Enriching Existing Test Collections with OXPath

Extending TREC-style test collections by incorporating external resources is a time consuming and challenging task. Making use of freely available web data requires technical skills to work with APIs or to create a web scraping program specifically tailored to the task at hand. We present a light-weight alternative that employs the web data extraction language OXPath to harvest data to be added to an existing test collection from web resources. We demonstrate this by creating an extended version of GIRT4 called GIRT4-XT with additional metadata fields harvested via OXPath from the social sciences portal Sowiport. This allows the re-use of this collection for other evaluation purposes like bibliometrics-enhanced retrieval. The demonstrated method can be applied to a variety of similar scenarios and is not limited to extending existing collections but can also be used to create completely new ones with little effort.Comment: Experimental IR Meets Multilinguality, Multimodality, and Interaction - 8th International Conference of the CLEF Association, CLEF 2017, Dublin, Ireland, September 11-14, 201

Scholarly Journals on the Net: A Reader's Assessment

published or submitted for publicatio

Technical alignment

This essay discusses the importance of the areas of infrastructure and testing to help digital preservation services demonstrate reliability, transparency, and accountability. It encourages practitioners to build a strong culture in which transparency and collaborations between technical frameworks are valued highly. It also argues for devising and applying agreed-upon metrics that will enable the systematic analysis of preservation infrastructure. The essay begins by defining technical infrastructure and testing in the digital preservation context, provides case studies that exemplify both progress and challenges for technical alignment in both areas, and concludes with suggestions for achieving greater degrees of technical alignment going forward

Special Libraries, May-June 1977

Volume 68, Issue 5-6https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_sl_1977/1004/thumbnail.jp

Fair Use Challenges in Academic and Research Libraries

Summarizes findings from a survey of librarians on the application of fair use in copyright practice to fulfill libraries' missions of teaching and learning support, scholarship support preservation, exhibition, and public outreach

Encoding models for scholarly literature

We examine the issue of digital formats for document encoding, archiving and publishing, through the specific example of "born-digital" scholarly journal articles. We will begin by looking at the traditional workflow of journal editing and publication, and how these practices have made the transition into the online domain. We will examine the range of different file formats in which electronic articles are currently stored and published. We will argue strongly that, despite the prevalence of binary and proprietary formats such as PDF and MS Word, XML is a far superior encoding choice for journal articles. Next, we look at the range of XML document structures (DTDs, Schemas) which are in common use for encoding journal articles, and consider some of their strengths and weaknesses. We will suggest that, despite the existence of specialized schemas intended specifically for journal articles (such as NLM), and more broadly-used publication-oriented schemas such as DocBook, there are strong arguments in favour of developing a subset or customization of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) schema for the purpose of journal-article encoding; TEI is already in use in a number of journal publication projects, and the scale and precision of the TEI tagset makes it particularly appropriate for encoding scholarly articles. We will outline the document structure of a TEI-encoded journal article, and look in detail at suggested markup patterns for specific features of journal articles

Why Print and Electronic Resources Are Essential to the Academic Law Library

Libraries have supported multiple formats for decades, from paper and microforms to audiovisual tapes and CDs. However, the newest medium, digital transmission, has presented a wider scope of challenges and caused library patrons to question the established and recognized multiformat library. Within the many questions posed, two distinct ones echo repeatedly. The first doubts the need to sustain print in an increasingly digital world, and the second warns of the dangers of relying on a still-developing technology. This article examines both of these positions and concludes that abandoning either format would translate into a failure of service to patrons, both present and future

An Exploratory Sequential Mixed Methods Approach to Understanding Researchers’ Data Management Practices at UVM: Findings from the Quantitative Phase

This article reports on the second quantitative phase of an exploratory sequential mixed methods research design focused on researcher data management practices and related institutional support and services. The study aims to understand data management activities and challenges of faculty at the University of Vermont (UVM), a higher research activity Research University, in order to develop appropriate research data services (RDS). Data was collected via a survey, built on themes from the initial qualitative data analysis from the first phase of this study. The survey was distributed to a nonrandom census sample of full-time UVM faculty and researchers (P=1,190); from this population, a total of 319 participants completed the survey for a 26.8% response rate. The survey collected information on five dimensions of data management: data management activities; data management plans; data management challenges; data management support; and attitudes and behaviors towards data management planning. Frequencies, cross tabulations, and chi-square tests of independence were calculated using demographic variables including gender, rank, college, and discipline. Results from the analysis provide a snapshot of research data management activities at UVM, including types of data collected, use of metadata, short- and long-term storage of data, and data sharing practices. The survey identified key challenges to data management, including data description (metadata) and sharing data with others; this latter challenge is particular impacted by confidentiality issues and lack of time, personnel, and infrastructure to make data available. Faculty also provided insight to RDS that they think UVM should support, as well as RDS they were personally interested in. Data from this study will be integrated with data from the first qualitative phase of the research project and analyzed for meta-inferences to help determine future research data services at UVM