[Asis-l] JASIST Volume 5, # 1 TOC

Richard Hill rhill at asis.org
Wed Nov 19 10:24:42 EST 2003


Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
Volume 55, Number 1; January 1, 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 “In this Issue” has 
been cut into the Table of Contents.]
CONTENTS

EDITORIAL
In This Issue
Bert R. Boyce   1

RESEARCH
Mapping Information Policy Frames: The Politics of the Digital Millennium 
Copyright Act
Terrence A. Maxwell
Published online 19 September 2003
3
          In this issue we begin with Maxwell who is interested in how 
government representatives, authors, user advocates, content providers, and 
internet service providers, stakeholders all in the debates over the 
formulation of the Digital  Millennium Copyright Act, framed their 
positions as shown in their testimony in the nine relevant congressional 
hearings, as well as which groups were most effective.  All hearing 
utterances by an individual were consolidated into a single document 
resulting in 71 documents, 29 from congress and 42 from stakeholders. 
Maxwell’s policy taxonomy which develops 8 classes: Communal Cohesion, 
Marketplace of Ideas, Knowledge Creation, Individual Happiness, Information 
Dissemination, Information Ownership, Global Village, and Global Hegemony, 
was utilized as a framework. Concordance software produced 1537 words that 
were consolidated into 88 coding terms assigned as indicators to the 
appropriate  taxonomic class.  The documents were then auto-coded with 
AtlasTi content analysis software generating a file of 4,441 content units 
with at least one code. A factor analysis produced key terms in different 
sectors of the taxonomy and an MDS run produced  4 clusters both indicating 
participants expressed themselves across multiple taxonomic sectors. While 
Congress displayed linkages indicating attempts to play a balancing role, 
congressional framing tended to be closer to content providers than to 
other groups.

Spatialization of Web Sites Using a Weighted Frequency Model of Navigation Data
René F. Reitsma, Lehana Thabane, and J. Michael B. MacLeod
Published online 23 October 2003
13
         Reitsma, Thabane, and MacLeod are interested in the display of 
document sets as visualized geometric spaces. Such spaces can use metrics 
and dimensions determined arbitrarily prior to analysis of data, or they 
may use secondary data (logged website transaction counts, perhaps) with 
techniques like factor analysis or MDS to find a structure. Using high 
transaction volume between an origin and a destination as an indicator of a 
small distance and a low volume as an indicator of a large distance, a 
transaction log can provide input to MDS. One problem is the possible 
origination of multiple sessions from the same address where one can not 
determine if consecutive requests are part of the same transaction and thus 
frequencies may be invalid.  They suggest the use of the probability that a 
count is a transaction as a weight rather the count alone, with this 
probability depending upon the time separation between an origin and a 
destination with less time indicating a higher probability. A transaction 
log for a website for undergraduate engineering learning was analyzed in 
this manner and  weighted transaction counts were compared to the use 
of  straight count inputs to MDS using the Euclidean metric and four 
dimensions. Weighted results were not significantly different.

Localization in Modern Standard Arabic
Ahmed Abdelali
Published online 22 September 2003
23
         Abdelali points out that spoken Arabic variants can be large 
enough to affect comprehensibility while Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) is 
taught in schools, and used by the media in 21 Arab countries. He 
investigates the degree of variation from country to country in MSA by 
examining various Arabic language newspapers available in machine readable 
form on the Web. While 48% of words collected are unique to their source, 
most of these occur less than three times, and a threshold above three 
decreases the uniqueness percentage dramatically indicating in general a 
high degree of uniformity.   Differences are identified based upon 
spelling, transliteration of English and French words, different degrees of 
usage geographically, local only use of tribal names, and imported words.

Enhanced Web Document Retrieval Using Automatic Query Expansion
M. Shamim Khan and Sebastian Khor
Published online 19 September 2003
29
         Khan and  Khor want to expand the traditionally short web query 
using contiguous term phrases of four or less non-verbs  extracted from the 
first 40 sentences of initially retrieved documents.  A rule governed 
tagging scheme is utilized to identify noun phrases. Each identified phrase 
is then searched independently, so that the top of the retrieved list for 
each can be skimmed. Using three questions obtained from questioning past 
searchers, and doing their own category decisions for relevance judgements, 
they ran the analysis on the top thirty documents retrieved for each query 
and scored the documents retrieved by the initial and expanded searches 
with a 1 or 0 depending upon the presence of the predetermined categories. 
For two out of the three queries the relevance scores of the initial 
queries are higher than the expanded queries, but expansion did succeed in 
retrieving more categories than the initial queries.

