Journal of the American Society for Information Science (JASIS) -- Table of Contents

Contributed by
Richard Hill
American Society for Information Science
Silver Spring, Maryland, USA
[email protected]

VOLUME 50, NUMBER 14 and VOLUME 51, NUMBER 1

CONTENTS for Volume 50, Number 14

Editorial

• In This Issue
  Bert R. Boyce
  In this issue, the Perspectives articles are introduced by the guest editor. Here we cover the three research papers included. They are quite diverse and include a statistical language study, a historical look at indirect referencing, and a user study of relevance criteria. We begin with the relevance study by Hirsh.

Research

• Children's Relevance Criteria and Information Seeking on Electronic Resources
  Sandra G. Hirsch

  Ten fifth-grade students were randomly selected from a class required to find three sources of information on a sports figure for a class report. They were interviewed after selection of a figure and during their research, which was conducted at home and in both the school and public libraries. They were also observed carrying out searches on the school's computers. Students were asked what they were doing and why. A second interview was carried out during the third week of the information-gathering process. Results are an analysis of field notes and transcripts of recordings. Students were able to articulate their relevance criteria and used titles, notes fields, abstracts, Internet summaries, and skimming techniques to evaluate the initial relevance of material retrieved. Topicality is the prime criterion in textual material. Novelty accounted for 15% of the decisions, authority for only 2%. Being interesting was the prime criteria for graphic material, and accounted for 10% of textual decisions. Peer interest was also a noticeable criteria at 7% for text and 10% for graphics. The use of topicality as a criteria early in the process gives way somewhat to the interesting criteria in the second interview.

• Indirect-Collective Referencing (ICR): Life Course, Nature, and Importance of a Special Kind of Scientific Referencing
  Endre Szava-Kovats

  A longitudinal sample was utilized by Szava-Kovats to review 100 years of The Physical Review, yielding 4,200 papers and 84,000 formal references. If such references contain phrases like "and references cited therein," or "and references therein," they are considered to be instances of Indirect-collective referencing (ICR). A separate review of early issues shows a possible occurrence in 1897, but the first clear occurrence in 1901. The IRC phenomena grows steadily over the century and faster than the growth of papers themselves. From a recent issue, 4 of 19 papers exhibiting ICR were chosen and traced. The number of occurrences is 40% larger than the total references normally available for citation indexing.

• Computer and Natural Language Texts--A Comparison Based on Long-RangeCorrelations
  Peter Kokol, Vili Podgorelec, Milan Zorman, Tatjana Kokol, and Tatjana Njivar

  Long-range correlation (LRC) is based upon a generalization of entropy. The power, alpha, of the distance between two points on the x-axis in a random walk model, characterizes the differences between texts. Using 20 works each in English, German, and Slovenian, and 20 computer programs in each of C++, Pascal, and FORTRAN, Kokol, Podgorelec, Zorman, Kokol, and Njivar find mean values of alpha for the texts to be close to 0.5, but the mean values for the programming languages are significantly higher. The long-range power law appears to apply to both.

Perspectives on Copyright and Fair-use Guidelines for Education and Libraries

[From the acknowledgment: I also extend my thanks to Lois Lunin and her colleagues at John Wiley & Sons, Inc. They expressed an early interest in publishing these essays, continued to push us when the project needed additional motivation, and they kindly cooperated in permitting the authors to enter into a most extraordinary agreement for these essays. The fundamental objective of these essays is to assist decision makers at libraries and educational institutions throughout the country, who may be struggling with the question of whether the CONFU guidelines on fair use may be appropriate standards for local policies and practices. We hope that these essays will assist with those decisions, and promote discussion of these issues. To that end, the agreement with John Wiley & Sons, Inc. allows the publisher to retain the copyright to these works, but this published version includes the statement that they may be reproduced and distributed by nonprofit educational institutions and libraries. We hope that this permission will allow the articles to be widely shared at colleges and universities and at libraries to increase awareness of copyright and to help those institutions make more informed decisions with respect to fair use.]

• Introduction and Overview
  Kenneth D. Crews

  The articles in this collection grew out of a series of presentations delivered in April 1997 at a "Town Meeting on Fair Use, Education, and Libraries" held on the campus of Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. That event was one of a series of Town Meetings convened around the country to discuss the development of "fair-use guidelines" by the Conference on Fair Use (CONFU). The need for debate about the meaning of fair use and the appropriateness of fair-use guidelines was vividly clear at the Town Meeting, and is demonstrated repeatedly in this collection of essays.

