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The Value of Information

Association for Information Science
Pacific Northwest Chapter
Fall Meeting
Sept. 20-21, 2002

Lewis & Clark College, Portland, OR

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

In times of economic uncertainty, both for-profit and non-profit organizations look carefully at how they use their resources. Why is information--its storage, organization and retrieval--an important resource to organizations? How can information "add value" to an educational, governmental or business enterprise? What kinds of research and projects make information more valuable to organizations? How can the value of information be distributed across the digital divide?

Friday, September 15

Negotiating and Licensing Electronic Content

Electronic content licensing workshop with enough information, tips, practical examples and expert advice to give those starting out a grounding in content negotiations and licensing practices. With this course, librarians get a fundamental grounding in how to read content contracts, negotiating skills, and best practices for licensing electronic content. Attendees gain an understanding of license terms and conditions - what they mean and how to know what the library needs. Learn how to lead your library's licensing team and to structure content licensing negotiations for success. Bring your questions and problems to this workshop for answers.

Welcome and opening remarks

1:10 - 2:00 p.m. Council Chamber, Templeton Student Center

Connecting to the Internet: The Economics of Access for Rural Public Libraries

Becky Sears Becky@gatesfoundation.org
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Americans are logging on to the Internet in ever-increasing numbers, a trend paralleled by public libraries. While 95% of public libraries offer public access to the Internet, not all connections are created equal; rural communities face a limited number of options for Internet connectivity and are often forced to chose less than desirable solutions. What is the value of Internet access to rural libraries? How do market factors and public policy influence Internet service options for rural libraries? Using an economic lens, this presentation addresses some of the challenges involved in providing rural communities with public access to the Internet.

Rebecca M. Sears is a Senior Network Specialist at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation with the Libraries Division. She is also pursuing a Master's in Public Administration from the Daniel J. Evans School of Public Affairs at the University of Washington with a focus on information and communication technologies (ICTs) and international development.

The Dirty Secret of Automated Classification.

Julie Martin, julie.martin@boeing.com
Boeing Corporation

In this talk I will discuss the benefits and limitations of automated classification, the types of auto-classification tools available, the different techniques used by these tools, and the amount of human intervention necessary to get successful results with them. I will also share the results of some of my experiments using Verity's Intelligent Classifier product as well as other products being evaluated by Boeing.

Julie Martin received her MLS in 1995 from the University of Washington. She has worked for Boeing for five years on a number of projects related to digital library development, information filtering, taxonomy and metadata schemas, and virtual reference services. Prior to her job at Boeing she worked on thesaurus development for Corbis.

Visualizing Information: Using WebTheme to Visualize Internet Search Results

Karen A. Buxton Karen.Buxton@pnl.gov
Mary Francis Lembo
Hanford Technical Library

Information visualization is an effective method for displaying large datasets in a pictorial or graphical format. The visualization aids researchers and analysts in understanding the data by evaluating the content and grouping documents around themes and concepts. With the ever-growing amount of information available on the Internet, visualization methods are needed to analyze and interpret the data. WebTheme allows users to harvest thousands of web pages and automatically organize and visualize their contents.

WebTheme is an interactive web-based tool that provides a new way to investigate and understand large volumes of HTML text-based information. It has the ability to harvest data from the World Wide Web using search terms or by following user specified URLs. WebTheme technology enables users to rapidly identify themes and concepts found among thousands of pages of text. Using the suite of WebTheme tools, the user can further explore and analyze areas of interest within a dataset. WebTheme was developed at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) for NASA as a method for generating meaningful, thematic, and interactive visualizations.

Karen A. Buxton is an Information Specialist at the Hanford Technical Library*. Karen has a Master of Science in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois. Prior to working at the Hanford Technical Library, Karen worked as Corporate Librarian for Schweitzer Engineering Labs in Pullman Washington and as a Reference Assistant at the University of Idaho Library.

Mary Frances Lembo is an Information Specialist at the Hanford Technical Library*. She received her Master in Librarianship from the University of Washington in 1995. Prior to her current position, she worked as a science reference librarian at the University of New Orleans in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Taking Stock on the Economy and the Information Industry

Susan Golden
Program Manager
Smithsonian GlobalSound

Susan Golden will speak on the impact of this volatile economy on the information industry and on the information professional. Her presentation is based on interviews conducted with a variety of participants in the industry: consultants, analysts, recruiters, students and academicians as well as practitioners from both the public and private sector.


Susan Golden joined Smithsonian Global Sound as project manager and information architect. She received her B.A. in African American studies from UC Berkeley and after forays into weaving and teaching, earned her Master's in Librarianship from the University of Washington, where she worked as a reference librarian in the Music Library cataloging the library's jazz collection. She began her library career as a children's librarian, storyteller and puppeteer and ended it as head of reference for a large business library. In 1990 she began her next venture as an entrepreneur and founded the Golden Information Group, which ultimately became a powerful advocate for the commercial applications of the Web. Though the majority of her clients were in high tech or environmental law, she concentrated on socially focused organizations such as the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. As the Web began to mature, Golden's career changed with it, and she became an information architect, helping clients such as Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard to organize and make accessible large bodies of content over the Web. Eventually she joined the staff of Hewlett-Packard to build a market research product called DeepCanyon. DeepCanyon was spun off by HP and eventually went the way of many a dot.com. Following this Golden joined Smithsonian Global Sound.

