Networked Information Resources

1. Networked Information Resources Information about information: indexing, tagging, and social bookmarking

2. Human-literature interface • Central concern of information science: the effective intermediation between people and literature

3. What causes the concern • Information overload • Specialized knowledge, fragmented literature

4. Information overload • “What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it” Herbert Simon (as quoted by Hal Varian in Scientific American, Sept. 1995).

5. How literatures are integrated • Review articles, meta-analysis (e.g. Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics ) • Special issues (e.g. Nucleic Acids Research annual database issue; JASIS&T bioinformatics issue) • New disciplines (e.g. Bioinformatics; Computers & Chemistry) • Citations indexing • Subject Indexing and descriptive cataloging (human and machine) • Knowledge discovery systems (e.g. collaborative filtering, Arrowsmith) • book buying network

6. Bibliographic control • Describing • Descriptive cataloging • Subject indexing • Citation indexing • Exploiting (traces of evidence) • How

7. New forms of bibliographic analysis • Citation/link analysis (bibliographic coupling, co-citation coupling, author co-citation analysis…) • Collaborative filtering (behavioral and social aspects) • Swanson’s “undiscovered public knowledge”

10. Author Co-citation Analysis • Clustered configurations of names often reveals: shared schools of thought or methodological approach, collaborative and student-mentor relationships, ties of nationality and other relationships…

11. Resource representation & discovery • Machine/automatic indexing • Human generated metadata (prepared by authors, users, indexers)

12. Metadata • Metadata is structured information that describes, explains, locate, or otherwise make it easier to retrieve, use, or manage an information resource.

13. Indexing languages • Natural language (machine extracted terms from document, e.g. Google and other full-text search engines) • Controlled vocabulary (used by the indexer to create bibliographic records e.g http://www.ulcc.ac.uk/unesco/ • Folksonomy (user generated terms for resources sharing e.g. http://www.librarything.com/ )

14. Folksonomy • combining "folk" and “taxonomy,“ refers to the collaborative but unsophisticated way in which information is being indexed on the web. Instead of using a centralized controlled vocabulary, users are encouraged to assign freely chosen keywords (called tags) to pieces of information. e.g. http://del.icio.us/