On 13 Mar 2006, at 15:37, MacLeod, Roderick A wrote:
> The usefulness of subject classification in repositories, from the
> information retrieval perspective, grows once numerous repositories
> are
> harvested together and access is facilitated via an aggregated subject
> interface. This much increases the likelihood of a potential user to
> find material on any particular subject.
This thread began as an attempt to provide evidence in an outstanding
library vs academic argument about the utility of subject
classifications in a repository (and hence the amount of effort that
should be expended on them). The observation for a relatively large
institutional repository (by current standards) was that 0.8% of
article downloads are assisted by the subject index.
You have suggested that subject classifications are more useful in
aggregated collections. Do you have any data for the use of a subject
interface in a (large) subject repository? Of the the largest OAI-
compliant subject repositories registered in ROAR
(archives.eprints.org) some don't use subject classifications
(Citeseer, arxiv) and some do (PMC, American Memory).
Perhaps it could be the case that beyond a particular scale, a
subject interface becomes important. But beyond that again, at
Internet scale, we already know that search engines have dominated
over catalogues.
But I think that it comes back to actual usage: what evidence-based
practice should we recommend to the managers of new and planned
repositories?
> This has been recognised elsewhere: "Ultimately, most seekers and
> users
> of scholarly information are persuing a topic or train of thought.
> Although the publisher, author, and the institution with which the
> author was associated may be of some interest to seekers and users of
> scholarly information, usually those interests pale in comparison
> to the
> topic (and scholarly task) at hand. Ultimately, a good, user-centric
> scholarly information system must meet the needs of students and
> scholars. These end-users need a system that enables broadcast
> searching
> across a wide variety of e-print servers, digital libraries, and
> institutional digital repositories to identify and retrieve
> potentially
> pertinent scholarly content". Peters, T.A. (2002). Digital
> repositories:
> Individual, discipline-based, institutional, consortial, or national?
> The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 28(6), pp. 414-417.
And presumably, due to the growth of interdisciplinary research, we
need to offer interfaces that transcend the traditional, fixed
boundaries of subject-based repositories?
> "We feel more strongly than ever that there are significant advantages
> to a disciplinary approach to electronic services supporting advanced
> scholarship and higher education".
Let's have more than feelings to offer new repositories.
> They continue "Unfortunately, we
> have seen little of the structure of the disciplinary community in
> electronic services." Stephen, T. and Harrison, T. (2002). Building
> systems Responsive to Intellectual Tradition and Scholarly Culture.
> The
> Journal of Electronic Publishing, 8(1).
Surely a disciplinary structure can be imposed on a set of OAI
resources by any service that wants to? Isn't that the point of
interoperaability standards - to allow reuse of information?
--
Les Carr
>
> Both reported in http://www.icbl.hw.ac.uk/perx/analysis.htm
>
> Roddy MacLeod
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Repositories discussion list
>> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Leslie Carr
>> Sent: 9 March 2006 00:38
>> To: [log in to unmask]
>> Subject: Use of Navigational Tools in a Repository
>>
>> A recent discussion between some colleagues on the utility (or
>> otherwise) of subject classification in repositories prompted
>> me to undertake a brief investigation whose results I present
>> here. (I'll also send this to AMSCI, so apologies for any
>> duplicate copies that you see.) The discussion has broadly
>> been between computer scientists and librarians over whether
>> subject classification schemes offer advantages over
>> Google-style text retrieval; the study below looks at the
>> evidence as demonstrated in the usage of one particular
>> repository. As such it doesn't address the intrinsic value of
>> classification, but it does offer some insight into the
>> effectiveness of navigational tools (including subject
>> classification) in the context of a repository.
>>
>> ----------------
>> The University of Southampton Institutional Repository has
>> been in operation for a number of years and an official
>> (rather than experimental or pilot) part of its
>> infrastructure for just over a year. As part of its
>> capabilities, it includes lists of most recently deposited
>> material, various kinds of searches, a subject tree based on
>> the upper levels of the Library of Congress Classification
>> scheme and an organisational tree listing the various
>> Faculties, Schools and Research Groups in the University and
>> a list of articles broken down by year of publication. These
>> all provide what we hope are useful facilities for helping
>> researchers find papers (ie by time, subject, affiliation or
>> content).
>>
>> Over a period of some 29.5 hours from 0400 GMT on March 7th 2006,
>> 1978 "abstract" pages (ie eprints records) were downloaded
>> from the repository (ignoring all crawlers, bots and spiders).
>>
>> Of the 1978 downloaded pages, the following URL sources
>> (referrers, in web log speak) were responsible:
>> 439 - (direct URL, perhaps cut and paste into a browser
>> or clicked on from an email client)
>> 225 EPRINTS SOTON pages
>> 25 OTHER SOTON WEB pages
>> 1264 EXTERNAL SEARCH ENGINES
>> 21 EXTERNAL WEB PAGES
>>
>> ie the local repository facilities, including subject views
>> and searches, led to only 225/1978 = 11% of all downloads.
>>
>>
>>
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