SiteLines - Ideas About Web Searching

Data Mining Primer

From the US government, Data Mining, An Overview, is a short primer for those wanting to understand what data mining is all about. By Jeffrey Siebert, an infomation analyst at the US Congressional Research Service. In PDF format.

ITFacts.biz

Spotted on Resourceshelf.com, this is an outstanding addition to sites for finding technology-related reports and trends. Since the decline and fall of Cyberatlas and Nua's Internet statistics sites (which lost most of their good content when they integrated into ClickZ), those interested in web search and other media use trends have had to increase their bookmark list in the absence of quality aggregator sites. Although this is presented as a weblog (and is available as an RSS feed), postings are categorized and the site is fully searchable.

2003 National Survey of Information Technology in US Higher Education

The Campus Computing Project is an important, ongoing compilation of information on the state of university and college computing issues. Started in 1990, the project surveys over 600 two-and four-year public and private colleges and universities in the United States, and publishes the results.

A summary of the 2003 national survey is available in PDF format. As expected, the report shows substantial growth in campus wireless access, policies to control illegal downloading of music and video, and the increasing presence of campus portals.

A Voice-Over-IP Primer

There is a buzz in the telcomm industry, and plenty of new business and consumer offerings of telephones that use broadband Internet connections rather than a telephone line to create voice connections. It's hard to imagine or visualize how your phone service might be different if you signed up for VOIP from your local telephone company. To the rescue comes the FCC, which has put together a great little illustrated FAQ on VOIP for beginners: http://www.fcc.gov/voip/ The page also has links to statements made by US legislators and several FCC news releases.

Lost Internet Citations

As students and researchers refer to web pages and web sites more often in their work, tracing -- or even finding -- citations for later review can be difficult or impossible. Online materials can move; they may be revised (yet remain at the same web address); or disappear completely without warning.

How big a problem is loss of Internet references? In "Going,
Going, Gone: Lost Internet References" (Science 302/5646, October 31, 2003, pp. 787-788) the authors examined occurances of Internet references in three important U.S. scientific journals: New England Journal of Medicine, The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), and Science. They found that "Internet references accounted for 2.6% of all references and in articles 27 months old, 13% of Internet references were inactive." The article is available online at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/302/5646/787 (subscription required for full access)

Resources for Information Architects

If you're responsible for designing and maintaining your organization's web site, you may be interested in Martin White's recent roundup of resources for information architecture, which includes links to important web sites, books, discussion lists and conferences. From the February 2004 issue of Update.

How Much Information is Out There?

How Much Information is a project of the University of California, Berkeley School of Information Management and Systems. It examines how much information exists in print, film, magnetic, and optical formats – and seen or heard in telephone, radio and TV, and the Internet. The project originally started in 2000 and an updated 2003 study has just been released.

ChillingEffects.org

The Chilling Effects Clearinghouse is a web portal for information on the protection of rights related to the distribution of online information. A joint project of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, University of San Francisco, and University of Maine law school clinics, Chilling Effects provides information to help users understand First Amendment and intellectual property laws that provide protection to online activities.

The site offers information and background material dealing with topics such as Fan Fiction, Copyright, Domain Names and Trademarks, Anonymous Speech, and Defamation. The site is also collecting a database of Cease-and-Desist orders issued to web information providers.

This is a unique and valuable web source for information content providers' bookmark lists.

Quick Trick: Temporarily Remove Browser Toolbars

This is a great trick for those of us who teach web searching or prepare printed materials with screenshots of web pages. You can instantly remove all the toolbars from your browser window by pressing the F11 key on your Windows keyboard. The effect is only temporary: pressing F11 again restores your previous toolbar settings. The trick works in both Internet Explorer and Netscape on a Windows platform.

Does clicking make us dumb? No, but search engines do

Those of us who have been in the information literacy business pre and post-web have noticed subtle changes in behavior of end-users engaged in the "research" process. I've become intrigued by watching otherwise mindful, inquisitive professionals search the web. Armed with a mouse and a high speed connection, searchers seem to abandon the art of creative, reflective information gathering and turn into clicking automatons. Perhaps the most important web search skill isn't navigational skill: maybe the key to effective web search might be reading the page before making a clicking decision.

So I read with great interest an only-slightly tongue-in-cheek article by M.O. Thirunarayanan, a professor at Florida International University in Miami, titled From Thinkers to Clickers: The World Wide Web and the Transformation of the Essence of Being Human, in the web journal Ubiquity.

Thirunarayanan accuses the web of turning thinkers into clickers: "The act of clicking instills in human beings a sense of being in control. Clicking on a link gives a person who is doing the clicking the feeling that he or she is in charge of the situation." He suggests that as people "click on one hyperlink after another, they often forget the initial question to which they were trying to find an answer."

I'm in full agreement that the web has reinforced the notion that research is a single, momentary event rather than a complex intellectual process that takes time and talent. But I don't think the mouse is as culpable as search engines for the oversimplification of user searching behavior.

