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List
of ideas about what a library does, functional analysis
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Don Turnbull (page up) Here's the text of the slides I want you to fill in the blanks with your ideas: Class Work: Design Lists What does
the Library do? Class Work:
Functional Analysis |
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Amaris Vigil (page up) Class Work:
Design Lists . What does the Library do? In theory, a library should organize and provided assess to information as well as aid in the search for information.....which for the most part UT does. . People? Different libraries serve different populations. A public library has a huge population, A university should mostly relate to the interests of the faculty and students. Special libraries have a much narrower focus and therefore much narrower population. (ok that was not necessary....I think we all know that...never mind) . Institution?
- . Future
- On the
Web? . Broad Competitors'
Functionality - Beyond Category . Bookstores Users have help in looking up information (in this case just books, cd's and magazines) or they can browse by defined sections.....also books can be held for a customer for a certain time period and are not given to other customers until that time period is over... Book finding services . Information finding services In the my intro to reference class we talked about these....a customer pays an individual to research and find the information they are looking for, sometimes this includes copying and binding the info for the customer in a defined amount of time....though I have not found any online yet... Affinity Analysis Needed- better, (maybe simpler) interface, better way to keep track of the books and articles wanted...liked the shopping cart idea for this....but overall anything to improve the UTNETCAT..... |
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Leonard (page up) Class Work: Design Lists What does the Library do? The Library is a gateway for students, faculty and staff members of the university to all kinds of information for the purpose of research and higher learning. People? The UT library serves students (undergraduate and graduate), faculty and staff members of the university. - In the real world? Current
Future
Class Work:
Functional Analysis Other Libraries
Other University
Libraries Bookstores
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Diana Miranda (page up) What does
the Library do? People?
Current It is hard for users to find information because the way the collection is arranged in the building. There is part of the collection classified using LCC, the other part is in Dewey, that is confusing for users. There is also a section with over sized books in the sixth floor. How you suppose to do browsing if the collection is not in one place? In the reference section there are around 5 different collections. They all are classified with LCC but they also have colored strips in their cover to know to which sub collection they belong. By browsing the information on the walls it is hard to know what services the library offer to students. Future Uniformity in the classification number is going to be required for users benefit. - On the Web? Current The library web site has problems with its design and content. It has duplicate information and navigation bars that confuse users, inconsistencies in the navigation flow, buttons with confuse names, pages explaining how services work but in a very general way, important services hard to localize and finally, an unclear an hard way to find information in its database. Future No duplicate
information, especially navigation bars. Main page with less buttons to
click and a well design "Help" section, where users can find
information about hours, services and ways to use the database system,
including the FAQ's. The new page is going to include different colors
and more appropriate images to illustrate. Electronic service of Selective
Dissemination of Information. It would be interesting if the library can
offer the possibility to personalize the main page as people do with Yahoo.
- Competitors' Functionality Other Libraries Seattle Public
Library (http://www.spl.org/) Other University
Libraries Beyond Category Bookstores Amazon.com The "Look
inside option" is really helpful. Book finding services Bublos.com
(book price comparison site) |
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Andrew Switzky (page up) What does the Library do? Archive for cultural heritage Allows inexpensive access to books, reference materials, entertainment Community meeting place. Institution?
On the Web?
Future Clifford Lynch has some interesting ideas about the future of digital libraries: One of the things that I think is starting to become clear is that digital collections and digital libraries aren't the same thing. The focus [in digital library development]is on creating large amounts of digital content and providing some fairly simple access tools, rather than upon sophisticated systems for ongoing use or apparatus providing interpretation. We can identify a series of trends that may lead us to a world of digital collections - databases of relatively raw cultural heritage materials, for example - and then layers of interpretation and presentation built upon these databases and making reference to objects within them. Probably we'll see interpretations that draw from many digital collections, and single digital collections contributing materials to many different interpretations. While I think that libraries, archives, museums, and the higher education community will be among the major creators of digital collections, the creators of presentations and interpretations of materials from these collections will be much more numerous and diverse. The distinction between digital collections, and interfaces which provide access (in the broadest sense, think interpretation as well as access here) to digital collections, looks like it is going to be very important. And the digital collection rather than the digital library or access interface is the locus of stewardship for digital preservation. As we construct and work with digital collections and digital libraries that we're going to need an infrastructure that encompasses digital versions of tools like gazetteers, dictionaries, vocabularies and vocabulary mappings. And these tools and infrastructure components need to become building blocks - network services for access by computer systems and structured data for interpretation by computer programs - that will facilitate their incorporation into a multiplicity of systems. when you put materials out there, people you would never have expected find these materials from sometimes very strange and exotic places that you wouldn't have imagined, and sometimes make extraordinarily creative or unpredicted uses of that material. So perhaps we should avoid over-emphasizing pre-conceived notions about user communities when creating digital collection, at least in part because we are so bad at identifying or predicting these target communities. But I think that digital libraries are somehow the key construct in building community, making community happen and exploiting community. Indeed, much of what we have learned about