LIS618 lecture 0 Thomas Krichel

Organization homepage Contents to be discussed today. Send mail to –Your name –Your secret word for grades delivery Interrupt me with as many questions as possible! Ask for breaks!

Proposed Organization Normal lecture Quiz at the beginning of every lecture –Remove two worst performances –Average to form 50% –No quiz next week! Search exercise 50% Formal syllabus to be made early next week!

Enlargement of hours I would like to make the sessions longer To compensate, some weeks would not have class Such weeks would be concentrated at the end of the term Advantages for students –Saves students time to travel –Improves grades because of worst performance discount. I will not be there some weeks, may have to add extra out-of-class work.

Search exercise find victim of an information need conduct interview about an information need experienced by the victim, write down expectations search in Dialog and on web discuss results with the victim write essay, no longer than 7 pages.

About me Born 1965, in Völklingen (Germany) Studied economics and social sciences at the Universities of Toulouse, Paris, Exeter and Leiceister. PhD in theoretical macroeconomics Lecturer in Economics at the University of Surrey 1993 and 2001 Since 2001 assistant professor at the Palmer School

Why? During research assistantship period, (1990 to 1993) I was constantly frustrated with difficult access to scientific literature. At the same time, I discovered easy access to freely downloadable software over the Internet. I decided to work towards downloadable scientific documents. This lead to my library career (eventually).

Steps taken I 1993 founded the NetEc project at later available at as well as at These are networking projects targeted to the economics community. The bulk is –Information about working papers –Downloadable working papers –Journal articles were added later

Steps taken II Set up RePEc, a digital library for economics research. Catalogs –Research documents –Collections of research documents –Researchers themselves –Organizations that are important to the research process Decentralized collection, model for the open archives initiative

Steps taken III Co-founder of Open Archives Initiative Work on the Academic Metadata Format Co-founded rclis, a RePEc clone for (Research in Computing, Library and Information Science)

Interest in databases From my point of view I have two interests in database searching –As a provider, I must understand how people search in order to provide some data that they can use and will use. –As an economist, I have a strong interest in information as a commodity. The database market is an important market place.

Database searching (DS) subset of the subject of information retrieval (IR) DS mainly thought as applicable to the set of large structured databases as opposed to do web searching for those, a general knowledge of what databases are seems useful Concentrate on textual databases

traditional social model user goes to a library describes problem to the librarian librarian does the search –without the user present –with the user present hands over the result to the user user fetches full-text or asks a librarian to fetch the full text.

economic rational for traditional model In olden days the cost of telecommunication was high. database use costs –cost of communication –cost of access time to the database the traditional model controls an upper bound on costs

disintermediation with access cost time gone, the traditional model is under threat there is disintermediation where the librarian looses her role but that may not be good news for information retrieval results –user knows subject matter best –librarian knows searching best

Web searching IR has received a lot of impetus through the web, which poses unprecedented search challenges. with more and more data appearing on the web DS may be a subject in decline –it is primarily concerned with non-web databases –There is more and more web-based methods of searching

Thank you for your attention!