Category: Research

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What I’ve done with My Summer Vacation

It has been a busy month at the Institute with all of us traveling and moving in different directions before the start of the semester. I thought it would be useful to recap some of the recent projects I’ve been working on and where they are headed. Some of this information is just an update to previous posts on my blog, some is new. Sorry if it is repetitive, but it helps me put it all in one place.

My projects have revolved around two threads…credibility and digital reference. There are three major projects here:

• Reference Extract: A digital reference search engine
• Story Starters: building a blogging community of answers and questions, and
• IKE: the Inductive Knowledge Engine

Let me break them down:
Continue reading “What I’ve done with My Summer Vacation”

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Working Hard

WmiSorry I have been quiet for a while. I’ve been very busy preparing for a MacArthur presentation next week. I’ve been building the Story Starters site…and having a fun time in source code. The basics of the site are done and almost ready for public play (on the “reference implementation at least). We’ll need to do some re-writing and cleaning up (not good to do database design while you are also figuring out the feature set).
It is also becoming clear to me how Story Starters is going to become the next version of QABuilder – OpenQA.

I hope to have a site up for folks to look at end of next week.

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End of a Busy Month

Well, yesterday I finished up a working demo site of Story Starters for the National Science Digital Library. Doing that and teaching kept me too busy to blog. My plan is to make a more general and scalable demo for the world. Hopefully I can have that up by the end of the week. My intention is to also tie in Reference Extract.

Right now in Reference Extract you can search digital reference knowledge-bases and then extend your search to cited references.Like this:

DR Archives –> Cited Searches

No imagine, chaining more specific searches together, so now we can add blogs in Story Starters:

Blogs –> DR Archives –> Cited Searches

Making this capability generic, a local library could add their archives, and then extend to Reference Extract:

My Library –> DR Archives –> Cited Search

And one could continue to add more links:

My Library –> DR Archive –> Cited Search –> Google

The idea would be to make a general utility to tie these searches together in a seamless interface and allow any interface mix and match (and collapse) these chains based on a given user interface. So a library could go:

My Library –> Cited Search –> Google

etc.

Just an idea. Off to start the Story Starter site.

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Story Starters

LogoWe’re in the process of developing a service called “Story Starters.” It is sort of a fun idea that grew out of an immediate need. The immediate need was a way to connect Blogs with our QABuilder software. Where we’ve ended up (for now) is a general blog starting service. A person or organization posts some list of items they want to be blogged about, and from within blogging software (WordPress to start with), can browse lists and pick the ones they want to blog about. The resulting blog entries are then aggregated and sent back to the posting agent…read more to see why this might be useful.
Continue reading “Story Starters”

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NISO Rises from the Ashes

So as I mentioned I’m working on linking blogging and digital reference, and trying to figure out how to pass messages between the two without doing a major re-work on QABuilder. Then it hit me (I’m slow sometimes)…this is what we built NISO AZ to do, and why we integrated it into QABuilder. It should be a simple matter to get questions and answers into QABuilder using NISO AZ.
Continue reading “NISO Rises from the Ashes”

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Gateway to Educational Materials Portal to Expand

Information Institute of Syracuse forms transition team to manage and develop new web site features and member services

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Syracuse Mar 25, 2005 The Gateway to Educational Materials (GEM), already one of the Internetâ??s most popular destination web sites for teachers, will introduce new options and services in the coming months designed to provide better searching, added flexibility and personal interaction, according to officials from the Information Institute of Syracuse, GEMâ??s home since 1996. The new features are part of a reorganization process that will also improve and expand services to groups hosting or contributing to the rapidly growing collection of high quality lesson plans, reference materials, and other exemplary educational resources.

Originally developed with funding by the United States Department of Education, GEM has grown from a collection of 700 lesson plans in 1998 to a digital library featuring over 42,000 resources today from over 700 providers including PBS, NASA, The Smithsonian and many others. The GEM websiteâ??s popularity among teachers is due to the quality of resources it houses, its organization of educational materials, and search technologies that provide much more precise and relevant results for teachers than general Internet search engines.

â??The Gatewayâ??s success and growth over the past three years encouraged us to reconsider how the project should be funded and managed,â?? noted R. David Lankes, director of the Information Institute of Syracuse. â??We need to transition to a consortium model that embraces a wide range of funding sources, that facilitates rapid development of new technologies and capabilities, and that reflects an increasing emphasis on academic standards as an integral part of the Gatewayâ??s search and retrieval functions,â?? he continued.

The transition to the next version of The Gateway to Education Materials Portal will be directed by the GEM Exchange, a partnership of JES & Co., a non-profit organization with extensive experience in academic standards and organizational management, the Information Institute of Syracuse, and the Information School at the University of Washington, who will continue to oversee the development of new services provided by the Gateway on behalf of the consortium members. The next release will include an individual personalization space for teachers and the ability to create and share information about the available resources including alignment to state and national standards. Access to the GEM portal by teachers will continue to be free.

For more information, see http://thegateway.org, or visit JES & Co.â??s website at http://www.jesandco.org

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Nicholson and Lankes’ Research to be Featured at ALA

Research

Nicholson and Lankes’ Research to be Featured at ALA
By: Virtual Dave on: Mon 24 of Jan, 2005 [07:45] (325 reads)

Nicholson and Lankes’ work in digital reference knowledge bases and the Digital Reference Electronic Warehouse (DREW) will be one of three research projects presented at the RUSA Research Roundtable.

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From the letter of acceptance:

The RUSA Reference Services Section’s Research & Statistics Committee has selected your paper proposal to be one of three presented at the 2005 ALA Annual Conference in Chicago, Illinois. The committee was very impressed with your submission and we’re looking forward to having you on the program.