LIS 454: Value Added in online searching and Selective Dissemination of information SDI

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LIS 454 Value Added in online searching and
Selective Dissemination of information (SDI)

• Class 5

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(1)Before..Think about SDI!!

• Yahoo Ten Years

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1995
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SDI And Value

• How do we measure the value of databases
  nowadays?
• Why is A more expensive than B?
• Features!
• Value of information
• Importance of updated information
• Importance of personalization
• The importance of retrieving what is most
  important to me.

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For next class What is open access?

• Open access - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
• BioMed Central about us Open access charter
• ARL and Scholarly communication
• Key Open Access Concepts
• Open Access
• Add to this Open Source!!

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The notion of value

• Whereas in the private sector an innovation
  merely needs to be profitable to be worth doing,
  in the public sector innovation must be about
  doing something worthwhile.... Second, public
  sector innovation involves more than simply doing
  the public's business well....Third, non-profit
  and government innovation involves the broader
  public good. The ultimate purpose of innovation
  is not to win awards, boost public confidence, or
  attract foundation support, but to create public
  value. (Light, 1998, p. xv, emphasis in the
  original) (Cited by Deiss, Kathryn))

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Value Added and SDI

•   Access to authoritative business, news,
  company, financial, market, and technical
  data.     Customized data sets and interfaces,
  at host, enterprise, and desktop levels.    
  Desktop interfaces that integrate local and
  external content.     Customized views for
  different departments, from the RD lab to the
  sales force to the executive suite.     "Push"
  and "pull" options, enabling automatically fed
  content as well as user-defined searches.    
  Enterprise-wide, flat-rate pricing plans that
  encourage widespread use.     Fall-back
  reliance upon enterprise libraries and
  information centers for advanced research.(2003
  Econtent 26 (4))

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SDI and Science

• Selective dissemination of information to
  individuals provides a new and promising method
  for keeping abreast of current scientific
  information. Since SDI services are directed to
  the information needs of each individual, they
  are a significant step beyond grouporiented
  services and products, which require considerable
  expenditure of effort by each user as he sorts
  useful information from trash. However, SDI
  systems do require a high degree of precision in
  matching scientists against documents. They must
  operate more efficiently and economically than
  many current systems which occasionally provide a
  useful item of information to users. To meet
  these stringent requirements for quality,
  precision, efficiency, and economy, more research
  must be devoted to comparing and improving
  indexing methods, which are the basic component
  of all information storage and retrieval systems.
  (Schneider, Science, 1971)

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SDI and Science Blame it on indexing!

• Indexing effort is expended only once, whereas
  search and retrieval effort is required by every
  user of a system. If information were better
  analyzed and organized during input operations,
  if more basic research were devoted to the effect
  of indexing methods on the performance of
  information systems, and if more emphasis were
  placed on the quality and usefulness of retrieved
  information, then the magnitude of problems
  related to the storage and retrieval of
  scientific information might be considerably
  reduced. (Schneider, Science, 1971)

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Value Added and SDI

• Selective dissemination of information (SDI) has
  been around at least as long as I've been working
  in libraries (a period of time that now extends
  so far into the past that I hate to mention
  specifics anymore). It became a hot item when
  online databases came into fashion in the 1970s,
  particularly in academic and special libraries.
  If one simply stretches the definition a bit, the
  medieval monk who kept an eye out for special
  manuscripts for an ecclesiastical superior was
  practicing SDI. The caretaker in the Alexandrian
  Library, who watched for special interests of
  some wealthy Greek noble, was practicing SDI.
  (Anderson, Proactive Reference, 88)

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MY Website
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Other sources (like annotation tools)

• http//del.icio.us/ (Social bookmarks manager)
• http//www.flickr.com/ (Photo Archive)
• http//www.furl.net/ (Bookmarks)

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The Buzz

• It is hard to avoid the buzz online about Flickr,
  a photo organising/sharing service yet to
  celebrate its first birthday. In tones echoing
  the optimism of early 90s internet culture,
  enthusiasts say the service makes possible new
  kinds of conversation and community. For others,
  it shows how the efforts of individuals can be
  harnessed to help organise the internet.
• Flickr's growth has matched this excitement.
  Though still in beta, it has 245,000 members, and
  is growing at 5-10 a week, according to
  co-founder Caterina Fake. "We have 3.5m photos
  online - members upload up to 60,000 new photos a
  day."
• Flickr is well designed and easy to use, but its
  popularity is probably because it permits what
  Fake calls "a rich, sharing experience". The
  tools it gives users - in particular the ability
  to "tag" photos (describe their content with a
  key word) and then, via those tags, share images
  with others, have unleashed the social potential
  of digital photos. (3 February 2005)

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And the tools? And the problems?

