More Publications About Databases

Presents publications on online databases. Home information services; Online reference and information retrieval; Government policies or regulations affecting information flow

Utilization of Reference Books by Students: A Case Study of Covenant University, Nigeria

This study assessed the utilization of reference books by final-year students of Covenant University, Nigeria with a view to providing valuable data to help students to get a better orientation on the use and importance of reference sources for their research work, to guide instructors and teachers on the use of library, information retrieval processes and information literacy, and to help University management, policy-makers and other stakeholders to make appropriate policies concerning the acquisitions of library materials. The survey method of research was adopted for the study. The simple random sampling technique was used in choosing the study population. The respondents for the questionnaire, interview and focus group discussion were chosen from the 400- and 500-level undergraduate students at the Covenant University. 300 copies of the questionnaires were administered to respondents. A focus group discussion was conducted with 30 participants. And 18 students were interviewed. It was revealed that students prefer online resources, which accounts for the poor usage of the hardcopy reference materials. It is, therefore, recommended that the library should intensify its information literacy skills program in order to help users maximize online reference resources. At the same time, the library should acquire more online reference sources rather than buying hard copies for a few user

The relevance of reference Librarian in the 21st century: a critical look

This paper examines the relevance of the reference librarian in the face of ubiquitous IT tools which could be used to access information resources from a remote place without necessarily coming physically to the library. The users seems to under-estimate the impact of the library and librarians in their quest for information, since there is the Internet, search engines, databases and myriads of other online journals, institutional repositories, self-archives, academic blogs from which information could be crawled within seconds. This phenomenon has brought about a gross reduction in the use of library resources by patrons, and reference librarians seem to be redundant in their duty posts. It was revealed in this study that reference librarians are now faced with new roles, and dynamic methods of service delivery. New roles of the reference librarian in the 21st century includes providing access to information, acting as information advocates, advising role, information organisation and retrieval, knowledge and digital management, and information mining, digital referencing among others. The study concluded that the reference librarian (‘Hybrid Librarian’) must adapt to the growing trends of Information and Communication Technology, using internet resources, new social media, semantic web, cloud computing, mobilie technology (Library 2.0/3.0) and other relevant tools in carrying out reference services. Key words: Reference Librarian, Hybrid Librarian, Online referencing, Information and Communication Technology (ICT), Library 3.0 and Apo mediatio

INFLUENCE OF ANTERIOR THALAMIC INACTIVATION ON THE RETRIEVAL OF SPATIAL REFERENCE MEMORY AND WORKING MEMORY IN THE RADIAL ARM MAZE

Previous studies have shown that the anterior thalamic nuclei (ATN) contain a large population of head direction cells, which fire as a function of an animal’s directional orientation in an environment, thereby providing a compass-like representation guiding navigation. Recent work has suggested that directional orientation information stemming from the ATN is critical for the generation of hippocampal and parahippocampal spatial representations, and may contribute to the establishment of unique spatial representations in radially oriented tasks such as the radial arm maze. While studies have confirmed that ATN lesions impair the acquisition of new spatial information in variants of the radial maze, few have attempted to dissociate its unique contributions to acquisition vs. retrieval and spatial reference vs working memory in radial tasks. Here, we addressed these questions by training rats in a radial arm maze procedure to asymptotic levels, and after 24hrs, animals were administered muscimol inactivation of the ATN before a 4 trial probe test. We report impairments in retrieval of both spatial reference and working memory, suggesting a general absence of improved navigation across post-inactivation training trials. Taken together, the results above suggest that the ATN modulates the retrieval of previously acquired allocentric spatial information in the radial-arm maze, but also suggests a critical role in the online guidance of accurate spatial behavior. The results are discussed in relation to the thalamo-cortical circuits involved in spatial information processing

Information Retrieval and Terminology Extraction In Online Resources for Patients with Diabetes

Terminology use, as a mean for information retrieval or document indexing, plays an important role in health literacy. Specific types of users, i.e. patients with diabetes need access to various online resources (on foreign and/or native language) searching for information on self-education of basic diabetic knowledge, on self-care activities regarding importance of dietetic food, medications, physical exercises and on self-management of insulin pumps. Automatic extraction of corpus-based terminology from online texts, manuals or professional papers, can help in building terminology lists or list of “browsing phrases” useful in information retrieval or in document indexing. Specific terminology lists represent an intermediate step between free text search and controlled vocabulary, between user’s demands and existing online resources in native and foreign language. The research aiming to detect the role of terminology in online resources, is conducted on English and Croatian manuals and Croatian online texts, and divided into three interrelated parts: i) comparison of professional and popular terminology use ii) evaluation of automatic statistically-based terminology extraction on English and Croatian texts iii) comparison and evaluation of extracted terminology performed on English manual using statistical and hybrid approaches. Extracted terminology candidates are evaluated by comparison with three types of reference lists: list created by professional medical person, list of highly professional vocabulary contained in MeSH and list created by non-medical persons, made as intersection of 15 lists. Results report on use of popular and professional terminology in online diabetes resources, on evaluation of automatically extracted terminology candidates in English and Croatian texts and on comparison of statistical and hybrid extraction methods in English text. Evaluation of automatic and semi-automatic terminology extraction methods is performed by recall, precision and f-measure

