Basics of qualitative research: Grounded theory procedures and techniques

The major change in the second edition of this book is the addition of a new chapter on probabilistic retrieval. This chapter has been included because I think this is one of the most interesting and active areas of research in information retrieval. There are still many problems to be solved so I hope that this particular chapter will be of some help to those who want to advance the state of knowledge in this area. All the other chapters have been updated by including some of the more recent work on the topics covered. In preparing this new edition I have benefited from discussions with Bruce Croft, The material of this book is aimed at advanced undergraduate information (or computer) science students, postgraduate library science students, and research workers in the field of IR. Some of the chapters, particularly Chapter 6 * , make simple use of a little advanced mathematics. However, the necessary mathematical tools can be easily mastered from numerous mathematical texts that now exist and, in any case, references have been given where the mathematics occur. I had to face the problem of balancing clarity of exposition with density of references. I was tempted to give large numbers of references but was afraid they would have destroyed the continuity of the text. I have tried to steer a middle course and not compete with the Annual Review of Information Science and Technology. Normally one is encouraged to cite only works that have been published in some readily accessible form, such as a book or periodical. Unfortunately, much of the interesting work in IR is contained in technical reports and Ph.D. theses. For example, most the work done on the SMART system at Cornell is available only in reports. Luckily many of these are now available through the National Technical Information Service (U.S.) and University Microfilms (U.K.). I have not avoided using these sources although if the same material is accessible more readily in some other form I have given it preference. I should like to acknowledge my considerable debt to many people and institutions that have helped me. Let me say first that they are responsible for many of the ideas in this book but that only I wish to be held responsible. My greatest debt is to Karen Sparck Jones who taught me to research information retrieval as an experimental science. Nick Jardine and Robin …

Information retrieval

Cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) is an active sub-domain of information retrieval (IR). Like IR, CLIR is centered on the search for documents and for information contained within those documents. Unlike IR, CLIR must reconcile queries and documents that are written in different languages. The usual solution to this mismatch involves translating the query and/or the documents before performing the search. Translation is therefore a pivotal activity for CLIR engines. Over the last 15 years, the CLIR community has developed a wide range of techniques and models supporting free text translation. This article presents an overview of those techniques, with a special emphasis on recent developments.

Translation techniques in cross-language information retrieval

Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet. By Christine L. Borgman. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007. Pp. xxiv+336. $35.00 (cloth). ISBN‐13 978‐0‐262‐02619‐2.

Older adults are in triple jeopardy during COVID-19: compared with younger people, older adults are (1) more likely to develop serious conditions and experience higher mortality; (2) less likely to obtain high quality information or services online; and (3) more likely to experience social isolation and loneliness. Hybrid solutions, coupling online and offline strategies, are invaluable in ensuring the inclusion of vulnerable populations. Most of these solutions require no new inventions. Finding the financial resources for a rapid, well-coordinated implementation is the biggest challenge. Setting up the requisite support systems and digital infrastructure is important for the present and future pandemics.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/08959420.2020.1771237

When Going Digital Becomes a Necessity: Ensuring Older Adults' Needs for Information, Services, and Social Inclusion During COVID-19.

In this opinion paper, we argue that global health crises are also information crises. Using as an example the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) epidemic, we (a) examine challenges associated with what we term "global information crises"; (b) recommend changes needed for the field of information science to play a leading role in such crises; and (c) propose actionable items for short- and long-term research, education, and practice in information science.

https://asistdl.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/asi.24357

Global health crises are also information crises: A call to action

The emergence of the iSchool movement and the establishment of iSchools have helped to reshape the landscape of the library and information science (LIS) discipline. In this article, based on a set of research questions focusing around the research and education efforts of about 25 iSchools, we performed a study using both quantitative and qualitative methods on publically available data obtained from the web. Our results show that iSchools share the same vision and mission of working on relationships between information, people and technology, and have established themselves as the appropriate institutions for researchers from diverse subject areas to study this interdisciplinary integration. Overall, we are seeing an emerging iSchool identity and a defining iField, but there are still many important developments to make.

The state of iSchools: an analysis of academic research and graduate education:

Purpose – This paper aims to identify the opinions of undergraduate students on the importance of internet‐based information sources when they undertake academic tasks.Design/methodology/approach – Based on a set of identified typical academic tasks for undergraduate students, three research questions were designed around the students' usage and views of information resources for completing these tasks. Web‐accessible questionnaires were used to collect data from participants in two universities in the USA and China, and the data were analyzed using quantitative methods, which included several statistic methods.Findings – The results confirm that undergraduate students use different information resources for various academic tasks. In their tasks, online electronic resources including search engines are the most commonly used resources, particularly for complex academic tasks. Social networking sites are not used for the students' individual academic tasks, and traditional resources still play equal or mo...

Undergraduate students' interaction with online information resources in their academic tasks: A comparative study

This paper describes an investigation of signal boosting techniques for post-search data fusion, where the quality of the retrieval results involved in fusion may be low or diverse. The effectiveness of data fusion techniques in such situation depends on the ability of the fusion techniques to be able to boost the signals from relevant documents and reduce the effect of noise that often comes from low quality retrieval results. Our studies on Malach spoken document collection and HARD collection have demonstrated that CombMNZ, the most widely used data fusion method, does not have such ability. We, therefore, developed two versions of signal boosting mechanisms on top of CombMNZ, which result in two new fusion methods called WCombMNZ and WCombMWW. To examine the effectiveness of the two new methods, we conducted experiments on Malach and HARD document collections. Our results show that the new methods can significantly outperform CombMNZ in combining retrieval results that are low and diverse. When the tasks are to combine retrieval results that are in similar quality, which have been the scenarios that CombMNZ are applied often, the two new methods still can obtain often better, sometimes significantly, fusion results.

Dan Wu

Papers

Global health crises are also information crises: A call to action

The state of iSchools: an analysis of academic research and graduate education:

Undergraduate students' interaction with online information resources in their academic tasks: A comparative study

Toward a Robust data fusion for document retrieval

Online health information seeking behaviors among Chinese elderly