  Because these articles are based on conference presentations, they often bridge the gap between the formality of a published study and the informality of the original presentations in a relaxed setting open to broad-based discussion and debate. Frequent readers of JASIS will be struck by the lack of scientific analysis present in these articles.

  Much of the debate over copyright law and its implications is too often based on experiential evidence, anecdotes, and individual perceptions of the relationship between the law and organizational objectives. These articles and all of the CONFU negotiations are unquestionably built on such "unscientific" processes rather than empirical studies of causal relationships. These articles, therefore, reveal, for better or for worse, that much of the debate over copyright is not yet in the realm of scientific inquiry. These articles also reveal a wealth of opportunity for future research questions.

• CONFU-sed: Security, Safe Harbors, and Fair-Use Guidelines
  Dwayne K. Buttler

  The first essay by Buttler (1999) examines the foundation of fair-use law and early fair-use guidelines. It also explores the origins of the Conference on Fair Use, and the call to build on the past with an understanding of fair use for newer technologies. At the time of the Town Meeting, in April 1997, the direction of CONFU was taking clear shape, and the participants understood well the nature of the forthcoming guidelines that would appear in a CONFU report later that year (CONFU, 1997). Indeed, events had become sufficiently crystallized that the "final" CONFU Report (CONFU, 1998) includes guidelines that differ little from the proposed guidelines that were debated in early 1997.

• What's Right About Fair-Use Guidelines for the Academic Community?
  Mary Levering

  Levering urges the academic community to experiment with the guidelines and give them a chance, rather than rejecting them before implementation.

• What's Wrong With Fair-Use Guidelines for the Academic Community?
  Kenneth Frazier

  Frazier makes clear that he does not oppose all possible guidelines, but he articulates serious concerns about the interpretations of fair use that emerged from the CONFU process.

[The next four essays articulate views about various guidelines on the subjects of multimedia development, the making and archiving of digital images, transmissions of material in distance learning, electronic-reserve systems, and interlibrary loans. Of all the CONFU guidelines, the multimedia guidelines probably have received the greatest attention, including the strongest statements of support as well as the most vociferous criticism.]

• The Multimedia Guidelines
  Joann Stevens

  Stevens (1999) describes events leading to development of those guidelines, and identifies how they may be useful in the academic community.

• Testing the Limits: The CONFU Digital-Images and Multimedia Guidelines and Their Consequences for Libraries and Educators
  Christine L. Sundt

  Sundt (1999), however, takes those guidelines and the digital-images guidelines to task, focusing on their legal and practical questionability. She further explores complex questions surrounding the identification of copyright owners and securing permissions once a user reaches the limits of fair use for digital images. Under the proposed guidelines, Sundt points out that users will readily hit those limits, particularly as the guidelines establish rigorous time limits on use and require permission for any repeat uses of images.

• Guidelines for Distance Learning and Interlibrary Loan: Doomed and More Doomed
  Laura N. Gasaway

  [See below.]

• Electronic Reserves and Fair Use: The Outer Limits of CONFU
  Kenneth D. Crews

  Gasaway (1999) and Crews (1999) take an insider's look at negotiations surrounding possible guidelines for distance learning, interlibrary loan, and electronic reserves. These activities have several common traits. They are of tremendous importance to librarianship, education, and research. These activities are also of growing importance and frequent occurrence at colleges and universities around the country. Moreover, although these activities may change with the application of new technologies, particularly the use of computer networks and transmissions, they are also based on long-standing practices and expectations about the legal underpinnings of earlier technology. In particular, struggles with new technologies may be predicated on experiences with photocopies for library reserves and television transmissions for distance learning.

  Gasaway and Crews reveal that negotiations with respect to these issues ultimately collapsed and failed to produce guidelines that received consensus support at CONFU meetings. The inability of CONFU to generate guidelines for these important issues demonstrates the limits of the unstructured negotiations in CONFU and the inability of negotiated guidelines to achieve broad support when the issue is of central importance both to the academic community and to the commercial publishing community.

