[Asis-l] JASIST, Volume 55, Number 4

[Richard Hill]

Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
Volume 55, Number 4, February 15, 2004

[Note: at the end of this message are URLs for viewing contents of JASIST
from past issues.  Below, the contents of Bert Boyce=s AIn this Issue@ has
been cut into the Table of Contents.]


CONTENTS

EDITORIAL
In This Issue
Bert R. Boyce	281

RESEARCH
Name That Tune: A Pilot Study in Finding a Melody From a Sung Query Bryan
Pardo, Jonah Shifrin, and William Birmingham
283
Published online 10 December 2003
     Pardo, Birmingham, and Shifrin describe the matching processes of what
is commonly called a Query-by-Humming system for the search of musical
databases based upon content rather than metadata and called MuseArt. Sung
queries vocalized as a single repeating syllable are recorded, transcribed,
and converted into a sequence of pitch intervals and rhythms using a MIDI-
like representation, as are themes stored in the database. Fifty
milliseconds or more of low variance pitch constitutes a note defined by
pitch, onset time, and duration.
Retrieved themes are ranked by similarity in timing and pitch contour, and
may be played. Both string matching processes and a hidden Markov model,
where a themes probability of generating the query provides the similarity
measure, are utilized. Using a database of 284 themes from 260 Beatles songs
and targets from this set as queries, string alignment mean right rank was
consistently one, while the hidden Markov model yielded a mean right rank of
1 in 23 of 29 cases. The string matching system was 12 times faster than the
hidden Markov model. 


The Digital Reference Research Agenda
R. David Lankes	
301
Published online 18 December 2003
     Lankes believes that the interest in digital reference service has been
primarily found among practitioners, and thus the research agenda produced
by the Harvard symposium reported here will encourage the research community
to address the topic. Digital reference is defined as "the use of human
intermediation to answer questions in a digital environment." The central
research question is expressed as, "How can human expertise be effectively
and efficiently incorporated into information systems to answer user
questions?" Other questions concern measurement of costs and benefits, the
architecture that would be necessary and sufficient, the identification of
information need through questions, and the nature of satisfactory answers.
The agenda assumes that human expertise is a useful component and that
digital reference is in some sense different than traditional reference.
Research in the area may be viewed from a perspective of policy, of systems,
of evaluation, or of behavior. 


Reconfiguring Control in Library Collection Development: A Conceptual
Framework for Assessing the Shift Toward Electronic Collections
Lisa M. Covi and Melissa H. Cragin	
312
Published online 18 November 2003
     Covi and Cragin contend that as a consequence of the shift in library
collection development from an ownership model to an access model,
collections are exhibiting both breaks in the continuity of scholarly
publications and information masked by difficulty with interface use or
metadata inadequacy. A review of the current academic library collection
development milieu leads to the observation of a lack of a conceptual
framework to measure and evaluate the use of electronic sources. A
comparison of eight electronic versions of abstracting and indexing and full
text databases exhibits inconsistent availability of information on scope,
coverage, currency, selectivity, and authority. 


Information-Seeking Behavior of Chemists: A Transaction Log Analysis of
Referral URLs
Philip M. Davis	
326
Published online 20 November 2003
     Davis looks at the logs of the American Chemical Society servers to
identify the path into the servers taken by Cornell University IP addresses.
Thus, behavior described is that at an individual computer, not necessarily
that of an individual scientist. The method will not identify referrals from
other than Web-based e-mails, browser bookmarks, or within domain URLs.
Referral data from December 2002 until February 2003 provided 9,949 valid
Web connections with referral URLs from 1,591 unique IP addresses. Library
catalogs provide 25% of referrals, bibliographic databases 24%, e-journal
lists 18%, Web pages 11%, and Web searches 10%.  E-journal lists were mostly
those provided by Cornell libraries; Web pages were dominated by the ACS
journal pages 33% and Web-based new sources 24%, but departmental and
personal pages were nearly as productive. The relationship between the
number of domains and number of referrals appears to follow an
inverse-square law. Redundant and complementary access tools are in regular
use with heavy users demonstrating more methods of access.



An Information Processing Model of Undergraduate Electronic Database
Information Retrieval
Karen Macpherson	
333
Published online 25 November 2003
     Macpherson models the thinking processes underpinning electronic
information retrieval in order to generate teaching strategies on that
subject. Her model is rooted in the cognitive psychology concepts of
declarative and procedural knowledge and the Piaget-like stages of cognitive
development, and is said to involve two stages, problem recognition (an
internal search of the individual's declarative knowledge schema for
appropriate central concepts) and a second
stage, a production (an iterative process where decision points are reviewed
and appropriate operations carried out). The second stage terminates in
synthesis and evaluation, which may lead to a return to stage one. On the
assumption that success in searching would be increased by teaching
knowledge development for information retrieval as well as searching
procedure skills and that such success would validate the model, 254
undergraduates were divided into an experimental group which received
technique and concept-based instruction and a control group which received
only skill-based search techniques. No differences were found in pretests,
but in the posttests the control group was significantly lower than on the
pretest and the experimental group significantly higher. Of 12 variables
examined in the retrieval assignment, only number of concepts showed a
significant difference in favor of the experimental group.


The Added Value of Task and Ontology-Based Markup for Information Retrieval
Suzanne Kabel, Robert de Hoog, Bob J. Wielinga, and Anjo Anjewierden	
348
Published online 3 December 2003
     Kabel, et alia, believe that retrieval is enhanced if highly structured
concept spaces (controlled indexing languages) include work task concepts as
well as core content. Such enhancement is expected to involve both a
qualitative increase in work task outcome and a decrease in the effort
required. A domain ontology provides descriptors for the topic at hand (in
this case Gorillas, and it is limited to physical, mental, social,
behavioral, and communicative). A task or description ontology provides
multiple roles for concepts derived from document content by providing types
of description, for example, generality and possible instructional use).
Seventy psychology students were divided into three groups, one using
keywords only, one using the structured domain ontology, and the third
having the descriptive ontology as well. They searched a database of 250
keyword described pictures and text fragments, and made use of their
retrievals in the creation of lesson plans for which templates were
provided. Plan quality was assessed by three coders, and measures of
efficiency and effectiveness based upon relevant fragments, total fragments,
fragments observed, and fragments used, were computed. Efficiency
differences are not statistically significant, but effectiveness differences
are. Quality criteria are not significantly different across the treatments.



BOOK REVIEWS
Mapping Scientific Frontiers: The Quest for Knowledge Visualization, by
Chaomei Chen
Jesper W. Schneider	
363
Published online 20 November 2003

Understanding Reference Transactions: Transforming an Art Into a Science, by
Matthew L. Saxton and John V. Richardson, Jr.
Denise E. Agosto	
365
Published online 16 December 2003

Chat Reference: A Guide to Live Virtual Reference Services, by Jana Smith
Ronan
Lorri Mon		
366
Published online 2 January 2004

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR	369

CALLS FOR PAPERS
Special Topic Issue of JASIST: Soft Approaches to Information Retrieval and
Information Access on the Web	
372

Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) 2004: Global Reach and Diverse
Impact	
373 

                                                      
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------------
Richard Hill
Executive Director
American Society for Information Science and Technology
1320 Fenwick Lane, Silver Spring, MD  20910 
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