This exploratory study examines the explosive growth and the "bibliometrics" of the World Wide Web based on both analysis of over 30 gigabytes of web pages collected by the Inktomi "Web Crawler" and on the use of the DEC AltaVista search engine for cocitation analysis of a set of Earth Science related WWW sites. The statistical characteristics of web documents and their hypertext links are examined, along with examination of the characteristics of highly cited web documents.

This submission reports on a cross-disciplinary inquiry into topicality and relevance, involving an in-depth literature analysis and an inductive development of a faceted typology (containing 227 fine-grained topical relevance relationships arrayed in three facets and 33 types of presentation relationships). This inquiry reveals a large variety of topical connections beyond topic matching (the common assumption of topical relevance in the field), renders a closer look into the structure of a topic, and induces a generic topic-oriented information architecture that is meaningful across topics and domain boundaries. The findings from the analysis contribute to the foundation work of information organization, metadata development, intellectual access / information retrieval, and knowledge discovery. The typology of topical relevance relationships is structured with three major facets: * Functional role of a piece of information plays in the overall structure of a topic or an argument; * Mode of reasoning: How information contributes to the userâ s reasoning about a topic; * Semantic relationship: How information connects to a topic semantically. This inquiry demonstrated that topical relevance with its close linkage to thinking and reasoning is central to many disciplines. The multidisciplinary approach allows synthesis and examination from new angles, leading to an integrated scheme of relevance relationships or a system of thinking that informs each individual discipline. The scheme resolving from the synthesis can be used to improve text and image understanding, knowledge organization and retrieval, reasoning, argumentation, and thinking in general, by people and machines.

The increasing price of electronic journals, indexing and abstracting databases along with the traditional published print subscriptions has forced library community to explore alternative means of subscription. The emergence of library a very promising development in this direction. The Phenomenon of consortia or group of libraries maintaining information resources together has become very common these days, In India, during last few years we witnessed many consortia based subscription. This paper briefly discusses the concept, need, advantages and also the major consortia initiatives in India.

The advances in library net working technology has brought an inexpensive way of distributing and sharing information within the organization as well as libraries located in remote areas.The advantages of Intranet, Extranet and Internet being numerous, includes streamlining of the information processing and management, facilitating information dissemination and enriching communications and collaborations. Attempts have been made to discuss opportunities provided by these three advanced networks enabling librarians and information professionals in efficient collection development, management and serving users with value added information at ease.

The heterogeneous environment of information retrieval on the World Wide Web has brought recognition for the need of interoperability among diverse systems to the fore. In subject retrieval, users encounter not only different vocabularies and schemes but also different languages. As a result, there has been a flourish of projects in the last few years aimed at improving interoperability among subject vocabularies and knowledge organization schemes, with some targeting different vocabularies and others focusing on different languages. This paper attempts to analyze the methods used in these projects. It begins with a brief overview and then examines in particular the approaches and methods used in relevant efforts.

This is the text of an invited presentation (available in two versions, 9 pages narrative paper, and 26 slides presentation) given at the Berlin 4 Open Access Conference, March 29th-March 31st, 2006, Albert Einstein Institute, Potsdam (near Berlin). Abstract: India, the second most populous nation in the world, is emerging as an important player in the world economy and geopolitics. In the nearly six decades since Independence, India has made considerable progress. A number of leading corporations, especially in the areas of automobiles, information technology and chemicals, have set up shop in India for manufacturing, business process outsourcing and R&D. Advanced countries look at India as a huge market to be tapped and a reservoir of English-speaking workforce that can be hired at a fraction of the cost they pay as wages in their home countries. About a million people work in software industry alone. And now India is increasingly looked up to for outsourcing R&D. In the past few months, many heads of states and governments â including President Bush - came calling and President Bush even spoke about the rather sensitive subject of cooperation in nuclear energy. Both the Vice chancellor of Oxford in the UK, the Rt Hon Chris Patten and the President of Harvard University Lawrence Summers in the US visited India recently and are keen to set up centres of excellence devoted to Indian studies. Indeed Harvard is planning to institute a dozen chairs in the new centre. Despite a long history of science, scholarship and philosophical inquiry dating back to millennia before the emergence of modern European civilization, India is struggling to keep pace with the West in science and technology. Although there are about 300 universities, and about the same number of government funded research laboratories under agencies such as the Departments of Atomic Energy and Space and the 1 Ministries of Defence, Agriculture, Science & Technology, and Ocean Development, Indiaâ s research output in science and technology, as seen from the Web of Science, is barely 2.5% of the worldâ s journal literature. What is more, in none of the subjects Indian papers on the whole are cited as often as the world average. It will not be wrong to conclude that India is contributing to growth of knowledge in the sciences sub-optimally. There is a crying need for strengthening higher education (and, indeed, education at all levels) and promoting excellence and innovation in research. India is investing millions of dollars to set up three institutions of excellence in science on the lines of the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore and six world class medical colleges and hospitals of the quality of the All India Institute of Medical sciences in underserved regions.

The paper suggests extensions to SKOS Core to make explicit where concepts in a knowledge organization system have changed from one version of the system to another.

As a way to gain greater insight into the operation of Library and Information Science (LIS) e-learning communities, the presented work applies automated text mining techniques to text-based communication to identify, describe and evaluate underlying social networks within such communities. The main thrust of the study is to find a way to use computers to automatically discover social ties that form between students just from their threaded discussions. Currently, one of the most common but time consuming methods for discovering social ties between people is to ask questions about their perceived social ties via a survey. However, such a survey is difficult to collect due to the high cost associated with data collection and the sensitive nature of the types of questions that must be asked. To overcome these limitations, the paper presents a new, content-based method for automated discovery of social networks from threaded discussions dubbed name networks. When fully developed, name networks can be used as a real time diagnostic tool for educators to evaluate and improve teaching models and to identify students who might need additional help or students who may provide such help to others.

This paper uses Paul Ricoeur's distinction between language and discourse to help define a North American research agenda in knowledge organization. Ricoeur's concept of discourse as a set of utterances, defined within multiple disciplines and domains, and reducible, not to the word but to the sentence, provides three useful tools for defining our research. First, it enables us to recognize the important contribution of numerous studies that focus on acts of organization, rather than on standards or tools of organization. Second, it gives us a harmonious paradigm that helps us reconcile the competing demands of interoperability, based on widely-used tools and techniques of library science, and domain integrity, based on user warrant and an understanding of local context. Finally, it resonates with the current economic, political and social climate in which our information systems work, particularly the competing calls for protectionism and globalization.

This item is not the definitive copy. Please use the following citation when referencing this material: Dillon, A. (1988) The role of usability labs in systems design. In: E. Megaw (ed.) Contemporary Ergonomics 88. London: Taylor and Francis, 69-73. Abstract: The issue of usability is a central concern for contemporary system designers and a major focus of research in the domain of HCI. In an attempt to evaluate the usability of products some companies have invested heavily in the the development of so-called "usability labs". Consisting of sophisticated video recording equipment and observation facilities, these laboratories may well be expected to provide insight into the process of interaction that would otherwise remain hidden. Is this in fact the case? Are usability labs the universal panacea for the problems of evaluation? The present paper outlines the advantages and details the limitations of such facilities and argues that the problems lie less with the laboratory and more with the evaluator.