• The Economics of Publishing: The Consequences of Library and Research Copying
  Colin Day

  Day (1999) is the director of a large university press, and he emphasizes the importance of copyright protection for the survivability of scholarly publishing, and he cautions about the adverse consequences of a broad interpretation of fair use.

• The Immunity Dilemma: Are State Colleges and Universities Still Liable for Copyright Infringements?
  Kenneth D. Crews and Georgia K. Harper

  Crews and Harper (1999) reflect on the practical and legal meaning of a series of court rulings that may give limited immunity to state colleges and universities against copyright infringement claims. That development is presented here not only as a matter worthy of discussion itself, but also as an example of the dynamic legal forces that often have extraordinarily complex effects on policy making and decision making within educational institutions.

• Fair-Use Guidelines: A Selected Bibliography
  Noemi A. Rivera-Morales

  Rivera-Morales (1999) has prepared a bibliography of resources for further information. Her work lists the guidelines from the past and from CONFU. She includes numerous sources about the guidelines and about the general copyright issues that the guidelines broach. Her bibliography lists citations to news coverage about CONFU. Although the press coverage was hardly plentiful, the occasional articles offer glimpses of the processes and tensions that underlay the difficult negotiations. As Rivera-Morales further points out, the literature often lacks systematic reviews and analyses of the needs of academic users or of the interests of copyright owners. She emphasizes the need for additional investigations to assess the extent to which fair-use guidelines meet their objectives and serve the interests of proponents.

CONTENTS for Volume 51, Number 1

Editorial

• In This Issue
  Bert R. Boyce

• Special Topic Issue: When Museum Informatics Meets the World Wide Web
  Guest Editors: David Bearman and Jennifer Trant
• Introduction: When Museum Informatics Meets the World Wide Web, It Generates Energy
  David Bearman and Jennifer Trant

  Application domains both adapt technologies in distinctive ways and manifest requirements that can propel basic research in novel directions. Museum informatics is one such domain and its impacts on the World Wide Web are of both sorts. The half-dozen articles we have selected from the 1999 Museums and the Web Conference for this special issue of JASIS, were selected because collectively they delineate important concerns of museum informatics as an application domain, and call for new methods in information science as a whole.

  Our hope is that in this intersection of museum informatics with JASIS, play and research will both benefit and that we'll see some results at future annual Museums and the Web Conferences. [Full texts of other papers from 1997-1999 presentations can be found on the web at www.archimuse.com by following links to mw97, mw98, and mw99.]

• Effective Levels of Adaptation to Different Types of Users in Interactive Museum Systems
  Paterno and C. Mancini

  At its most basic, this concern for the visitor is manifest in the design of museum spaces. Paterno et.al. ask of web design what every museum exhibition designer faces with every exhibition: Why should each visitor to an information resource see it in the same way, when their knowledge, expertise and purposes are so different? Although they arrive by way of a requirement of museum informatics, the problem they are confronting is central to the future of e-commerce - if people don't see themselves in what they find presented to them on the web, and if the responses from the system are addressed to some one else, they will leave unsatisfied. By taking the problem in two stages - first creating some test response-types and allowing visitors to self identify, and then exploring how this model could be made more complex in the types it presents and in its response to visitor input, these researchers are providing usable answers, on their way towards analysis of an exceptionally complex research problem.

• On Pattern-Directed Search of Archives and Collections
  Garett O. Dworman, Steven O. Kimbrough, and Chuck Patch

  Museum information spaces also pose informational challenges. Dworcman, Kimbrough and Patch expose the limitations of the best developed area of information science, information retrieval methods, when they ask a question basic to any "collection" of information: what attributes are correlated in this collection? In museum informatics this is an obvious question, as it would be in legal research (with the documents for a court case) or regulatory enforcement (with the records of a company), but it requires methods that are until know quite undeveloped in information science as a whole.

• On-Line Exhibit Design: The Sociotechnological Impact of Building aMuseum over the World Wide Web
  Paul F. Marty

  Day to day tasks in museums are highly visual and information resources tend to demand more multimedia integration than team tasks in much of the business world. Marty's application of workflow enhancing information processing methods to a typical museum situation - planning a reinstallation of galleries - exposes the challenges of applying technology solutions to a demanding application domain and demonstrates the likely benefits such methods will have when applied to other design intensive business processes. Importantly, Marty recognizes the social informatics of the situation as well, and can reflect on the impact of these changes in working methods on the environment in which the work takes place.

