Highway
Safety Research Center Library
1998
LAUNC-CH Spring Conference
Live
From the Internet: Web Rings
Money,
Twins, & Birds
Document
Retrieval using IRIS at TREC-6
Library
News / Member News
Moving
to the Web: Government Information In Transition
The Highway Safety Research Center Library is located at 730 Airport Road, Bolin Creek Center, Suite 300, and is open 8:00 - 5:00 Monday - Friday, telephone (919)962-8701. The library exists primarily for use of Highway Safety Research Center Research Staff, but library services are available for use by UNC students, faculty and staff and by the public by appointment.
Staff: Mary Ellen Tucker is Librarian. Graduate students from
the UNC-CH School of Information and Library Science assist with document
delivery, cataloging, and maintenance of archives.
The Collection: This is one of the few special libraries in
existence that focuses on the subject of traffic safety. Subject matter
is concentrated on the following areas: Engineering analysis and design
of streets and roadways, including facilities for pedestrians and cyclists;
and, applied psychology, including young and old driver studies, prevention
of drunk driving, and driving simulation. There is a large collection of
statistical data on traffic accidents from North Carolina, the United States,
and several foreign countries. Library staff maintain and add to collections
of research studies and serials from European and Australian research agencies.
In the spring of 1997, full catalog records for HSRC Library holdings began to be added for the first time to the UNC-CH Libraries Online Catalog. Library holdings information is not complete at this time.
Borrowing: Collections may be used in the library and the Research
Center only. Interlibrary loan requests are honored. A photocopy machine
is available for use of library visitors.
Services: Services provided include reference, acquisitions,
cataloging, maintenance of an internal archive of HSRC research, HSRC research
project tracking services, and specialized literature and information search
services. The HSRC Library is a member through OCLC of the Transportation
Access Group, which links transportation libraries in the United States
and Canada for shared information access. Although requests for information
are accepted from the UNC community and the public, it is suggested that
inquiries first be made to public or academic libraries.
--Mary Ellen Tucker
The keynote speaker , Peter Young, Chief, Cataloging Distribution Service at the Library of Congress and a 30-year observer of changes in library service and technology, will speak on "Balancing the Postmodern Library." Concurrent sessions will offer you the opportunity to attend three skills sessions during the conference. These sessions go by the names of Evaluating What You Find On the Internet, User Rights and Electronic Copyright Management Systems: Alternatives to Pay-Per-Use, Consumer Health Resources: Where to Find the Answers to All Those Questions, Basic PC Troubleshooting Skills, How to Look Fabulous While Straddling a Fence: Issues of Multiple Formats in Federal Documents, and "Well...Digitize Something!": Retaining our Collections in a Time of Digitization!!
Additional information about the conference, including full descriptions of these exciting sessions, can be found in the registration information or on the Conference Web site at http://www.lib.unc.edu/launcch/archives/conf98.htm Mark your calendars NOW! You will not want to miss the exciting Spring Conference!
International Medical Libraries on the Web Ring
http://www.glenlib.demon.co.uk/medlib/
The History Ring
http://members.tripod.com/~PHILKON/ring.html
Baker Street Web Ring (dedicated to Sherlock Holmes) http://www.geocities.com/~sherlockian/rings/baker_street.html
International Poetry Web Ring
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/2141/poetry/poetweb.html
Civil War Virtual Archive Web Ring
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/1867/cwring.html
In time for
the Christmas Holiday!
The Cheesecake Web Ring!!!!!
http://www.users.cts.com/sd/p/pdurkin/chzcake.html
Merry Christmas (part of the Holidays Web Ring)
http://www.uleth.ca/~mueller/xmas.htm
Among other items in this exhibit is an early 19th-century broadside promoting a public lecture by the "original" Siamese twins, Eng and Chang Bunker, who were long-time residents of North Carolina.
Now under way is the Audubon Conservation Project. Keeper Neil Fulghum is working with Jane Sugarman, a paper conservator in Greensboro, in preserving a group of original Audubon bird prints that form a valuable part of the NCC's Josephine and Mangum Weeks Ornithological Collection.
We were one of two groups from UNC this year to participate in the Sixth Text REtrieval Conference (TREC-6). Greg Newby from SILS also participated. Hosted last month by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) at their headquarters in Gaithersburg, Maryland, TREC brings together information retrieval researchers from universities and companies throughout the world to discuss their work on a common set of problems. TREC participants can take part in one or more "tracks." During the summer before the conference, the various participants in a given track each conduct experiments using the same document collection, the same set of queries, and the same guidelines. Controlling the conditions of the experiments allows for more reliable comparisons between the document retrieval systems of the participants. The results of the various experiments are then discussed at the conference.
We participated in three different tracks but directed most of our energies toward the "Interactive Track." A goal of this track is to not only compare the effectiveness of participants' systems but to do this in a setting that mirrors the real world as much as possible. Hence, a searcher enters a query in order to satisfy an information need, evaluates the relevance of the retrieved documents to this query, modifies the query in the course of the search in order to retrieve different kinds of documents, and so forth. In order to take part in this track (as well as in another similar track), we needed to find searchers. We are most grateful to the people who searched for us, who included librarians at UNC, students at SILS, and others.
