Relevance: A literature review and framework for thinking about the notion in information science. Relevance: the ability (as of an information retrieval system) to retrieve material that meets the user's needs.''.
Prologue: How Parts I and II Are Connected Across Time and What This Work Is All About
This work (2006) updates relevance issues in information science over the past 30 years or so, building on the relevance examination of an earlier review (1976). The aim of this work remains essentially the same: it is an attempt to trace the evolution of thinking about relevance in information science over the last three decades and to provide an updated, contemporary framework within which the highly dissonant ideas of relevance may still exist. interpreted and related to each other.
Introduction: How Information Technology Made the Study of Relevance Ever More Relevant
Treatments of relevance in IR—in algorithms, measures, evaluation—are beyond the scope of this review. While knowledge for knowledge's sake is sufficient impetus in investigations of the idea of relevance, there is also pragmatic potential.
Historical Footnote: A Reminder of How Relevance Came into Being in IR and Affected a Lot of Things
In fact, the first discussions of relevance in the early 1950s were not about relevance, but about irrelevance or "false drops"—the unwanted information retrieved by IR systems. The importance of relevance: how relevance is universally well understood, how it is understood in information.
Meaning of Relevance: How Relevance Is Universally Well Understood, How It Is Understood in Information
The understanding of relevance in computing evolved over time and was adapted to specific circumstances. Still, creation-inference is a useful distinction, adding to our understanding of relevance in computing.
Theories of Relevance: What Theoretical Constructs Were Borrowed From Elsewhere and How We Still Don’t
The strength of the theory lies in proposing a number of explanations and operational, predictive principles about cognition and communication in terms of relevance. We are still searching for a theory of relevance that applies to the context of information science and especially IR.
Models of Relevance: How Relevance Was Reviewed and Reviewed, and How a Few Models Came Out of
Let me elaborate on the nature of relevance from the stratified model point of view. Manifestations of relevance: How relevance is not one thing but many and how they are interpreted.
Manifestations of Relevance: How Relevance Is Not One Thing But Many And How They Are Interpreted
This introduced situational relevance—a connection between the information or information object and the situation, task, or problem at hand facing the user. Ingwersen and Ja¨rvelin (2005) introduced bibliographic relevance—a relationship between metadata representations (eg, as found in a catalog) and the topic or subject under consideration.
Behavior of Relevance: Or Rather, How People Behave Around Relevance and How It Was Studied
Or more specifically: What people look for in information or information objects to infer relevance. Barry and Schamber (1998) compared the results from two of their studies (Barry, 1994; Schamber, 1991) to study the similarities and differences in the derived criteria.
Effects of Relevance: Or Rather, What Influences Are Related To Relevance Judges and Judgments
A second, independent set of importance judgments (B-judgments) was then made by asking each of the eight judges to rate the importance of six additional questions not his/her own, in order to rank the performance of the resulting system using four different sets of judgments (A, B, their intersection and union). In the first study, two additional (or secondary) raters independently re-judged a set of up to 200 relevant and 200 non-relevant documents as judged by the primary rater for each of the 49 topics in TREC-4; then the performance of the 33 retrieval techniques was evaluated using three sets of judgments (primary, secondary, and crossover pooling).
Epilogue: A Backward and a Forward Look on Relevance Scholarship With Some Suggestions for
The concept of relevance in IR.Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. Indexing and retrieval performance: The logical evidence. Journal of the American Association for Information Science.
Introduction
Predictions Made in the 1970s for the Future of Intellectual Freedom in Libraries
This undoubtedly led to an outlook for the profession's future for intellectual freedom that was far more pessimistic than Castagna's. He quoted Pauline Wilson, who wrote that ``The ALA is so full of discord [sic] that it is effectively immobilized''.
Intellectual Freedom Cases and Laws of Direct Relevance to Libraries from the 1970s to 2005
The Supreme Court made clear that only ``the first and second prongs of the Miller test—invoking prurient interests and patent infringement—are issues of fact for the jury to determine as to the application of contemporary community standards'' (Pope v .Illinois, 1987: 15). These courts have applied the principle established by the Supreme Court that the government may not restrict speech based on its content unless the government proves that the restriction is necessary ``to advance a compelling interest'' and `` the least restrictive way is to further the articulated interest''.
The Expanding Role of the Library Profession in Defending Intellectual Freedom from the 1970s to 2005
Castagna then outlines the development of the ALA's official actions: the Library Bill of Rights, the Intellectual Freedom Committee, the Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom, the Office for Intellectual Freedom, and the Freedom to Read Foundation (FTRF). Privacy: An Interpretation of the Library Bill of Rights (2002) and accompanying Questions and Answers (2002; revised 2005) affirm those rights.
The Future of Intellectual Freedom for Library Users
The FTRF and ALA also participated as amicus in a challenge to the constitutionality of the gag provisions in national security letters. Section 1711 of this statute amended Title III of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, 20 U.S.C.
A Representative Reference Transaction circa 1976
Draw the call numbers here in the upper left corner of each card and then I'll show you how to find literary criticism articles on Arnold's poetry. It is important that you turn to the front of the book and check that abbreviated title in the list so that you know the magazine's full title (turn to the front of the volume).
