Special Libraries, February 1962

Volume 53, Issue 2https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_sl_1962/1001/thumbnail.jp

From the visual book to the WEB book : the importance of design

This paper presents the results of two studies into electronic book production. The Visual book study explored the importance of the visual component of the book metaphor for the production of more effective electronic books, while the WEB book study took the findings of the Visual book and applied them to the production of books for publication on the World Wide Web (WWW). Both studies started from an assessment of which kinds of paper book are more suitable for translation into electronic form. Both also identified publications which are meant to be used for reference rather than those which are read sequentially, and usually in their entirety. This group includes scientific publications and textbooks which were both used as the target group for the Visual book and the WEB book experiments. In this paper we discuss the results of the two studies and how they could influence the design and production of more effective electronic books

HILT : High-Level Thesaurus Project. Phase IV and Embedding Project Extension : Final Report

Ensuring that Higher Education (HE) and Further Education (FE) users of the JISC IE can find appropriate learning, research and information resources by subject search and browse in an environment where most national and institutional service providers - usually for very good local reasons - use different subject schemes to describe their resources is a major challenge facing the JISC domain (and, indeed, other domains beyond JISC). Encouraging the use of standard terminologies in some services (institutional repositories, for example) is a related challenge. Under the auspices of the HILT project, JISC has been investigating mechanisms to assist the community with this problem through a JISC Shared Infrastructure Service that would help optimise the value obtained from expenditure on content and services by facilitating subject-search-based resource sharing to benefit users in the learning and research communities. The project has been through a number of phases, with work from earlier phases reported, both in published work elsewhere, and in project reports (see the project website: http://hilt.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/). HILT Phase IV had two elements - the core project, whose focus was 'to research, investigate and develop pilot solutions for problems pertaining to cross-searching multi-subject scheme information environments, as well as providing a variety of other terminological searching aids', and a short extension to encompass the pilot embedding of routines to interact with HILT M2M services in the user interfaces of various information services serving the JISC community. Both elements contributed to the developments summarised in this report

Optimising metadata to make high-value content more accessible to Google users

Purpose: This paper shows how information in digital collections that have been catalogued using high-quality metadata can be retrieved more easily by users of search engines such as Google. Methodology/approach: The research and proposals described arose from an investigation into the observed phenomenon that pages from the Glasgow Digital Library (gdl.cdlr.strath.ac.uk) were regularly appearing near the top of Google search results shortly after publication, without any deliberate effort to achieve this. The reasons for this phenomenon are now well understood and are described in the second part of the paper. The first part provides context with a review of the impact of Google and a summary of recent initiatives by commercial publishers to make their content more visible to search engines. Findings/practical implications: The literature research provides firm evidence of a trend amongst publishers to ensure that their online content is indexed by Google, in recognition of its popularity with Internet users. The practical research demonstrates how search engine accessibility can be compatible with use of established collection management principles and high-quality metadata. Originality/value: The concept of data shoogling is introduced, involving some simple techniques for metadata optimisation. Details of its practical application are given, to illustrate how those working in academic, cultural and public-sector organisations could make their digital collections more easily accessible via search engines, without compromising any existing standards and practices

The effect of WWW document structure on students' information retrieval

This experiment investigated the effect the structure of a WWW document has on the amount of information retained by a reader. Three structures common on the Internet were tested: one long page; a table of contents leading to individual sections; and short sections of text on separate pages with revision questions. Participants read information structured in one of these ways and were then tested on recall of that information. A further experiment investigated the effect that 'browsing' - moving between pages - has on retrieval. There was no difference between the structures for overall amount of information retained. The single page version was best for recall of facts, while the short sections of text with revision questions led to the most accurate inferences from the material. Browsing on its own had no significant impact on information retrieval. Revision questions rather than structure per se were therefore the key factor

Special Libraries, December 1964

Volume 55, Issue 10https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_sl_1964/1009/thumbnail.jp

Judging a book by its cover: interface elements that affect reader selection of ebooks

Digital library research has demonstrated the impact of content presentation on both search and reading behaviours. In this paper, we scrutinise the influence of ebook presentation on user behaviour, focussing on document thumbnails and the first page view. We demonstrate that flaws in presentation increase the volume of short time-span reading, and reduce the likelihood of long-span reading when compared to other documents. This reflects other patterns of information seeking behaviour that demonstrate increased short-term reading when information content is uncertain, and suggests an ineffective use of reader time on less useful content

Special Libraries, December 1964

Volume 55, Issue 10https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_sl_1964/1009/thumbnail.jp