Applying Wikipedia to Interactive Information Retrieval

There are many opportunities to improve the interactivity of information retrieval systems beyond the ubiquitous search box. One idea is to use knowledge bases—e.g. controlled vocabularies, classification schemes, thesauri and ontologies—to organize, describe and navigate the information space. These resources are popular in libraries and specialist collections, but have proven too expensive and narrow to be applied to everyday webscale search. Wikipedia has the potential to bring structured knowledge into more widespread use. This online, collaboratively generated encyclopaedia is one of the largest and most consulted reference works in existence. It is broader, deeper and more agile than the knowledge bases put forward to assist retrieval in the past. Rendering this resource machine-readable is a challenging task that has captured the interest of many researchers. Many see it as a key step required to break the knowledge acquisition bottleneck that crippled previous efforts. This thesis claims that the roadblock can be sidestepped: Wikipedia can be applied effectively to open-domain information retrieval with minimal natural language processing or information extraction. The key is to focus on gathering and applying human-readable rather than machine-readable knowledge. To demonstrate this claim, the thesis tackles three separate problems: extracting knowledge from Wikipedia; connecting it to textual documents; and applying it to the retrieval process. First, we demonstrate that a large thesaurus-like structure can be obtained directly from Wikipedia, and that accurate measures of semantic relatedness can be efficiently mined from it. Second, we show that Wikipedia provides the necessary features and training data for existing data mining techniques to accurately detect and disambiguate topics when they are mentioned in plain text. Third, we provide two systems and user studies that demonstrate the utility of the Wikipedia-derived knowledge base for interactive information retrieval

Database resources of the National Center for Biotechnology Information

In addition to maintaining the GenBank® nucleic acid sequence database, the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) provides analysis and retrieval resources for the data in GenBank and other biological data made available through the NCBI web site. NCBI resources include Entrez, the Entrez Programming Utilities, MyNCBI, PubMed, PubMed Central, Entrez Gene, the NCBI Taxonomy Browser, BLAST, BLAST Link (BLink), Electronic PCR, OrfFinder, Spidey, Splign, Reference Sequence, UniGene, HomoloGene, ProtEST, dbMHC, dbSNP, Cancer Chromosomes, Entrez Genomes and related tools, the Map Viewer, Model Maker, Evidence Viewer, Trace Archive, Sequence Read Archive, Retroviral Genotyping Tools, HIV-1/Human Protein Interaction Database, Gene Expression Omnibus, Entrez Probe, GENSAT, Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man, Online Mendelian Inheritance in Animals, the Molecular Modeling Database, the Conserved Domain Database, the Conserved Domain Architecture Retrieval Tool, Biosystems, Peptidome, Protein Clusters and the PubChem suite of small molecule databases. Augmenting many of the web applications are custom implementations of the BLAST program optimized to search specialized data sets. All these resources can be accessed through the NCBI home page at www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Social networks and information retrieval, how are they converging? A survey, a taxonomy and an analysis of social information retrieval approaches and platforms

There is currently a number of research work performed in the area of bridging the gap between Information Retrieval (IR) and Online Social Networks (OSN). This is mainly done by enhancing the IR process with information coming from social networks, a process called Social Information Retrieval (SIR). The main question one might ask is What would be the benefits of using social information (no matter whether it is content or structure) into the information retrieval process and how is this currently done?With the growing number of efforts towards the combination of IR and social networks, it is necessary to build a clearer picture of the domain and synthesize the efforts in a structured and meaningful way. This paper reviews different efforts in this domain. It intends to provide a clear understanding of the issues as well as a clear structure of the contributions. More precisely, we propose (i) to review some of the most important contributions in this domain to understand the principles of SIR, (ii) a taxonomy to categorize these contributions, and finally, (iii) an analysis of some of these contributions and tools with respect to several criteria, which we believe are crucial to design an effective SIR approach. This paper is expected to serve researchers and practitioners as a reference to help them structuring the domain, position themselves and, ultimately, help them to propose new contributions or improve existing ones

The evolution of electronic reference sources

Purpose To provide a historical look at the development of web versions of reference materials and discuss what makes an easy-to-use and useful electronic handbook. Design/methodology/approach Electronic reference materials were limited to handbooks available on the web. Observations and assumptions about usability are tested with an information retrieval test for specific tasks in print and online editions of the same texts. Findings Recommended adoption of those elements which create a well designed book in combination with robust search capabilities and online presentation result in an easy-to-use and useful electronic reference source. Research limitations/implications The small sample size that was used for testing limits the ability to draw conclusions, and is used only as an indication of the differences between models. A more thorough look at difference between electronic book aggregates, such as ENGnetBASE, Knovel® and Referex would highlight the best features for electronic reference materials. Practical implications Advantages to particular models for electronic reference publishing are discussed, raising awareness for product evaluation. Areas of development for electronic reference book publishers or providers are identified. Work in these areas would help ensure maximum efficiency through cross title searching via metasearching and data manipulation. Originality/value The paper presents results from some human computer interaction studies about electronic books which have been implemented in a web interface, and the positive effects achieved