Introduction
The economics and cost of reference service have received less attention than technology even though technology has been the main cost driver as reference service has changed. The technology and cost of reference service delivery along with a bleak assessment of the future of reference service with the foreboding title "When Reference Librarianship Died: It Began in Detroit" (Vavrek, 1978).
Technological Change
The respective roles and, to some extent, the responsibilities of the reference librarian and reference service user changed. The same training issues were, at least potentially, applicable to users of end-user systems.
Rethinking Reference
So ingrained was the value placed on the reference desk, some looked for solutions in redesigning the desk itself. Some say the reference table should be the center of the reference universe; others focus on one primary area.
Meeting Users Where They Are
The libraries of the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities have joined together to offer 24/7 chat reference services to their faculty and students (AJCU Virtual Reference Project, 2004). This required librarians to heavily advertise their service's screen name and urge students to add it to their friend lists.
Assessment
Most importantly, blind tests erase the user's judgment of the value of the reference transaction. The reference literature of the past three decades is replete with calls for better assessment of reference service quality and value.
Collaboration
The RASD Commission produced the Reference Assessment Manual; provides a good snapshot of the state of the art in the mid-1990s (Reference and User Services Division, 1995). The various valuation methods of the past, used together, remain relevant, but require adaptation to a different environment.
It is highly unlikely that RQ enjoyed non-librarian subscribers because of ''The Exchange.''However, one need not be a librarian to subscribe to the Wombat list, a recognition that the role of the end user has grown. A reference publisher's 2005 prediction that ''age will also pass'' holds true; but how much longer.
Instruction
This was implicit in OSU's Gateway and Rettig identified it as common ground for instruction and reference (Rettig, 1995). It also fit well with the broader concept of information literacy, which Breivik distinguished from bibliographic instruction saying that bibliographic instruction "[is] aimed at teaching things to people, while information literacy focuses on empowering students to be independent, self- focused inquiry” (Breivik, 1999).Aims for Information Literacy Instruction: A Model Statement for Academic Librarians (Association of College and Research Libraries, 2001).
The Future
They reflect some of the broader trends in reference services over the past three decades. However, in practice, it is rare that an academic library does not have a curriculum.
Coda: A Representative Instant Messaging Reference Transaction circa 2006
The future of reference: Point-of-need reference service: No longer an afterthought.Reference Services Review. The second chapter devoted to health sciences libraries appeared in the ninth volume of Advances in Librarianship.
Information Resources
The dramatic increase in funding available to health sciences libraries with MLAA was repeated in the late 1990s with the doubling of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) budget (Brainard et al., 2001). Environmental health was included as part of the program's mission statement in the mid-1990s, leading to its renaming as the Toxicology and Environmental Health Information Program (TEHIP).
IT and Library Services
In the interest of a hospital's network security, its IT staff may restrict access to Internet-based information resources. In response to the apparent decline in the number of hospital libraries in the United States and the reported underfunding of many academic health sciences libraries, MLA sponsored a study on the value and contributions of library services.
Collaboration and Resource Sharing
Since 1978, academic libraries for health sciences in the United States and Canada have been sharing this data as part of a survey known as the Association of Health Sciences Libraries Annual Statistics (Shedlock and Byrd, 2003). Hospital libraries have similarly shared data as part of a more recent “benchmarking initiative” coordinated by members of the MLA Hospital Library Section (Rand and Dudden, 2002; Todd-Smith and Markwell, 2002).
Health Sciences Librarians’ Education and Professional Development
Health sciences libraries have also collaborated in sharing information about their collections, budgets, staff sizes, and their patrons' use of their resources and services. A number of fellowship programs are now available to support health sciences librarians' efforts to gain additional expertise.
Informatics
The maturity of informatics as a professional field reached a milestone in 1990 with the formation of the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA). Commercial entities involved in clinical information systems are similarly united as part of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS).
Health Information Outreach
Many of these projects are aimed at meeting the information needs of public health personnel and eliminating health inequalities. The purpose of the forum was to identify best practices and lessons learned from outreach to public health personnel.
Conclusions
Additional Competencies: Public health and health sciences librarianship. Journal of the Medical Library Association. A longitudinal study of contributors to the National Library of Medicine Bulletin of the Medical Library Association.
Oral History Then and Now
Oral history's entry into the documentary mainstream has been far from smooth, complicated by the sheer realities of producing end products from recorded interviews and the preservation challenges involved in dealing with inherently unstable media. Indeed, issues of preservation and access pose the greatest challenges facing the field of oral history in the coming years.
Defining the Term and the Work
This issue became the first item of business when the International Council on Archives (ICA) established an Oral History Committee in 1992. It was hoped that this more inclusive title would help bridge the gap between contemporary oral history practitioners and those involved in the preservation of various oral traditions.
Evolution and Direction
This change in emphasis is not universal, of course, and many interviews and oral history projects continue to deal with national and local factors. Of course, there are other gaps in documentation, and oral history is to some extent the main tool for addressing them (Fogerty, 1983, p. 148).
The Present and the Past
