W3C standards. The goal is to explore the various standards in enough detail to give participants a solid understanding of XML and the benefits gained from using it. The workshop begins with an introduction to XML with relevant discussion on the current status of XML and related standards, the benefits of using XML, XML documents as structured information, and the advantage of separating content from style and presentation. This is followed by an explanation on basic XML document syntax and how to use XSL/XSLT to render XML for display in a browser or other device. The workshop concludes with an exercise that illustrates the key points brought up in the above discussion in a working example.

Slides

Exercises

Exercise Answers

Welcome and opening remarks

Just Tell Me, Please, Where Can I Get the Article?

With the proliferation of print and electronic journals and numerous ways to access them, library patrons and staff, still just want to know, "Where can I get the article?" In many libraries patrons are required to check the library catalog, review a print or web-based journal list, and then search one or more full-text subscription databases in order to find out whether the library "holds" a particular article. Furthermore, once the patron actually finds where the article is, access may require use of one or more authentication schemes. What can you do when all your library user wants to know is if you have the article they are looking for?

How can we improve this process? How can journal and holdings information be consolidated and standardized for improving access? Are there efficient alternatives to maintain and update this data, yet provide pathways among the various resources?

At Pacific Lutheran University we began to address these problems by developing a web-based journal and holdings database that includes all of the library's periodicals, whether in print, microform or online. Links are given for all online resources and authentication simplified using LDAP. As resource links change, this ColdFusion-served database provides a single point for maintaining and updating links, usernames, and passwords while MARC record tags in the online catalog can remain static with links to the journal and holdings database.

Content Management with XML

With the explosion of the Internet and the growing popularity of doing business and research over the Web, organizations are finding it extremely difficult, time consuming, and expensive to manage the ever-expanding content on their Web sites. A variety of strategies and solutions using XML are available for taking control of content, preventing an overwhelming burden from additions and changes to Web sites.

Knowledge gained by analyzing web site goals, target publications, collection mechanisms, storage systems, and publishing workflow can be applied using XML. The process ensures that tags correctly and adequately describe content, that all users and programs understand the purpose of each tag, that tags can be translated to format tags when content is displayed, and that the finished design is consistent with emerging standards for XML tagging in any given industry. In addition, the process can help avoid the overly complex, incomprehensible, and tangled tag sets which XML makes so easy.

Presentation and Slides

Bringing a third dimension to IR: A review of recent developments in multidimensional display of bibliographic information

The past decade has seen the cost of computing decline to the point where robust 3D display technologies, formerly confined to expensive engineering and scientific workstation applications, have become available to mainstream PC's. Yet the current crop of information retrieval (IR) tools in the library and business information marketplace have not taken advantage of the 3D image rendering power of modern PC's, choosing to stick to two dimensional displays. That may change soon.

Researchers from several disciplines have seized the opportunity to build information retrieval (IR) tools that take advantage of advances in geographic information systems, 3D modeling, and virtual reality to display bibliographic information from large document databases. This program will review some of the more interesting results of this research. Program participants should come away with a better understanding of:

• The benefits and shortcomings of 3D IR tools that currently exist in the marketplace.
• The thrust of current research in the multidimensional display of bibliographic information.
• What to expect from development of these technologies in the next few years.

Life being so short : printed book indexes in Europe from 1450 to 1600

Isolated examples of European book indexes exist going back to the fifth century, C.E. However, the use of indexes did not flourish until the coming of the printed book in Europe around 1450, C.E. An examination of OCLC bibliographic records indicates that indexes rapidly became a common feature in books in the first 150 years of European printing. The writings of Conrad Gesner and evidence from early books in the University of Washington Special Collections provide a picture of early indexing techniques. In a period of rapid technological change, indexers explored new ways to provide easy access to information and developed techniques still in use today.

Presentation and Slides

ASIS-PNC Business Meeting

Make it happen. Is there something you would like to do or be involved in with the ASIS Pacific Northwest Chapter? This is your chance.

Dinner and Keynote Address
Helping people find content...preparing content to be found: Enabling the semantic Web

Anyone who has spent time searching for information on the Web or at a Web site knows how frustrating the experience can be. More often than not the search returns zero hits, or thousands of hits that must be further sifted manually. Tim Berners-Lee inventor of the Web and Dagobert Soergel a professor of Library and Information Science share a vision for the future that they call the semantic Web or SemWeb. This vision provides the lingua franca--XML, and the Rosetta Stone--DTDs; but the Holy Grail--accurate content automatically processed so that it can be easily found, remains out of reach. Institutions that are cultural authorities have a unique opportunity to be major players in transforming content roulette into successful search experiences. This talk is about the concept of the semantic Web, how it is being built, how organizations can participate in building it, and how it is transforming the Web user experience today and will continue to transform it in the future.

Saturday, September 16, 2000

Measuring information quality: databases, e-publishing and the WWW

An outline of commonly described dimensions and metrics of information quality. Contexts for which information quality measurement is important include data warehousing and mining, provision of legal information, and use of general information sources on the internet, especially when retrieval is mediated by web search tools. Included will be techniques for measuring information quality in controlled environments, as well as a look at prospects for doing the same with general sources on the internet.

Relationships and data : extending the concepts of RDF

Resource Description Framework (RDF) has at its core, the concept of paired entities held together by a relationship. In RDF, this concept is applied to information resources and descriptions of them, however it has potential for applications far beyond such resources. Indeed, much of the potential is because entity-relationship-entity triples are oftentimes direct representations of real-world situations. By linking such triples together, infinitely extensible chains and networks of chains can be created which accurately record complex, multi-dimensional realities. Ironically enough, these complex webs can be captured, recorded, and manipulated in very simple data structures; which themselves have the potential to be realized in a variety of platforms and applications.

Presentation

Slides, Andrew Grove

Slides, John Begley

Slides, Vivian Bliss

Using PHP to build dynamic web sites

PHP is a server-side scripting language similar to Microsoft Active Server pages or Cold Fusion pages. It is becoming increasingly popular among web developers because of its flexibility and because the software needed to run it is free. In this presentation, I'll explain how you can use PHP to write dynamic web pages such as an ILL request form that retains user-submitted data across multiple requests. I'll also discuss using PHP to provide web-access to database content in an SQL database.

Presentation and Slides

XML(ibraries)

Will XML supplant MARC for cataloging? Is it the 'killer app' that digital libraries need to deploy successfully? What does the future look like for the use of XML in libraries and information centers? We'll look at a handful of current efforts in a variety of settings to get a sense of this technology moving -- and fitting -- into libraries.

Andrew Grove
Program Chair, ASIS-PNC
Microsoft Corporation Redmond, WA
andgro@microsoft.com