Information Search Performance and Research Achievement: An Empirical Test 
of the Anxiety-Expectation Mediation Model of  Library Anxiety
Anthony J. Onwuegbuzie and Qun G. Jiao
Published online 19 September 2003
41
         Onwuegbbuzie and Jiao have, with Bostick, presented an information 
literacy process model of library anxiety, which they believe is a 
significant problem in the use of academic libraries by students not 
particularly anxious in other areas of their lives. The Anxiety-Expectation 
Mediation or  AEM model is a structural equation model that  incorporates 
library anxiety, research proposal writing achievement, age, GPA, learning 
style, perfectionism, academic procrastination, hope, and academic self 
perception. Here Onwuegbbuzie and Jiao  are interested in whether anxiety 
effects educational outcomes. Using 225 graduate students from a 
introductory level research methods course, scores were obtained on the 
Library Anxiety Scale, Self-Perception Profile for College Students, the 
Hope Scale, the Procrastination Assessment Scale-Students, Multidimensional 
Perfectionism Scale, the Productivity Environmental Preference Survey, and 
a Background Demographic form was completed. Library anxiety and academic 
self-perception mediate the relationship between ability to write research 
proposals and the other variables thus supporting the AEM model. Library 
anxiety is related negatively to research performance while self-perception 
is related positively.

Catalogers' Common Ground and Shared Knowledge
Alenka Sauperl
Published online 7 October 2003
55
         Sauperl believes that an indexer’s subject interpretation of a 
document is dependent upon the sociologically constructed knowledge state 
of the author, the likely user, and that of the indexer herself, and that 
each such state can result in differing interpretations. She believes that 
this places the source of indexing inconsistency with the indexer’s 
background and culture and conducts think aloud observations and interviews 
with twelve American academic library catalogers to construct a model of 
the indexing process and to  determine if they are aware of the 
inconsistency situation. Meaning is gathered from the document itself, but 
also from public sources, the practice of the individual library,  and the 
cataloger’s interest and experience. Catalogers are aware of the 
multi-meaning problem and actively tried to limit its effects, but are more 
oriented toward the cataloging community than toward readers or authors 
viewpoints.

Literature Growth, Journal Characteristics, and Author Productivity in 
Subject Indexing, 1977 to 2000
Ming-yueh Tsay
Published online 30 September 2003
64
         Ming-yueh Tsay conducts a bibliometric study of 24 years of the 
literature of subject indexing as collected by searching LISA for the term 
“subject indexing” from 1977 to 2000, identifying 14,382 items.  The 
literature grew rapidly from 1978 to 1981, slows from 1983 to 1985, and 
resumes strong growth from 1987 to 1991. There is a drastic reduction in 
new papers in 1992, an even greater fall in 1993, and production then 
continues at this level, providing a relatively good fit for a logistic 
curve. Journal articles provide 78% of the items, proceedings 16.3%, and 
books about 6%. Article distribution shows the typical Bradford 
distribution. Authors of a single item constituted 76.7% of the set, with 
an average production of 1.4 papers per author. The observed data on author 
productivity do not conform with Lotka’s law.

An Experiment Using Coordinate Title Word Searches
Frederick G. Kilgour
Published online 4 November 2003
74
         Once again Kilgour looks at the efficacy of known item title word 
search using the University of Michigan Online Public Access Catalog.  In 
previous tests he found single screen display results 84% of the time using 
surname and one title word, 96.1% of the time using surname plus both first 
and last title word, and 98.5% of the time using surname and researcher 
chosen significant title words.  Here he uses title words alone to search 
for 749 records selected from those used at the University of North 
Carolina Chapel Hill in the first half of 1993.       One fifth of these 
items had no authors. Use of title words alone was successful 86.4% of the 
time with items having personal authors and 91.5% of the time with 
anonymous items. Use of title words is consistently more productive than 
the 53.8% success rate of author alone search.

BRIEF COMMUNICATION
An Improved Fast Encoding Algorithm for Vector Quantization
Li-Juan Liu, Xu-Bang Shen, and Xue-Cheng Zou
Published online 22 September 2003
81
         Liu, Zou, and Shen provide an algorithm for image data compression 
using a vector quantization technique which appears more efficient than the 
previous vector quantization technique and which they claim will speed up a 
code book searching process.

BOOK REVIEWS
Technology and the New Economy, edited by Chong-En Bai and Chi-Wa Yuen
John Cullen
Published online 19 September 2003
88

The Universal Computer: The Road From Leibniz to Turing, by
Martin Davis
Julian Warner
Published online 28 October 2003
89

XML Data Management: Native XML and XML-Enabled Database Systems,
edited by Akmal B. Chaudhri, Awais Rashid, and Roberto Zicari
Nicholas Rhodes
Published online 28 October 2003
90

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR   92
------------------------------------------------------
The ASIS web site <http://www.asis.org/Publications/JASIS/tocs.html> 
contains the Table of Contents and brief abstracts as above 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 




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