Easy-to-use search engines, which deliver search results for any request (even misspelled ones), erroneously and repeatedly reinforce the power of the searcher.

Serious searchers know that searching is easy and research is hard. Yet search engines have become powerful models that research universities and commercial content portals are racing to emulate. To respond to user demands for Google-like search interfaces for licensed databases, many research libraries are working to enable one-box searching across many different databases. Almost every commercial content management tool has a prominently-displayed search box on the front page that permits keyword search, because that's what everyone expects.

But one-box meta-search can't treat each individual database uniquely, and may even mask the unique qualities (like explosions in Medline, for example), taxonomies and controlled vocabularies that have been carefully constructed by database creators. Yes, it's harder to spend several minutes learning how to use a database before you search it, and yes, it's harder to browse a catalogue of resources than it is to pop a keyword into a box. Nevertheless, doing so almost always produces more reliable search results, with greater searcher confidence.

More on what's behind web addresses

Librarian Greg Notess' On the Net columns in Online Magazine are required reading for serious searchers. In the May/June issue, Greg deconstructs web addresses, helping us understand basic conventions but also covering topics as web-address shortening tools, alternative URLs, how URLs can be altered for tracking purposes, and ways that spammers can cloak a URL so it can't easily be identified and reported as spam.

Why Citation Errors Perpetuate

In the December 12 2002 issue of Nature Magazine, Philip Ball explores why identical article citation errors seem to perpetuate over time. The research suggests that is that this results in "lazy citation" -- a case of authors not actually reading the article that is being cited, but simply citing a previous citation with the original errors intact.

The numbers are very significant. Based on the number of distinct misprints tracked, only 22–23% of citations followed from a reading of the original paper.

Trends in the Evolution of the Public Web

An interesting study in D-Lib Magazine by researchers at OCLC, Trends in the Evolution of the Public Web suggests that 1) growth in the number of web sites has reached a plateau and actually shrank slightly last year; 2) globalization of the public web continues to be a myth, as web content is dominated by English-language content originating in the U.S. with no sign that this dominance may be shifting; 3) there is little if any progress toward adoption of formal metadata schemes for public Web resources.

Knowledge Translation Lessons for Libraries

My top trend for libraries in 2003 is Knowledge Translation. Defined as the process that transfers research results from knowledge producers to knowledge users, knowledge translation products digest information from many sources, make decisions on what in that body of information is good information, and then repackage that “good information” into an easy-to-use tool that professionals can use with confidence.

Health care leads in the knowledge translation area.

Health care publishers have taken the lead in creating knowledge translation tools for use by physicians. Products like PDXMD.com (Elsevier), Inforetriever, and BMJ's Clinical Evidence are some examples of products currently in the marketplace.

With the easy availability of handheld computers with enlarged storage capacity, these knowledge-translation tools can bring content to actual practice, enabling physicians to carry around their practice tools as they move through their rounds.

Knowledge Translation tools are stepping beyond health care settings.

Although more popular in medicine than any other profession, knowledge translation tools are creeping into other professions, because professionals need access to information but lack the time to gather and process it themselves. Workingfaster.com's Search Portfolio is a product of this trend -- a web site selection service for librarians and libraries that simply lack the time to do nitty gritty site selection themselves. I also subscribe to Execubooks -- which takes major bestsellling business books and digests them into 2-5 pages that I can read online, print, or download onto my handheld and read on the subway. Welcome back Readers Digest -- with a brave new business face.

The trend toward knowledge translation is important for libraries.

These tools present a purchasing challenge for libraries, who already purchase the primary sources that form the basis of knowledge translation tools. Why should libraries buy the translated product when they already own the "real thing"? Much like the paperback-purchasing quandry that stymied public libraries decades ago, libraries are quickly coming to the conclusion that if they don't buy knowledge translation tools, their users will. And information consumers care little about the processes that go into creation of a knowledge product, whereas librarians care a lot about the decisions that may have an impact on the end-product.

For example, will a commercial publisher select or prefer their own family of published content for synthesis? Who writes the synthesized content? How is it reviewed? How often is it updated and how does the publisher respond to major new developments? Particularly in subject areas like health care, practice changes may happen quickly based on new evidence.

Knowledge translation sells because no one has time to keep up with their profession.

Libraries have never really seen themselves as being in the time-saving business. But time is being seen by our users as an increasingly precious commodity, and now more than ever, people want their information pre-digested and packaged for easy use when and where they need it. Libraries may want to take up the charge of knowledge translation tools to see how they can offer their users time-saving tools to uncomplicate their lives.

Further Reading
The Canadian Institutes of Health Research is a leader in knowledge translation research and practice. The site has a good bibliography plus links to relevant web sites.

How to Decode a Web Address

Do you ever wonder how those very long web addresses are constructed? Genie Tyburski of the Virtual Chase explains why those long addresses look the way they do.