eLucidate (Journal)
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Understanding & Improving Search Using Large-Scale Behavioural Data
No full textA key benefit of text mining is that it can be used to improve the whole search experience and optimise search engine technologies. The rise of web-based search systems over the past decade has enabled information scientists to develop powerful large-scale behavioural logging technologies that provide a unique insight into ‘what searchers do’; how people interact with web-based search systems. This ability to gather traces of human behaviour on an extensive scale and speed provides the backdrop to innovation and improvement in search, complementing other forms of experimental research that observes how people engage with search systems including, for example, controlled lab-based observational studies
The Changing Face of Information Professional in the Pharmaceutical Industry
Get PDFAt UKeiG’s 2016 Members’ day in June this year John Wickenden reflected on his varied career working with one pharmaceutical company. Over the years he managed to reinvent his role as technology advanced, influencing management and ensuring his continued relevance to the business critical objectives of his employer. There are so many lessons to learn from his experiences that we revisit his career in this issue and are taken on a whirlwind tour of nearly five decades of technological transition. With every decade of IT change Wickenden, rather than fearing obsolescence through disintermediation, grabbed the opportunity for change. He was left standing long after his company’s library was closed to make way for conference space.
 
Editor\u27s Note
No full textEditorial overview of this issue\u27s content with comments, news and observations
Unlocking Research: An interview with Danny Kingsley
Get PDFDanny Kingsley, founder of the Office of Scholarly Communication at Cambridge University, shows that researchers are circumventing cash-strapped academic libraries (often illegally) to access the full text of scholarly papers. We feature an interview with Danny, who discusses this and other research support issues
Reflections on Information Retrieval: The 2016 Strix Annual Lecture
Get PDFThis article pays homage to the success of UKeiG’s Tony Kent Strix Award, with a brief overview of the fascinating 2016 Annual Lecture. Chris Armstrong writes: “The panel that runs the Tony Kent Strix Award felt for a number of years that the winners should be celebrated in some way that extended beyond a simple presentation, and the inauguration of the Annual Strix Lecture in 2015 was the outcome. Peter Ingwersen followed Microsoft’s Dr Susan T Dumais and will be followed next year by the 2016 winner, Professor Maristella Agosti.”
On his recent retirement from UKeiG, Chris, who with the Strix panel has managed the Award for many years, said: “It has been an honour to be associated with the Tony Kent Strix Award for so long. It is given in recognition and appreciation of a man I only knew slightly, but who made major contributions to information retrieval. The list of previous winners is impressive, from Professor Stephen Robertson through international luminaries such as Donna Harman, Peter Willett, Kalervo Jarvelin, Keith van Rijsbergen and Herbert van Sompel. The award stands as a fitting tribute to everything that Tony Kent accomplished. It should be said that it also marks the not inconsiderable effort put in over the years by my colleagues on the Strix panel who set up the Award following Tony Kent’s death.” In taking over the Award from the Institute of Information Scientists, UKeiG recognised its value and importance, and the group is proud to sponsor the Annual Lecture
"A School Library Built for the Digital Age": A Summary and Discussion of Key Conference Themes from IASL 2016, Tokyo
Get PDFAmy Icke, recipient of UKeiG’s Early Career award, reports on the IASL (International Association of School Librarians) Conference 2016, held in Tokyo, 21st - 26th August 2016. The theme of the event was “A school library built for the digital age” and Amy outlines and discusses key conference themes illustrated with examples delivered by librarians working in a range of countries including Japan, Australia, Sweden and Canada.
Key messages for our readers in all sectors includes:
The importance of context: knowing your organisation and your audience and tailoring your message to them;Meaningful collaboration and relationship building: how to forge successful working relationships between staff and libraries;The diversity of the LIS work role;The importance of teaching digital literacies and getting students “work ready”
Higher Education Focus: Collection Development - Negotiating the Future
Get PDFTwo beneficiaries of the UKeiG student and early career professional grants programme report back on conferences they attended earlier in the year. Their focus is on higher education: the emerging skills set required for effective collection development in universities, and the complex cultural (even political) considerations that have to be borne in mind before launching electronic reading list projects as part of the wider technology-enhanced learning agenda
Editor’s Note
Get PDFEditorial overview of this issue\u27s content with comments, news and observations
Facing the Future: Challenges & Choices
Get PDFThe UKeiG Members’ Day for 2016 was a great success, with an eclectic and enthusiastic membership taking time out to look to the future, addressing the trends and challenges impacting on the information profession.
CILIP Chief Executive Nick Poole led on an optimistic note by encouraging the profession to embrace change. ‘I believe the future for the information, library and knowledge profession is exciting and vibrant with endless possibilities shaped by changing technology and the changing needs of our users. The challenge is to continue to grow and develop, learn, adapt and innovate.’ UKeiG is in a prime position to shape and lead change.
Lin Lin, Senior User Experience Researcher at EBSCO presented us with a dilemma by unravelling the student psyche and highlighting the processes that an average young scholar goes through to research for an essay. Any information literacy training is quickly forgotten, jettisoned in the last minute midnight rush to hit a deadline; pursuing Google and Wikipedia with a vengeance, and largely oblivious to information professional speak like ‘Boolean’, ‘database, even ‘catalogue.’ Where have we gone wrong?
David Milward, CTO of Linguamatics, presented a fascinating insight into text mining, highlighting its huge potential to inform evidence-based decision-making. The auto-analysis and manipulation of free text on a large scale will enable us to extract and summarise key information, categorise documents more effectively, discover emerging terminology, generate metadata and define relationships between documents. However, there are significant challenges in this area, largely around making sense of masses of unstructured information and data, but also disambiguating natural language and all of the pitfalls that it presents in terms of synonymous terminology, different meanings and expressions, grammar and context