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Bridging the Gap:
Innovative Approaches to Providing Information Services

Association for Information Science
Pacific Northwest Chapter
Fall Meeting
Sept. 17-18, 1999

Microsoft Headquarters, Redmond, Washington

[Questions?] -- [Directions and parking] -- [Accommodations] -- [Registration Form]

Note: This schedule is subject to change

Friday, September 17

Workshop

Metadata for a Corporate Intranet

This workshop will focus on the practical aspects of using metadata in an intranet environment. Based upon her article, which appeared in the January 1999 issue of Online magazine, Ms. Doran will discuss how a locally designed metadata scheme was successfully implemented on the Weyerhaeuser corporate intranet. She will then lead workshop participants in a discussion of issues such as: building support for metadata within your organization, tailoring metadata to your organization's needs, building and maintaining a local thesaurus, and building metadata tools and getting people to use them. By attending this workshop, participants will gain a clearer understanding of the benefits and tasks involved in using metadata and learn about approaches to successfully introducing and managing metadata within an organizational context.

Kelly Doran received her MLS from the University of Washington in 1991 and started work at the Weyerhaeuser Technical Library the same year. She was an early champion of the Internet and of intranet development within Weyerhaeuser: her activities included creating a series of Internet user guides, maintaining the library's web page, and helping to sponsor and teach Internet training courses. Her responsibilities currently include designing templates for the library's intranet-accessible catalog, administrating the library's electronic journals, and writing customized user guides for networked databases.

Welcome and opening remarks

Taking It To the Web: Library Instruction for the 21st Century

As the electronic environment of the library becomes more and more pervasive, library instruction becomes increasingly necessary. Information resources constantly change and access to materials continues to broaden. Where once a freshman orientation class or two would generally suffice in teaching most students how to use the library throughout their college education, today's library instruction requires much more--especially in upper division courses.

This presentation describes how to utilize the Internet to expand the library instruction program by migrating material to the Web. It will focus on the following:

1. Why instruction needs to be Web-based
2. Finding a purpose and a plan
3. Organizing the information
4. Researching the material that needs to be included
5. Posting handouts, self-paced assignment, and other types of instruction
6. Working and teaching with the web-based materials
7. Evaluating what has been done
8. Set about making improvements

Fluency with Information Technology: Collaborating to meet the challenge

Find out about new partnerships that support the effective use of technology in teaching and learning for faculty and students at the University of Washington. UWired, a five-year-old collaboration supporting technology in education joins with the University Libraries, School of Library and Information Science, and the department of Computer Science and Engineering to design project-based integration of information and computer literacy skills with discipline specific concepts and capabilities. Hear about effective collaborative spaces created at the Odegaard Undergraduate Library to help foster teaching and training with technology and provide a support infrastructure for faculty students and librarians. Highlighting a new support tool, Catalyst, a task-based collection of guides and information for teaching with technology (http://depts.washington.edu/catalyst), UWired and the University Libraries (http://www.lib.washington.edu/) will describe what we have learned over the past year, how we have measured success, expanded the goals, and made the strategic decisions that have allowed campus-wide support for teaching with new technologies.

New Directions in Information Retrieval and Management

This talk will present an overview of new directions in information retrieval and management being studied at Microsoft Research. I'll begin by describing enhancements to core representation and matching algorithms based on natural language technologies, and probabalistic models. In addition, I'll take a step back from the core matching algorithms and look at other sources of information that can fruitfully be brought to bear to improve information access in a variety of applications. Important sources include: a) information about the world of objects (domain modeling); b) information about the user (user modeling); and c) improved interactive interfaces for information access and management.

Delivering Government Information Virtually: The GILS Movement Among the States

States are making progress in delivering local and state government information virtually. Find out how Washington State's Government Information Locator Service (WAGILS) became a national leader and a model program whose methodology and design is being adopted by the states of Oregon, New Hampshire, Illinois, New Mexico. Learn about the collaborative movement involving sixteen states to create an interoperable national GILS.

Washington State's Government Information Locator Service (WAGILS) is a program and a web search engine, Find-It! WashingtonTM, that offers easy and powerful access to state and local government information and services. The program provides services to participating governments in the form of workshops, consultation, and training in the development of content for web delivery.

WAGILS applies the principles of information organization found in librarianship to the world of web publishing, using a novel approach to creatively embed a metadata index in Web pages to improve discovery and minimize effort for citizens. The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) has funded an effort to disseminate the WAGILS model in four states. Through the IMLS project more than sixteen states are engaged in an effort to collaborate in the development of GILS efforts throughout the nation.