• Visiting a Museum Together: How to Share a Visit to a Virtual World
  Paolo Paolini, Thimoty Barbieri, Paolo Loiudice, Francesca Alonzo, Marco Zanti, and G. Gaia

  Social interaction is the key to learning in the museum. Paolini et.al. take the methods developed for that least real universe of video games and explore how they could be used to make real human interaction possible in the world of virtual cultural experiences. Simply by taking the requirements of museum informatics - interaction with objects and with people - to the World Wide Web, they have exposed a huge new area for research and development and begun to delineate requirements for object-based learning and social interaction that have relevance to other domains ranging from distance education to future leisure life.

• The Neon Paintbrush: Seeing, Technology, and the Museum as Metaphor
  Peter Walsh

  Museum visits, and museum exhibitions, are about making meanings. Peter Walsh reminds us that what we see is learned, and it changes as our expectations change. Through the prism of museum content, artifacts convey both what they are to us today and what they were to others when they were first created or discovered. Walsh asks us to examine the way in which current technology may be changing what we see. The tools of virtuality, no less than the microscope, take us to a world that is beyond our human perception, and in so doing transform the reality of the world in which we live by investing it with a potentiality it previously lacked, and which we will never again will be without.

• Designing Digital Environments for Art Education/Exploration
  Slavko Milekic

  Sometimes tools get in the way. Were the designers of computers influenced by the traditional design of museums in making computers so unfriendly?, asks Slavko Milecik. Could both the interface to the museum and that of the computer be made accessible to very small children, handicapped individuals and all of us who would be delighted to replace a keyboard or a mouse with eye movements and thought? As museum informatics struggles to meet the challenge to expand audiences and the demands of the Americans with Disabilities Act, Milekic elevates playfulness to a technological imperative and explores the consequences.

Research

• Using the Internet for Survey Research: A Case Study
  Yin Zhang

  After reviewing recent surveys conducted on the Web, Zhang lists their advantages and potential problems. A survey of 201 authors with papers in press in 8 journals was conducted as a case study. Respondent reactions were logged and respondents using the web were compared with those using fax or postal service. 125 useable replies were received via the web and 31 by fax or postal service. Respondents using the web to reply had higher self perceived ability to use the Internet, used the web more often, were seven years younger in mean age, but did not differ significantly in years of Internet experience, web access, or gender. Of the 147 who attempted access to the web survey 125 finished successfully. Of the 125 successful respondents, 36% viewed the overall survey results. Sixty percent only completed the survey, with the remainder looking only at their own completed results. The non-electronic respondents did not view results. Recent research shows known item searches to be the prime use of online public access catalogs.

• Block Addressing Indices for Approximate Text Retrieval
  Ricardo Baeza-Yates and Gonzalo Navarro

  This article looks at the efficiency of a modification of the inverted file indexing model. In block addressing indexing inverted file entries do not refer to text position within a particular document but rather to predefined blocks of text of the document. Space is saved, but block hits must be scanned sequentially. BaezaYates and Navarro show theoretically, and confirm experimentally using their methods on TREC databases, that both space and time considerations in a block index can be sublinear and, thus, that file growth decreases the relative significance of time and space considerations for the index.

• Surname Plus Recallable Title Word Searches for Known Items by Scholars
  Frederick G. Kilgour and Barbara B. Moran

  Kilgore and Moran, using the references to eight scholarly monographs published between 1990 and 1995, requested that their authors highlight recallable title words. Using surname and first specified word as keys, the number of authors and titles in the University of Michigan NOTIS- produced minicat was recorded. If the first search yielded more than 20 lines, a second word was added if available. When no word was available a NOTIS limiting field was used to repeat the search on only MARC 100 and 245 fields. A single screen minicat was produced 99% of the time and in 7 of those 11 searches where a second specified word was not available. Surname and one keyword searching gives a single screen in over 84% of the cases.

Book Reviews

• Communicating Research, by A. J. Meadows
  Christine L. Borgman
• Civic Space/Cyberspace: The American Public Library in the Information Age, by Redmond Kathleen Molz and Phyllis Dain
  Richard J. Cox

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