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Does Design Contribute to Ease of Use: An Exploratory Study of Web Facets in The Result Pages of Two Search Engines
Get PDFAn exploratory study was conduced to examine the design aspects of Web facets found in the search result pages of two search engines: Exalead and Excite. The goal of the study was to determine if Web facet design could contribute to perceived ease of use. This study builds upon findings from an earlier study (Milonas, 2010) in which the results indicated that users perceived the Web facets evident in the search result pages of the Exalead search engine easier to use than those found in Excite. The researcher surmised that the design of these Web facets might have contributed to the difference in perceived ease of use. The relationship between design and user perception in determining the ease of use of Web facets within these two search engines is explored. In the first component of the study, an expert inspection of the various design aspects of the search result pages of Exalead and Excite was conducted. In the second part of the study, five participants conducted an experiment using the Web facets found in the search result pages of the two search engines. Findings of both the expert inspection and the usability evaluation showed that there does not seem to be a significant difference in the design of Web facets within the two search engines. The findings seem to indicate that design of Web facets is not a contributory factor in terms of Web facet ease of use
Description Is a Drag, and Vice Versa: Issues with Vocabulary Control
Get PDFHow do controlled vocabularies address transgender topics?This talk explores the use of hierarchical taxonomic structures to describe people’s often-fluid gender identities and sexuality, particularly the lack of accurate and appropriate language in most commonly used subject thesauri, and how the lack of this accurate and appropriate language can affect potential users. More specifically, this refers to individuals who identify as gender nonconforming.This term, as defined by the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, refers to “people who do not follow other people's ideas or stereotypes about how they should look or act based on the female or male sex they were assigned at birth.” The phrase is frequently used as an umbrella term that encompasses a wide variety of gender identities,including transsexual, drag queen, gender queer, and butch. Many standard vocabularies have a long and complicated history with regards to prescriptive access points for marginalized groups and sexualities. This talk offers a historical overview of the ways in which authorizedvocabularies have differed from vernacular language commonly used by community members and LGBTQ scholars to describe their own lives, and explores well- and lesser-known subject vocabularies such as the Library of Congress Subject Headings, Medical Subject Headings, terminology used by community archives and libraries, and tags assigned by LGBTQ people when describing their personal collections. The proposal builds on research by Melissa Adler, Sanford Berman, Ellen Greenblatt, Matt Johnson, Patrick Keilty, and Hope Olson
The Impossible Decision: Social Tagging and Derrida’s Deconstructed Hospitality
Get PDFSocial tagging has been lauded for providing a voice of the user community, free of restrictions dictated by knowledge organization standards for subject access. Tagging allows many perspectives to be represented, but at what cost? Using deconstruction, Derrida argues that absolute hospitality is required to ensure justice for access and inclusiveness; however, the consequence becomes that the host becomes hostage to the other. In this ongoing research, we explore the Derridean concept of hospitality as it relates to social tagging, examining the consequences of unconditional inclusiveness, the process of discerning constraints to hospitality in order to interpret different kinds of "otherness"—or what Derrida (2000, 75) calls the "impossible" decision—and what mitigation means, using the social tagging environment to illustrate
How are Cookbooks Classified in Libraries? An Examination of LCSH and LCC
Get PDFThere is growing interest in food and cooking in the United States, and cookbooks are published on every topic. Library standards for subject analysis must accurately represent and organize cookbooks and materials on cooking. This paper describes a research project that examined the subject of cooking in the Library of Congress Subject Headings and the Library of Congress Classification using the work of Hope Olson as a framework. It examined how the subject headings and classification numbers are constructed, how they changed over time, and how national and ethnic cuisines are treated in each standard
KO and classification instruction objectives: Are we keeping up with the transformation of our field?
Get PDFEach objective listed in courses entirely or partially dedicated to knowledgeorganization (KO) and bibliographic classification in 30 distinct LIS programs was categorized as to: 1. its nature; 2. its subject; 3. its focus; 4. its taxonomic level. The results tend to reinforce observations made over the past 30 years in relation to KO and classification courses. Teaching and learning objectives tend to bevery general, with a clearly dominant theoretical focus. Few objectives focus specifically on the complex process of analyzing subjects, and on new types of skills now required to work with classification structures available in digital form. And even if KO educators recognize the necessity for students to develop high-level analytic and evaluative skills, there are very few references to those skills in current course objectives
Is FRBR a Domain? Domain Analysis Applied to the Literature of The FRBR Family of Conceptual Models
Get PDFDomain analysis helps visualize the semantic intellectual content of a coherent group, or domain. A domain is a group with an ontological base, an underlying teleology, common hypotheses and epistemology, and social semantics. FRBR has spawned a family of conceptual models, and much writing. A recent second anthology about the FRBR models raises the question of whether a coherent domain has formed around the FRBR family. Domain analysis is used here to visualize the semantic content of the FRBR family domain, and to compare its two main component groups, scholar authors and practitioner authors. Results show a common teleology with some subtle differences surrounding implementation of the FRBR family of models
EARTHENWARE FROM A FIRING SITE IN MYANMAR (BURMA) DATES TO MORE THAN 4,500 YEARS AGO
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The Process of Organizing Personal Information
Get PDFThis paper presents preliminary results from an ongoing research study, which explores the process of organizing personal information from a cognitive sociological perspective. To collect data, a short background questionnaire, a diary study, and two post-diary semi-structured interviews were conducted, for each of the participants. The initial analysis of the results showed that there are five stages in the process of personal information organization. Each stage involved different actions, thoughts, decisions, and factors. The findings from this study will deepen our understanding about information organizing behavior and will contribute to the development and design of various personal information devices and applications that support individuals’ organizing their information
Visualizing Domain Coherence: Social Informatics as a Case Study
Get PDFUsing bibliometric methods of inquiry, one of the eleven approaches of domain-analytic research offered by HjØrland (2002), we were able to visualize the emerging field of social informatics (SI). Past research has demonstrated the breadth and depth of biblometric tools by investigating a variety of research communities (White and Griffith 1981; Tsay 1989; McCain 1991; Borgman and Rice 1992; White and McCain 1998; Smiraglia 2006, 2009, Moore 2007; Jank 2010). Using the published literature produced in SI from 1997 through 2009, allowed visualization of domain-coherence in SI. Concepts that were utilized by which to measure domain coherence include the number of ideas espoused (Collins 1998, 42), scholarly productivity (Crane 1972), and the number of scholars participating (Price 1986; Collins 1998). In this lightning paper based on a recent dissertation (Hoeffner 2012) we will present a visualization based on the analysis of social informatics’ literature, showing growth in publication productivity, evidence of intellectually and socially connected scholars, reliance on scholars from within the fields of information science, and computer science, and two or three topical areas of interest that pertained to communication and aspects of computer mediation, as well as policy and access. Discourse among scholars was evident, and although the Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology overwhelming published the largest number of SI work, there was representation in a few key journals. Author co-citation patterns revealed a core group of scholars commonly cited together, and an investigation of self-citation practices revealed slightly less evidence among SI’s most prolific authors than in science overall. Recently, Smiraglia (2012) defined a domain as “a domain is a group with an ontological base that reveals an underlying teleology, a set of common hypotheses, epistemological consensus on methodological approaches, and social semantics.” Our visualization demonstrates continued coherence of SI as a domain