• Persistent Uniform Resource Locator
• Why PURL? The metaphor of knocking at the door.
• A PURL is a reliable URL
• Purl takes you to a Immediate resolution service
  which associates the purl with the actual URL.
• Purl lasts longer than the URL.

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RSS for Publishers

• So, what are publishers using RSS for? One
  obvious application is as an alerting service for
  tables of content information, or (as in the case
  of Ingenta) to send out notifications of new
  issues without going down to the article level.
  Some publishers (notably Nature Publishing Group,
  International Union of Crystallography, Ingenta)
  are already adding rich metadata using both the
  Dublin Core and PRISM term sets, while other
  publishers (BioMed Central, Institute of Physics,
  Oxford University Press, Extenza) are providing
  basic Dublin Core. (Hammond et al. D-LIB Magazine
  10 (12)

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RSS Rich Site Summary
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About RSS

• To really tap the outreach potential of RSS
  though, move beyond receiving and recording RSS
  content and become your own RSS feed. I think
  this is one of the great opportunities that blogs
  have brought to the information profession
  another venue in which we can be distinctive and
  offer a superior product. The most important
  strategy to apply to your feed is to ensure that
  it is substantive and on-point for your user
  community. That means going beyond topics like
  circulation due dates and special hours. For
  example, if your audience is a corporate firm,
  you need to offer them a feed that's relevant to
  the firm's goals. That's going to be really
  different than what's needed in an academic
  setting. It's a tantalizing opportunity to be
  creative, and creativity can expose more people
  to your own vision for information services.
  (Huwe, 2006)

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SDI tools that move ahead from the traditional.

• RSS
• Podcasts
• Blogs
• Tags

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RSS

• For Web users, the chief benefit of RSS is
  convenience. Instead of periodically going to web
  sites and blogs of interest to find out what is
  new, you can have that new information
  automatically delivered to you. This makes it
  less time-consuming to keep up. (Goldsborough,
  Teacher Librarian 34 no3 51 F 2007 )
• Bloglines
• Sun Microsystems' disclosure
• http//pipes.yahoo.com
• http//reader.google.com

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Blogs

• Use blogs as a library promotional tool to inform
  clients of changes and additions to library
  services and collections, and of news and current
  events. Watson and Harper'ssup5 findings in a
  study of the use of blogs, wikis and other
  collaborative technologies in the information
  industry in Australia found that more public
  libraries are using blogs than wikis and that 22
  per cent of public libraries used blogs to
  communicate with clients. (Mary Ann Kajewski,
  Australasian Public Libraries and Information
  Services 19 no4 157-63 D 2006 )
• www.madisonpubliclibrary.org/whatsnew.html
• http//inbox.berkeley.edu

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Podcasts

• The word podcast originates from combining 'iPod'
  and 'broadcast'. A podcast is an audio program
  distributed over the internet. Consider it like a
  radio show. Each show consists of a series of
  individual episodes that you can listen to
  however, whenever, and wherever you want. You
  listen when it is convenient. A podcast is unlike
  a regular downloaded audio recording or streaming
  audio in that the content distribution is
  automatically done through RSS (really simple
  syndication/rich site summary). (Kajewski, 2006)

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Podcasts

• Similarly to blogs, the standard way of receiving
  podcasts is by subscribing using a podcatcher or
  a podcast client such as iTunes, Juice, gPodder,
  Odeo and PodSpider. Subscription may be through
  podcast directories or by physically entering a
  podcast's RSS feed url onto the client.
  (Kajewski, 2006)

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Tags

• www.libraryjournal.com/Rethlefsen915
• Traditional library web products, whether online
  public access catalogs, library databases, or
  even library web sites, have long been rigidly
  controlled and difficult to use. Patrons
  regularly prefer Google's simple interface. Now
  social book marking and tagging tools help
  librarians bridge the gap between the library's
  need to offer authoritative, well-organized
  information and their patrons' web experience.
  (Rethlefsen, M. L. / LJ (September 15 2007)

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Value Added Deliverables

• During recent years, increasingly, information
  brokers prepare value-added deliverables for
  corporate information managers and librarians on
  a contractual or ad hoc, per-project basis.
  Individuals from various departments in companies
  of varying sizes and across many industries, as
  well as business, marketing, and management
  consultants, also hire information brokers when
  budgets and deadlines permit the time and expense
  it takes for this type of work. (Kassel, 2002)