The system that we studied in the Interactive Track is known as IRIS (Information Retrieval Interactive System). We had several goals in mind when creating this Web-based system. We wanted IRIS to improve the results of a search by utilizing techniques that have been shown to be effective in laboratory settings. We also wanted to maximize the user's input into the retrieval process as much as possible. Finally, we strove to make IRIS "user-friendly." When a user first approaches IRIS, she enters a query that consists of a string of words and phrases (e.g., asthma, drugs, "respiratory ailments"). IRIS then assigns numerical weights to these terms based on the frequencies of the words in the document collection. The user can change these weights, keeping in mind that a term with a higher weight is more influential in the retrieval process than a term with a lower one. A term can also have a negative weight, which has an effect similar to that of the Boolean operator NOT. A distinctive feature of IRIS is that it also displays, at this point in the search, statistically significant phrases that are related to the terms in the query. If the user thinks that some of these phrases are useful, she can add them to the query.
In general, the searchers found this feature to be helpful. IRIS ranks the documents in decreasing order of estimated relevance to the query, utilizing the full-text of the documents in the ranking algorithm (see the figure). The document titles are listed in the window on the left and the user can click on the document number next to the title to display the full-text in the window on the right. If the user finds a passage of words in the document that she wants to add to the query, she can add it using the "Emphasize Terms Box." The user can also utilize relevance feedback to improve the results of the search. A distinctive feature of IRIS is that it incorporates feedback models that allow the user to employ a three-valued scale of relevance. Hence, the user can mark "Yes," "Maybe," or "No" to indicate the document's relevance to the query. The feedback algorithms utilize the full-text of the evaluated documents to rank the next retrieved set in the following order: * documents similar to those judged relevant, * documents similar to those judged "maybe" relevant, * and documents similar to those judged not relevant.
The next screen in IRIS after the one shown in the figure displays the terms that the algorithm added to the query along with their term weights. The user can change these weights if she wishes. At the conference last month, we gave a talk about our research, and we conducted a demonstration of IRIS. The research of other TREC participants and their comments about IRIS (as well as the comments of our searchers) have given us ideas of ways to im prove the system. We look forward to implementing these ideas before next year's TREC-7 conference!
The Health Sciences Library received advance planning funds for a major library renovation planned for 2000 or 2001. The architect selection process is in full swing. The library also is engaged in a capital campaign to raise part of the funds for the renovation.
Martha Bedard has been elected Chair of the Membership Committee of the Association of North Carolina Health and Science Libraries.
Sarah McCleskey will receive her M.S.L.S. degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on December 21, 1997.
Gregory Newby attended the ASIS annual meeting in Washington, DC. He presented research results and a prototype information retrieval system at the 6th Text REtrieval Conference (TREC-6) in Gaithersburg, Maryland.
Melissa Cain has been elected to the CHPL Foundation Board of Directors.
Ridley Kessler, Federal Documents Librarian and head of the Government Documents section at Davis Library, set the stage with a brief history of the government's role in information dissemination. He also described the various technologies adopted by libraries over the years to enhance access to government information. Ridley explained that changes in the technology used to disseminate government information translates into increased cost for the libraries that are responsible for providing free access to this information. Depository libraries must continue to support fiche and microform as well as hardware and software for access to electronic formats.
Mike Van Fossen, State/International Documents Librarian at Davis Library, discussed various archival and access issues. He mentioned the possible benefits of collaborations between archival sites and government agencies to ensure future access to items that are only disseminated in electronic format. However, such an effort requires substantial staff and computing resources, beyond the reach of most regional depository libraries. On a lighter note, Mike outlined new, useful information now available f rom many state government Web sites, including employment opportunities, tax forms, legislative information, and state contract information. He also noted the increased availability of international government information, including statistics, bibliogra phic resources, and specialized indexes.
Barbara Levergood, Electronic Documents Librarian at Davis Library, highlighted the rapid growth of electronic documents collection at Davis. Davis received its first CD-ROM (Census Bureau Data) through the depository program in 1988. Since then, the collection has grown to 508 titles on floppies or CD-ROM. While electronic formats bring the benefit of increased access to timely information, they also introduce problems for collection development. Tracking the migration of information from print format to the Web or compendium CD-ROMs is difficult, and even though the information is in the public domain, librarians still need to deal with licensing issues as they apply to the search engines and proprietary formats used for electronic access. And last but not least, users still require assistance using computers and software, especially in libraries supporting the complex GIS software used for creating geographic representations of data.
All three speakers as well as members of the audience expressed concerns related to archiving and preserving government information in electronic formats. As technology evolves, the media, operating systems, and hardware become outdated. Electronic information based on outdated technologies becomes irretrievable unless something proactive is done to convert it. Government agencies are not interested in archiving for future access; the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) preserves less than 1% of all electronic government information.
Afterwards, attendees and speakers alike enjoyed refreshments in the
Wilson Library lobby. Snacks, juice and coffee were provided by LAUNC-CH
Program Committee members Linda Frank, Ruth Sill, and Harry McKown. Please
visit the Davis Library Government Documents Home Page at http://sunsite.unc.edu/reference/docs/
for items of interest to both librarians and the public.
--Brynn Mays