Dinner and Keynote Address

The Age of Findability

Peter Morville morville@semanticstudios.com
Semantic Studios

Peter is president and founder of Semantic Studios, an information architecture and strategy consultancy. Since 1994, he has played a major role in shaping the modern practice of information architecture design. Peter is co-author (with Louis Rosenfeld) of the best-selling book on the subject, Information Architecture for the World Wide Web , named "Best Internet Book of 1998" by Amazon and "The Most Useful Book on Web Design on the Market" by usability guru Jakob Nielsen.

Saturday, September 21, 2001

5:30 - 6:15 p.m.

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.

ERICA: A Case Study in Information Stewardship

Pam Novak pam.novak@pnl.gov
Merry Loew donna.rassat@pnl.gov
Donna Rassat merry.loew@pnl.gov
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

For a national laboratory, publications are the primary product of research and a vital business asset. At Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, an online system - the Electronic Records and Information Capture Architecture (ERICA) - was recently implemented to coordinate the pre-publication review and approval of reports, papers, and articles, and to make citations and/or full text of these documents available to the public via the Laboratory's external website. Although the original objective was to replace the paper-based approval system, it quickly became evident that ERICA was becoming a valuable repository of scientific and technical information, and that this information could be accessed and used in ways that support and influence business decisions.

This session will describe the ERICA system, its uses and benefits, and particularly the collaboration among organizations within the Laboratory that have key roles in information stewardship. The objective is to demonstrate how publication metadata can be of value to an organization's business planning activities.

Pam Novak is the manager of PNNL's Scientific and Technical Information Department, whose 140 staff provide publishing services, operate the site library, and manage the company's records. Pam holds a Masters in English Literature from the University of Virginia and a Bachelors in English from the University of Rochester. She has published on topics ranging from management to corporate web policy, and in 2000 co-authored an invited article on advanced publishing technologies and services for the Wiley Encyclopedia of Electrical and Electronics Engineering.

For the past 15 years, Merry Loew has developed, revised, and managed information for the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. For many years she wrote, edited, and disseminated hard-copy contracts and safety procedures. With the explosion of computer capabilities in the workplace, Merry transitioned many of these hard-copy procedures into electronically delivered products. More recently, she has been working with the Electronic Records and Information Capture Architecture (ERICA) system at the Laboratory to ensure that information about its scientific publications is accurately captured, stored, and properly disseminated to the public.

Donna Rassat has 15 years experience in Information Technology, developing and integrating business applications. For the past six years she has been instrumental in leading complex programs requiring responsive application development, customization of workflow, and system integration/interoperability. Scientific and technical information (STI) is the key product of a National Laboratory and the quality of data and ability to provide publicly available materials quickly is critical. Donna is the IT project manager for the rearchitecture of STI systems to streamline business processes and improve data quality; she is also assessing techniques for enabling the display of scientific notation via the web.

10-10:50 am Council Chamber, Templeton Student Center

Theasaurus Management Tools

Melissa Riesland, riesland65@yahoo.com

The more we get into “information architecture,” the more the conversation seems to turn toward thesaurus management tools. If you do not have a software engineer in your back pocket, there are actually quite a few products in the marketplace that are ready to wear and accomodating to every budget, from a couple hundred to several thousands of dollars. I will base this presentation on my own research leading up to the purchase of thesaurus management software for my workplace and a recently submitted paper to "Cataloging & Classification Quarterly." While not exhaustive, I will present representative examples of software readily available for your workplace.

Melissa Riesland graduated in 1999 from the University of Washington School of Library and Information Science. After an apprenticeship in the Microsoft Archives, she became the taxonomist for Singingfish, a multimedia search service. On the side, she helped co-found the ASIS&T Seattle Reading Group with Dana Bostrom and Vivian Bliss.

An E Journal Management Project

Mike Spalti
Salvadore Peralta
Willamette University

Ejournal management is a significant issue for libraries faced with a growing variety of content access modes and license agreements. This presentation will describe the development of an ejournal management solution that addresses the many of the critical needs of libraries and library patrons, including comprehensive journal look-up, OpenURL linking, and basic administrative tools. The goal of the project is to develop a relatively simple open source solution as an alternative to more feature-rich, pay-as-you-go vendor solutions. The system is written in perl and utilizes mysql, mod_perl, and apache. Under development during the fall of 2002, the system is scheduled to enter into production test phase in January of 2003.

Mark Dahl
Program Chair, ASIS-PNC
Lewis & Clark College, Portland, OR
dahl@lclark.edu