[Asis-l] JASIST Volume 53, Number 11

Tue Aug 6 13:47:16 EDT 2002

Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
JASIST
VOLUME 53, NUMBER 11

[Note: URLs for viewing contents of JASIST from past issues are at the 
bottom.  Immediately below, the contents of Bert Boyce's "In this issue" 
has been cut into the Table of Contents.]

     EDITORIAL

     In This Issue
     Bert R. Boyce
     877

     RESEARCH
     30,000 Hits May Be Better Than 300: Precision Anomalies in Internet 
Searches
     Caroline M. Eastman
     Published online 17 June 2002
     879
     In this issue we begin with a paper where Eastman points out that 
conventional narrower queries (the use of conjunctions and phrases) in a 
web engine search will reduce returned number of hits but not necessarily 
increase precision in the top ranked documents in the return. Thus by 
precision anomalies Eastman means that search narrowing activity results in 
no precision change or a decrease in precision. Multiple queries with 
multiple engines were run by students for a three-year period and the 
formulation/engine combination was recorded as was the number of hits. 
Relevance was also recorded for the top ten and top twenty ranked 
retrievals. While narrower searches reduced total hits they did not usually 
improve precision. Initial high precision and poor query reformulation 
account for some of the results, as did Alta Vista's failure to use the 
ranking algorithm incorporated in its regular search in its advanced search 
feature. However, since the top listed returns often reoccurred in all 
formulations, it would seem that the ranking algorithms are doing a 
consistent job of practical precision ranking that is not improved by 
reformulation.

     Information Seeking and Mediated Searching. Part 5. User-Intermediary 
Interaction
     David Ellis, T.D. Wilson, Nigel Ford, Allen Foster, H.M. Lam, R. 
Burton, and Amanda Spink
     Published online 11 July 2002
     883
    Ellis, et alia, now provide part five of their study on mediated 
searching which is treated separately here because of the presence of 
additional authors. The data source remains cases collected from 198 
individuals, 87 in Texas and 111 in Sheffield in the U.K. but the focus 
here is on seeker/intermediary interaction utilizing the Saracevic triadic 
IR model, and the method is the analysis of discourse. While the pre-search 
interview stressed problem definition, interaction during the search in 
terms of relevance and magnitude continued to develop the problem 
statement. The user and intermediary focused on search tactics, review and 
relevance, while the intermediary interaction with the system was comprised 
of terminology and answers. The interaction clearly affected the search 
process. Users and intermediaries considered the process effective and 
users felt the intermediary increased their overall satisfaction.

     Facilitating Community Information Seeking Using the Internet: 
Findings from Three Public Library-Community Network Systems
     Karen E. Pettigrew, Joan C. Durrance, and Kenton T. Unruh
     Published online 21 June 2002
     894
    Pettigrew, Durrance, and Unruh report on data collected by survey, 
interview, field observation and focus groups concerning three communities 
recognized for community information networks in which the local public 
library played a leading role. The survey was posted for 73 days on the 
website of each network and yielded 197 responses providing insights on how 
the public uses CI systems, barriers encountered, and resulting benefits to 
users and communities. Responding users were diverse demographically, and 
sought a wide variety of information types. The information types were 
broader than previous CI studies with a strong emphasis on employment, 
volunteerism, social services, local history and genealogy, sale, exchange 
and donation of goods, news, and technical information. Barriers identified 
were technological, economic, geographic, search skill related, cognitive, 
and psychological, as well as a large class of information related barriers 
concerning the quality of the information provided, its accessibility, and 
security. Users are identified who browse the CI system with particular 
interest in discovering material of potential value to others. The systems 
are valued and used by the adult population and seem to strengthen existing 
communities while stimulating the formation of information communities.

     A Case Study of Information-Seeking Behavior in 7-Year-Old Children in 
a Semistructured Situation
     Linda Z. Cooper
     Published online 27 June 2002
     904
    Cooper identifies search strategies in 21 seven year old children 
(entering Piaget's concrete operational stage), and compares these to those 
characterized by a model of adult search strategies with a particular 
interest on the impact of visual information. Videotapes were made of 
behavior at a bookshelf of the children in their regularly scheduled media 
center class and in visits outside the class time. Children largely ignored 
the camera and commented on the videotapes in a debriefing session. Field 
notes were also kept. The analysis produced counts of strategy types using 
the Belkin model. Thirty-three books on spiders were added to the 
collection and filed normally in Dewey 595.4. A CD-ROM encyclopedia was 
also made available and both were utilized. Nine search sessions on the 
CD-ROM encyclopedia were recorded and a Scan/Learn/Recognize strategy was 
favored. At the shelf a Scan/Select/Recognize strategy was common with only 
a few looking beyond the cover to make a selection. Metadata use was 
discussed and the children agreed it should be used. It was used in the 
CD-ROM search but not at the shelves. There is a tendency to rely on visual 
information if available, and it appears the Belkin model can be used to 
characterize children's search behavior.

     The Effects of Menu Design on Information-Seeking Performance and 
User's Attitude on the World Wide Web
     Byeong-Min Yu and Seak-Zoon Roh
     Published online 16 July 2002
     923
    Yu and Roh investigate the effects of providing a simple menu, a global 
and local navigation menu, and a pull-down menu on searching and browsing 
speed, as well as the user's perception of the appeal of each menu form and 
the degree of disorientation it might cause. The site was a shopping center 
with items and prices that could be approached by way of a simple menu with 
a hierarchal structure, a menu which retained global links across the top 
of the screen, with local links in a frame to the left, or a pull down menu 
design. Each of 21 student subjects was given ten searching and five 
browsing tasks assigned in three treatments, and responded to a post 
exercise questionnaire using a five point Likert scale on attitude toward 
the menus. Time was measured from the subjects' indication of starting 
until the price was provided, and the procedure repeated three times over a 
three-week interval with treatment switching. A repeated measure ANOVA 
showed a significant difference among the designs on search speed with the 
pull-down menu leading the other two. In browsing speed pull-down and 
global/local were not significantly different but both bettered the simple 
menu. Attitude and disorientation showed no significant differences.

