Searching Data: A Review of Observational Data Retrieval Practices in Selected Disciplines

A cross-disciplinary examination of the user behaviours involved in seeking and evaluating data is surprisingly absent from the research data discussion. This review explores the data retrieval literature to identify commonalities in how users search for and evaluate observational research data. Two analytical frameworks rooted in information retrieval and science technology studies are used to identify key similarities in practices as a first step toward developing a model describing data retrieval

Cultural institutions and Web 2.0

This report gives the results of an exploratory survey of the approaches that Australian cultural institutions are implementing to meet Web 2.0 challenges. For the purpose of this study cultural institutions are those organizations open to the general public that house information artefacts representative of national culture, namely galleries, museums, libraries and archives. The aim was to undertake a brief survey of the strategies being implemented by Australian cultural institutions to come to terms with Web 2.0 development, and meet challenges. This has been complemented by some consideration of management and technical issues that have been reported in the literature. The work leads to some findings that should inform both the institutions and the Australian research and development community of issues and opportunities relating to enhanced provision of access to Australian cultural heritage

LILAC and Citation Project Workshop

The LILAC Project (Learning Information Literacy across the Curriculum) is a multi-institutional study of student information-seeking behaviors (lilac-group.blogspot.com). This year we join forces with the Citation Project, a study of how students use the information they find (CitationProject.net), to consider what both studies may have to tell us about students’ information literacy “habits of mind.” Participants will gain hands-on experience with the research-aloud protocol (RAP) video captures used as part of this study and identifying and coding subject behaviors. We will demonstrate coding and analysis of information-seeking behaviors of both native speakers of English and multilingual writers in composition courses, share preliminary findings of a project examining the information literacy of multilingual writers, and discuss its relevance in composition classes, ESL academic writing classes, and content courses in different disciplines. In both large- and small-group discussions, we will consider what we are learning from results of these studies and what we can do with the information, sharing our experience in data analysis and results interpretation, and inviting participants to discuss how to consider the framing of LILAC projects from different disciplinary perspectives. The addition of citation context analysis like that done by the Citation Project allows participants to explore both the research process and the products of that research. The triangulation of data made possible by this combined research provides deeper and more nuanced understanding of information literacy in general and use and misuse of sources in particular

Improving Digital Record Annotation Capabilities with Open-sourced Ontologies and Crowd-sourced Workers

The Museum of the City of New York has undertaken a long-term project to digitize its collection of 1.5 million objects, annotate them with metadata, and make them publicly available via the Internet. At present, Museum staff annotate images using a traditional lexicon assembled from authority sources such as the Library of Congress and the Getty Art and Architecture Thesaurus, but with limited resources the Museum cannot scale to meet its goal of providing the highest levels of accessibility and discoverability of collections to researchers as well as to the general public. This project offers a cost-effective, scalable solution that 1) consolidates the current lexicon with linked open data sources by generating alignments and reconciling semantically equivalent elements, creating a super-set lexicon, and 2) divides the work of annotating into micro-tasks that can be completed by huge labor pools available through crowd-sourced marketplaces