designing successful digital libraries emphasizes the discipline of user-centered design. Effective digital libraries are designed both for purpose and audience, very much in contrast to digital collections. if we think of digital libraries as a collection of tools that make content alive, that help you to find it, that allow you to manipulate it, analyze it, annotate it, comment on it then digital libraries attract, they create, they define a community. But they also let the members of that community talk to each other. This conversation happens in explicit ways which we certainly are well aware of and have exploited in the sense that people who are working together on common interests find each other, they begin to talk to each other, we see digital libraries stretch into systems like collaboratories where there is active group annotation and analysis and creation of new knowledge happening. But digital libraries can also enable and facilitate implicit communication. My favorite example of implicit communication, which has not been muchexploited yet, is recommender systems, where basically the digital library system becomes a mechanism for reflecting the behavior patterns of members of the community to other members of that community in a controlled and useful way. The aggregation of materials in a digital library can be greater than the sum of its parts. Perhaps one underlying intuition is that as a scholar reads, absorbs, and integrates a body of primary materials and works written by other scholars, the collection of knowledge in his or her head goes beyond the simple sum of what has been read. Our digital libraries can assist, amplify, and to some extent reify this activity and allow the results to be more readily communicated, shared, and further advanced by entire communities. I'll give you three glimpses - just provocative snapshots, really - of what this may mean for the future of digital libraries. One is the really wonderful work that is going on at the Perseus Project at Tufts University. If you've not looked at this, you really must (see perseus.tufts.edu). One of the things that they are doing is they are computationally linking multiple resources together. Closely related to the work going on at Perseus is the broader emerging group of technologies called data mining. Basically the idea here is you amass huge amounts data and then you apply computational resources to look for patterns and relationships in it. The more data you can amass, the more computational resource you can apply, the more likely it is you may be able to unearth interesting and novel patterns and relationships. There is a charming statement which I had originally attributed to Alan Kay and I've been corrected that it really comes from Marvin Minsky apparently, a statement proposing someone in the future saying something like , "Can you imagine there was a time when the books in a library didn't talk to each other?" I think that one of the things they "say" is what we code into them with mark-up. Really good deep mark-up that exposes intellectual and semantic structure, that exposes content for linkage and data mining, and computation, is part of the language they're going to talk. I believe that efforts and ideas as diverse as the Text Encoding Initiative, some of the work with ontologies, with XML and particularly the development of XML schemas to support scholarly communication, and with the Semantic Web effort all reflect the importance of mark-up as a means of structuring information for reuse in a computational environment. And I think that suggests things to us about some of our strategies for digitization and building digital collections and in particular for the need to really talk with scholars, with teachers, with data miners, with digital library builders, with computer and information scientists and computational linguists and many other disciplines in a continuing way about what the appropriate mark- up structures are and how to implement them in our digitizing programs. And, perhaps most importantly, to recognize that appropriate mark-up is going to be an evolving area. It's going to evolve both in terms of what we want to mark up and how, and also in terms of what mark-up we can actually afford to do economically. we are starting to see a set of technologies evolve that basically provide people with individual portable libraries. It's starting to get quite reasonable to think about people running around with a couple of thousand digital books on their laptop. Now, what happens when people start amassing these kinds of large personal collections of digital materials and the objects compare notes with each other? I can readily imagine a situation where you add a new book in your personal digital library and it runs around and takes inventory of what else you have in there and it either consults its built-in catalog of other books from its publisher and starts bombarding you with ads, or, if it can talk to the outside world (think of some digital rights management type scenarios here), it reports it back to its publisher and says, "Oh, well, you should send this person new books announcements and special offers based on what I've just found in his personal digital library". Acquiring a book may become sort of an invitation to an ongoing communication among people and information sources and we haven't even begun to scratch the surface of the implications of that. Just as a quick example, think about what this might imply in the future about the ongoing responsibilities of authors, particularly in scholarly settings. Further out, approaching the fringes of speculative fiction, we can also imagine fact extractors that try to create databases of knowledge by mining evidence out of a continually growing corpus of books and articles; this gets much easier if data in these works is marked up in ways that facilitate extraction without having to fight the battles of natural language parsing and understanding. UT Library Outline (page up) I. Search UT Library Online: search box with dropdown selector A. UTNetCat
1. UTNetCAT-Online
Catalog B. Electronic Journals C. UT LOL Library Website D. UT Austin's Website E. Search engines 1. AllTheWeb
II. Express
Help: (not a link)-I think this started out as a help section that would
open up in a separate window and have navigation over several pages. It
would have been an electronic booklet; a finding aid for the library.
But that metaphor was only carried through for a few of the links. The
others link to interior library pages rather than open up a separate window.
Also, the navigation in the window doesn't work. B. How Do I ? (Our FAQS) C. Ask A Reference Question D. Renew Library Materials E. Access Electronic Reserves F. Pick up Your E-Docs G. Request A Book or Article that is not Available at UT (Interlibrary Services) H. Recommend a Book Purchase III. About the Library: links to About the Library section with a whole bunch of links in addition to those listed below. A. Visit
a UT Library IV. Finding Information A. UTNetCAT
Library Catalog V. Library
Services VI. Digital Library Services A. Handbook
of Texas Online VII. With deep appreciation to our sponsors and benefactors VIII. Current Library News IX. Exhibits X. News Archives XI. Fund a Book
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