The Digital Reference Electronic Warehouse Project Creating the Infrastructure for Digital Reference Research Through a Multidisciplinary Knowledge Base
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Feature the digital Reference Electronic warehouse Project Creating the Infrastructure for Digital Reference Research through a Multidisciplinary Knowledge Base One of the valuable offerings of librarians in the part of a library is the human intermediary—the digital age is the human intermediation of infor- librarian. This intermediary connects the users to mation needs. In physical libraries, these reference the information needed and can assist with advice questions are answered, and few artifacts remain about using the information retrieval systems and from the transaction; therefore, the knowledge cre- working with information. ated through the work of the librarian leaves with However, many users turn to Web search tools the patron. Due to the medium of communication, for their information retrieval needs. While these digital reference transactions capture the knowledge tools provide the user with Web pages that match of information professionals. There are hundreds of a word on the topic, the quality of the results is digital reference services generating knowledge ev- questionable. Most Web search tools are for-profit ery day; however, the lack of a schema for archiving companies and bombard us- reference transactions from multiple services makes ers with advertising. In addi- Scott nicholson and it difficult to create a fielded, searchable knowledge tion, search-engine optimiz- base. The development of such a schema would al- ers work to place commercial R. david Lankes low researchers to develop tools that practitioners sites at the top of lists; this Scott Nicholson is an Assistant Profes- can employ. In turn, this would create a collabora- has resulted in many searches sor at Syracuse University’s School of tive environment for digital reference evaluation. leading to page after page of Information Studies. R. David Lankes The goal of this work is to outline the steps needed commercial results. This com- is Director of the Information Institute to develop this schema, present the results of a sur- mercial information is appro- of Syracuse and an Associate Professor vey of digital reference services, explore some of the priate for some information- at Syracuse University’s School of Infor- pitfalls in the process, and envision the future uses seeking needs, and this is an mation Studies. Submitted for review of this Digital Reference Electronic Warehouse. area where the Web search May 2, 2005; accepted for publication tools excel. However, the July 28, 2005. he future, and some might even say search for noncommercial the present, for the library profession- information can be frustrat- al is the digital library. Instead of waiting ing. This is an opportunity Reference & User Services Quarterly, for the user to come to their information for libraries. vol. 46, no. 3, pp. 45–59 tcontainers in a physical collection, librarians select There clearly is a need © 2007 American Library Association. high-quality materials for users to access through for intermediation with the All rights reserved. the Internet. It is relatively easy to put a collection location of material online. Permission granted to reproduce for nonprofit, educational use. of static files online, however, the library is more Users have turned to ques- than just a collection of documents. A crucial tion-based search tools such volume 46, issue 3 | 45 Feature as Ask.com with the hopes of finding cades, and there are many theories de- many Web authors use Search Engine such assistance; however, these tools veloped from small samples that could Optimization (SEO) techniques to push perform no better than a general search be explored with this larger dataset. In their pages to the top of listings.5 If tool. There is another type of Web addition, by examining the common these two issues are combined—search search tool that can take a user’s ques- works referred to in different types of tools only index a small portion of the tion and match it to a set of results that questions, automatically generated di- Web, and some companies are chang- are likely to be on topic with little ad- rectories of high-quality material could ing their pages to aggressively hold the vertising and no direct charge—a digital be created and shared. The goal of the top positions in the rankings of search reference service. In fact, those teaching Digital Reference Electronic Warehouse tools—then it is expected that the typi- about Web search tools should always Project (DREW) is to create a large da- cal user who only explores the first page take the opportunity to present a digital tabase of reference transactions so that of rankings will become frustrated with reference service as a Web search tool researchers might better understand the the repetition of results. with built-in intelligence. process and then create tools for mea- One solution to these problems is Many libraries have started services surement and evaluation that managers human intermediation. Some search where they allow users to submit ques- of reference services could employ. tools have integrated human interme- tions via e-mail or Web forms. Librar- diation through directory-based search ians research the question and provide RelatIonship oF dREw tools; Yahoo!, for example, started as a an answer and related documents to the to Similar PRojectS directory-based search tool. These tools user. Some libraries offer this service allow a user to discover a small subset using a live-chat model, where the user There are several different types of digi- of resources that were selected using is interacting with a librarian with little tal multidisciplinary knowledge bases some type of quality criteria through time elapsing between question and re- currently available. Precursors to to- a hierarchical organization structure. sponse. These services are usually free, day’s knowledge bases are bibliographic Over time, search-tool companies have although the user base may be limited databases such as ArticleFirst and data- removed or reduced emphasis on these to users who are affiliated with the li- base aggregators like DIALOG. As these directory tools, promoting the full-text brary offering the services. Yahoo! has tools have grown to include access to search tools in their stead. also entered this domain with Yahoo! full-text resources, they have become There are some updated directory- Answers, which is a community-based true multidisciplinary knowledge bases. based Web search tools that harness the reference service. Users earn points for The difficulty in using these databases power of human intermediation. The good answers. Google ran a reference comes through the methods of retrieval. Open Directory (http://dmoz.org) and service for a few years called Google An- Searchers have to match the words used About.com (http://about.com) use ex- swers, in which those asking questions by the author when searching free-text perts to select Web sites on a topic and set a payment for an answer, but Google fields such as the title, abstract, and text provide users with a directory-based shut this service down in 2006. of the document. Conversely, searchers access method. For scholarly research, Some digital reference services, could attempt to match words selected Infomine (http://infomine.ucr.edu) is a commonly known as AskA services, by indexers such as subject headings. high-quality directory out of the United connect the user directly to an expert Users can get frustrated with these States, and BUBL (http://bubl.ac.uk/ in the field instead of to a librarian. tools, as they tend to match either too link) is focused on academic Web-based Services such as Ask Dr. Math (http:// few or too many articles.2 information from the United Kingdom mathforum.org/dr.math) and AskNSDL Another type of multidisciplinary and Europe. The difficulty with these (http://nsdl.org/asknsdl) allow users to knowledge base available is the Web. tools is similar to the problem with the ask questions of experts in specific top- Web search tools provide a portal to bibliographic databases; searchers have ics. This is a different model of the this knowledge base. Most current Web to match either the terms selected by reference process, but the information search tools allow the user to search large the authors of the pages or terms se- contained in these transactions is valu- portions of the textual data available on lected by the creator of the directory. able. Lankes presented a model that con- a conveniently accessed subset of the The setting for the current paper trasted these two types of services in his Web. These search tools cannot access is in digital reference, which is hu- research agenda for digital reference.1 large portions of the Web known as the man intermediation provided in direct There are hundreds of these services Invisible Web.3 In fact, one study claims response to a user’s query. Most of the around the world providing answers that the well-known search tools index time, the answer to a digital reference and resources in response to user needs. only about .03 percent of the Web.4 question contains text as well as links to If collected into a knowledge base, it In addition, as these search tools Web pages, journal articles, and other would be incredibly useful for research- index the words used on the page, information. Therefore, the answer will ers to explore the results of this process. the user has to search using the words connect the same types of resources dis- Information-seeking research has been used by the authors of the page. Due to cussed in the previous few paragraphs. an active line of exploration for de- the commercial nature of these tools, The transaction will also have some 46 | Reference & User Services Quarterly The Digital Reference Electronic Warehouse (DREW) Project metadata, such as subject headings, provide access to the KnowledgeBase to be discussed later, is automation of attached to it by either the user or by for their users by linking to Question- several of the cleaning processes such as a staff member during the digital refer- Point.OCLC also provides a Firefox assignment of subject headings.