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VAD Looking at the report

• Value-added deliverables fall into the realm of
  dissemination of information, a traditional
  library role, but they require additional skills
  that encompass critical thinking and writing and
  communication proficiency. Critical thinking
  recognizes 1) patterns and provides a way to use
  those patterns to solve a problem or answer a
  question 2) errors in logic, reasoning, or the
  thought process 3) the identification of
  irrelevant or extraneous information 4) critical
  analysis of preconceptions, bias, values, and the
  way that these affect our thinking

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VAD

• Value Added ( the need for efficiency)
• Librarians ( The intermediaries)
• Competitive Intelligence ( the sub-field)
• Knowledge Management (sub-field)

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VAD

• 1) Considerable time savings for the customer.
• 2) The enhancing of customer perceptions of the
  information center's worth.
• Interesting quantitative an qualitative factors.

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VAD

• When should I start to be concerned about Value
  added deliverables.
• Do you use them?
• NetAdvantage
• Have you prepared them? What are the main
  challenges?
• Look at your final assignment. You are preparing
  a value added deliverable in certain way.

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VAD

• What is it? Once complete, research is reviewed,
  filtered, organized, and synthesized into a
  written report that succinctly summarizes and
  further categorizes what has been uncovered
  during the research process. The final output can
  answer specific questions, either about companies
  or industries, or about business management,
  business processes, marketing and advertising
  strategies, or trends and forecasts about the
  future. (Kessel, 2002)

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Why VAD

• Minimizing or preventing user exposure to
  information overload ( assumption one)
• Increasing customer use (assumption two)
• Bringing in new business (how?)
• Online resources and deliverableswhat a team!

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Adapting the notion of SDI to your project

• Conduct research.
• Organize research results.
• Synthesize raw material into an executive or
  written report that includes a summary.

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Your model

• The adage "less is more" applies strongly to
  value-added deliverables. Learn to prepare
  reports with short sentences and bullets that
  concisely summarize research. Avoiding those huge
  printouts of hundreds of pages is one request
  that some clients make, although other clients
  prefer to review all materials and incorporate
  data into their own reports or analyzes.

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Your model

• The format. How does your client like the format?
  Have you thought about Pdf?

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Your model

• Customize reports according to client needs.
• Use sources that save time (and your money when
  necessary)
• Create models and templates.
• Value-added deliverables take hours to prepare
  but the pay off is BIG.

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Your model

• As the work progresses, the librarian records
  search
• strategies used, databases searched, dates of
  coverage
• provided by each database at the time of the
  search,
• number of items downloaded from each database
  (often
• records are tagged with the source database),
  order
• of precedence in removing duplicate citations,
  and
• number of duplicate items removed. All of this
  information is needed for final reporting.
  (Systematic Reviews in the medical field, McGowan
  et al. )

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Your model The value of email.

• Here's where using technology counter
  intuitively often produces the best results. At
  my library, we spend all this time blogging and
  doing Web publishing to make sure people will
  read our e-mail--a simple notion, but this
  community operates on e-mail, and it's worked
  well for us. We send a steady stream of e-mails,
  providing news and links to new Web publications.
  The sources range from major news feeds to
  outfits such as the Brookings Institution and the
  Organization for Economic Cooperation and
  Development. We have found that even though there
  are many ways for the faculty to keep up with new
  developments, many are too busy to do so. In
  effect, the library staff plays the role of news
  service, providing targeted info to various
  individuals and communities of practices that
  share research interests. (Huwe, Some Best
  Practices for Personalizing Outreach 2006)

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Look around

• Where is SDI available?
• Look at the electronic resources around you?
• Actually, when is SDI not available?
• What does that say? Where are we going then?

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Read for next classs discussion.

• Deiss, K. (2004) Innovation and strategy Risk
  and choice in using user-centered libraries.
  Library Trends, 53 (1), 17-32.
• McGowan et al. (2005). Systematic reviews need
  systematic searchers. Journal of the Medical
  Library Association, 93 (1).
• Mike Thelwall, Rudy Prabowo (2007). Identifying
  and characterizing public science-related fears
  from RSS feeds. Journal of the American Society
  for Information Science and Technology, 58 (3),
  379-390.
• Burroughs, J. M. (2007). News You Can Use
  Contemporary SDI and Anticipatory Reference for
  Government Information. The Reference Librarian,
  47 (2), 17-28