Visual Resource Reference: Collaboration Between Digital Museums and Digital Libraries

The Information Institute of Syracuse at Syracuse University is engaged in a project designed to build collaborative digital museum and digital library reference services. To that end, the project team is currently developing, testing, and evaluating procedures and mechanisms that will enable museums and libraries to work together in providing reference assistance over the Web to support patrons\u27 image information needs. The user-centered project is based upon a successful model for digital reference that has been widely embraced in the digital library community. This approach is expected to yield new insight into users\u27 image seeking behavior that will help museums and libraries provide transparent access to visual resources across collections and institutions. This article presents an overview of the project and discusses the challenges involved in helping users find appropriate images on the web

Evaluation of Text-Based and Image-Based Representations for Moving Image Documents

Document representation is a fundamental concept in information retrieval (IR), and has been relied upon in textual IR systems since the advent of library catalogs. The reliance upon text-based representations of stored information has been perpetuated in conventional systems for the retrieval of moving images as well. Although newer systems have added image-based representations of moving image documents as aids to retrieval, there has been little research examining how humans interpret these different types of representations. Such basic research has the potential to inform IR system designers about how best to aid users of their systems in retrieving moving images. One key requirement for the effective use of document representations in either textual or image form is thedegree to which these representations are congruent with the original documents. A measure of congruence is the degree to which human responses to representations are similar to responses produced by the document being represented. The aim of this study was to develop a model for the representation of moving images based upon human judgements of representativeness. The study measured the degree of congruence between moving image documents and their representations, both text and image based, in a non-retrieval environment with and without task constraints. Multidimensional scaling (MDS) was used to examine the dimensional dispersions of human judgements for the full moving images and their representations

Abstract Analysis of User Image descriptions and Automatic Image Indexing Vocabularies: An Exploratory Study

This study explores the terms assigned by users to index, manage, and describe images and compares them to indexing terms derived automatically by systems for image retrieval. Results of this study indicate that userderived indexing vocabulary largely reflects what users see in the image or what they perceive as the overall topic of an image. This is in contrast to system-derived indexing wherein terms are extracted from existing text surrounding the image. In many cases, the surrounding text does not describe the image, rather, the image is used to illustrate or expand upon the text. Systemderived vocabulary may describe higher level concepts, for example, industrial pollution rather than smoke. The paper concludes with suggestions for the use of natural language processing techniques to provide vocabulary alignment in image retrieval. 1

ABSTRACT

What elicitations or requests for information do search intermediaries make of users with information requests during an information retrieval (IR) interaction-- including prior to and during an IR interaction-- and for what purpose? These issues were investigated during a study of elicitations during 40 mediated IR interactions. A total of 1557 search intermediary elicitations were identified within 15 purpose categories. The elicitation purposes of search intermediaries included requests for information on search terms and strategies, database selection, search procedures, system’s outputs and relevance of retrieved items, and users ’ knowledge and previous information-seeking. These findings are compared with results from a study of end-user questions (Nahl & Tenopir, 1996) and a study of user elicitations of search intermediaries (Wu, 1993). Implications of the findings for the development of a dialogue-based model of IR interaction based on a grammar of IR interaction framework and the design of IR systems are also discussed.