ASIS-PNC Business Meeting

Come learn how you can become more involved in ASIS PNC and advance information science in the Pacific Northwest

Buffet Dinner and Keynote Address

Saturday, September 18

Toward More Seamless User Authentication: Implementing LDAP for Single-Password Access to Campus Resources

Providing on and off-campus access to protected electronic resources presents a number of challenges for user authentication. How do we identify, organize, and access these resources as well as integrate them among other non-authenticated resources? Can we design systems that interface effectively with diverse vendor authentication requirements and interfaces?

The need to restrict access to web-based resources provided the impetus to implement a central directory solution at Pacific Lutheran University. We use the Netscape LDAP Directory Server because it integrates well with Netscape's Enterprise Server, powering our main web site at http://www.plu.edu/. Our users can access e-mail, calendar accounts, licensed databases, and electronic reserves, all with a single password. The directory server also provides us with a net-accessible look-up for student and personnel e-mail addresses.

This presentation will focus on access problems and implementation of LDAP authentication. Using LDAP authentication required and promoted collaboration among Information Resources personnel in Networking, Library Systems, User Services, Reference Services, and Web Development for system development, implementation, and ongoing support.

Cluster Analysis of Web Categories

Users of text-based systems have several navigation strategies depending on a number of criteria (Wickens, C. D., 1992). Bates (1998) has implicated "folk classifications", naturally preferred terminology sets among various cultures, as a specific problem in information systems. Chen (1994) has called the mismatch between information retrieval system indexing and user terminology use, "the vocabulary problem". A website hyperlink structure: hyperlink topology; content behind hyperlinks; how narrowly or broadly service categories are defined; the choice of terminology and synonyms; explanatory phrasing; etc. highlights the consequences of the word and classification studies above. These choices have great consequences on the navigation usability of a website.

The challenge for web-site design teams is to apply the above findings in the web-site design process. Specifically, design teams need to choose that terminology which will enhance and facilitate self-directed discovery within a given hypertext link structure. This report describes how cluster analysis techniques can help structure web-site service categories so that targeted users can navigate more easily. Furthermore, it provides a method for continuing improvement of navigation usability of a hyperlink content structure.

Providing Web Access to a Local and Regional News Index

Because of the lack of local and region-specific coverage in news databases (i.e., Lexis-Nexis) the Libraries at Montana State University index Montana-related stories in two newspapers. In order to improve patron access to the index, the database has been transitioned from a flat-file and print index, to a Web-accessible relational database (in Microsoft Access), served via Cold Fusion Web Application Server.

The public is now able to browse and search subjects, search headlines, and limit searches by date or newspaper. This change is due in part to the functionality provided by a relational database, but also to the full-text searching capacity of the Verity search engine, and quick development provided by Cold Fusion.

This transition has dramatically improved access to information. In the process, we have encountered a number of issues that are frequently characteristic of applications of technology to improve services. In my presentation I will focus on the implementation of the newspaper index as it relates to the following topics, and the functionality afforded by moving the index to an Access and Cold Fusion application:

1. training of staff involved in the production of the Access database and Cold Fusion templates, and in data entry;
2. database design and clean-up of data;
3. ongoing revisions of data and/or Web components based on new comprehensions of software capabilities and user needs;
4. delineating areas of responsibility in a team-based environment, relating to data integrity, site design, features and functionality, and technical support.

Bridging the training gap between the virtual corporate library and real-life remote end users: the Intel Library's new web-based training for INSPEC

This presentation will look at "bridging the training gap" between a virtual corporate library and its remote end user employees. Our premise is that remote end user training is vital to ensuring that the corporation's employees value and use the virtual library's information resources. Librarians, as creators of the virtual library, face a challenge to develop training methods for remote end users which enable them to use electronic products effectively and efficiently, creating a return on investment for the corporation. This presentation will look at how the Intel Library partnered with SilverPlatter Inc. to build a new training strategy and Shockwave-based tutorial tool for remote end user training on the web-based INSPEC WebSPIRS product. The authors review Intel's corporate structure, how the Intel Library deploys electronic products, and the training challenges encountered with purchased electronic products. We then describe the process we used to reach a decision about exploring new training strategies for Intel's remote end users. We explain the training strategy we chose, and the tool that has been developed from that strategy.