     On Using Genetic Algorithms for Multimodal Relevance Optimization in 
Information Retrieval
     M. Boughanem, C. Chrisment, and L. Tamine
     Published online 20 June 2002
     934
    Boughanem, Chrisment, and Tamine use 144,186 documents and 25 queries 
from the TREC corpus AP88 to evaluate a genetic algorithm for multiple 
query evaluation against single query evaluation. They demonstrate niche 
construction by the use of a genetic technique to reproduce queries more 
often if they retrieve more relevant documents (genotypic sharing), or if 
they have close evaluation results (phenotypic sharing).New documents 
generated in each iteration are ranked by a merge based on one of these two 
principles. Genotypic sharing yields improvements of from 6% to 15% over 
single query evaluation, and phenotypic sharing shows from 5% to 15% 
improvement. Thus the niching technique appears to offer the possibility of 
successful merging of different query expressions.

     An Investigation of the Influence of Indexing Exhaustivity and Term 
Distributions on a Document Space
     Dietmar Wolfram and Jin Zhang
     Published online 10 July 2002
     943
    Wolfram and Zhang are interested in the effect of different indexing 
exhaustivity, by which they mean the number of terms chosen, and of 
different index term distributions and different term weighting methods on 
the resulting document cluster organization. The Distance Angle Retrieval 
Environment, DARE, which provides a two dimensional display of retrieved 
documents was used to represent the document clusters based upon a 
document's distance from the searcher's main interest, and on the angle 
formed by the document, a point representing a minor interest, and the 
point representing the main interest. If the centroid and the origin of the 
document space are assigned as major and minor points the average distance 
between documents and the centroid can be measured providing an indication 
of cluster organization. in the form of a size normalized similarity 
measure. Using 500 records from NTIS and nine models created by 
intersecting low, observed, and high exhaustivity levels ( based upon a 
negative binomial distribution) with shallow, observed, and steep term 
distributions (based upon a Zipf distribution) simulation runs were 
preformed using inverse document frequency, inter-document term frequency, 
and inverse document frequency based upon both inter and intra-document 
frequencies. Low exhaustivity and shallow distributions result in a more 
dense document space and less effective retrieval. High exhaustivity and 
steeper distributions result in a more diffuse space.

     A Comparison of Foreign Authorship Distribution in JASIST and the 
Journal of Documentation
     Shaoyi He and Amanda Spink
     Published online 10 July 2002
     953
    He and Spink count the first authors in JASIST and JDoc from 1950 to 
1999 whose affiliation is outside the country of origin of each publication 
and record the time period and the author's geographic location. Foreign 
authorship in JASIST increased nearly four fold from 1995 to 1999 and the 
number of represented locations 3.6 times while in the same time period 
JDoc's foreign authorship doubled and foreign locations increased four 
fold. The largest foreign location for JDoc is the USA and the largest 
foreign location for JASIST is the UK. Canada is second on both lists.

     Brief Communication

     Work Tasks and Socio-Cognitive Relevance: A Specific Example
     Birger Hjorland and Frank Sejer Christensen
     Published online 20 June 2002
     960
    Finally, in a brief communication, Hjorland and Christensen provide an 
analyzed example in order to clarify their views on relevance. A 
physician's information seeking focus in dealing with mental illness is 
seen as largely determined by his social cognitive state, with complexity 
increasing as the individual's understanding of the topic deviates from 
mainstream thinking. The physician's viewpoint on the disease will 
influence terminology utilized, and an eclectic attitude toward the disease 
will result in more broad criteria of relevance. Relevance is seen as a 
tool toward meeting an individual goal.

     Book Reviews

     The Modern Invention of Information: Discourse, History, and Power.
     Frank Exner, Little Bear
     Published online 23 May 2002
     966
     Identifying and Analyzing User Needs: A Complete Handbook and 
Ready-to-Use Assessment Workbook with Disk.
     Ethelene Whitmire
     Published online 13 June 2002
     966

     Designing with JavaScript: Creating Dynamic Web Pages.
     Terrence A. Brooks
     Published online 6 June 2002
     967

     Principles of Web Design.
     Dale A. Stirling
     Published online 6 June 2002
     968

     The Laws of the Web: Patterns in the Ecology of Information.
     Eric G. Ackermann
     Published online 20 June 2002
     969

     CALL FOR PAPERS

     A Perspectives Issue on Knowledge Management in Asia
     Published online 28 June 2002
     971

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[Note: The ASIST home page 
<http://www.asis.org/Publications/JASIS/tocs.html> contains the Table of 
Contents and abstracts from Bert Boyce's "In This Issue" from January 1993 
(Volume 44) to date.

The John Wiley Interscience site <http://www.interscience.wiley.com> 
includes issues from 1986 (Volume 37) to date.  Guests have access only to 
tables of contents and abstracts.  Registered users of the interscience 
site have access to the full text of these issues and to preprints.]

Executive Director
American Society for Information Science and Technology
1320 Fenwick Lane, Suite 510
Silver Spring, MD  20910
FAX: (301) 495-0810
PHONE: (301) 495-0900

http://www.asis.org

Executive Director
American Society for Information Science and Technology
1320 Fenwick Lane, Suite 510
Silver Spring, MD  20910
FAX: (301) 495-0810
PHONE: (301) 495-0900

http://www.asis.org