Designing and Developing Internet Reference Services to Support Firefighter Distance Learners in Illinois

SUMMARY

This article discusses issues surrounding the development of a small special library's Internet reference services to support firefighter distance learners for the University of Illinois Fire Service Institute's (IFSI) online Firefighter II Certification Program, the first of its kind in the nation. Planning for the Internet reference services involves consideration of user needs, funding, staff management, and collection development. In addition, this article explores how the IFSI Library has established a collaboration and partnership with the online course and Information Technology teams, and local public and community college libraries.     

Integrating Library Reference Services in an Online Information Literacy Course

SUMMARY

The Internet Navigator, an online information literacy course developed by a team of academic librarians in Utah, offers a model for teaching independent research skills to remote students. The course uses an online textbook that doubles as a self-paced tutorial, and a set of assignments that take students step-by-step through the research process. Assignments are submitted by e-mail and evaluated by reference librarian/instructors. Questions on the assignments follow the pattern of a reference interview helping instructors guide students to use useful research strategies and information sources. Other methods of integrating reference services with online learning are discussed.     

A Nontraditional Application of MetaSearch

ABSTRACT

Federated searching has become an increasingly popular way for academic libraries to provide access to their diverse and rapidly growing collections of electronic resources. IUPUI University Library handled the implementation of its federated search project somewhat differently than many academic libraries. The cornerstone of their efforts was to not only create a gateway to the library's electronic resources, but to build upon previous experience as a beta site for Ex Libris' SFX cross-referencing software by using MetaSearch in conjunction with SFX to permit teaching faculty to link to online bibliographies through the university's course management system, Oncourse. Issues of working with two closed systems needed to be overcome, but a product resulted that was embraced by the faculty and gave direction for future developments. doi:10.1300/J136v12n03_04     

Enhancing a Newspaper Collection Using the World Wide Web

Abstract

Serial cancellations have reduced the print newspaper collection at the University of Toledo (UT) Library by about one third since 1990. In the meantime, the number of newspapers publishing on the World Wide Web has skyrocketed, prompting UT to investigate accessing newspapers online. The immediate goal of this project is to provide library users with access to online versions of cancelled print newspapers, and eventually to enhance the collection even further with additional electronic newspapers. This article examines the trends in online newspaper publishing, researches the availability of Web sites in relation to the UT newspaper collection, critically reviews the sites found, and discusses the issues surrounding access to an online collection.     

Non-public and public online community participation: Needs, attitudes and behavior

Nonpublic participation within an online community, often called lurking, occurs when an individual joins a community, but does not post. This study examines the nature of lurking, why people lurk and the differences in attitudes between lurkers and posters. The results indicate significant differences between people who lurk and those who post in an online community. We conclude that when people lurk they are observing, which in no way is a negative behavior. This introverted or passive behavior affects lurkers' attitudes about the benefits of the community, their expectations, and opinions of themselves and others who lurk. In general lurkers are less optimistic and less positive than those who post. Blair Nonnecke is a usability professional and academic with a particular interest in user-centred design and online communities. Blair is an Associate Professor at the University of Guelph where he studies participation in online communities and the usability of in-vehicle navigation devices. His recent research focuses on three areas: survey methods for hard to reach participants, the role participation plays in online learning environments, and factors leading to participation in communities of practice. Dorine Andrews D.C.D. As a specialist in communications design, Dr. Andrews' research and publications focus on both online communities and the implementation of major technology change in organizations. She has taught at Georgetown University's Communications, Culture and Technology program and at the University of Baltimore's School for Interaction Design and Information Architecture. She is now a principal change consultant for RWD Technologies, Inc. headquartered in Baltimore, MD. She can be reached via e-mail at dandrews@rwd.com Jennifer Preece is Professor and Dean of the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland, USA. Her research and teaching interests focus on human-computer interaction, online communities and social computing. She has authored many papers and books on these topics. Her two most recent books are: Online Communites: “Designing usability, supporting sociability”, and a coauthroed book with Helen Sharp and Yvonne Rogers entiled “Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction”. Both books are published by John Wiley & Sons.     

Does Anyone Need Help Out There?

SUMMARY

In order to provide online help for distance students, as well as the increasing number of on-campus students who regularly access library resources, a team of librarians from the Marshall University Libraries created an online library assistance site (HELP). This site brings together traditional print handouts, FAQs, online subject guides, course-specific guides, learning modules, and instructional videos in one central location where users can get assistance with library-related questions at their point of need. This article discusses the rationale for developing the site, the process of creating it and incorporating user input, ongoing content development, the impact upon the Libraries' Web site, and future development plans.     

Interactive online learning

This paper describes a system for visual object recognition based on mobile augmented reality gear. The user can train the system to the recognition of objects online using advanced methods of interaction with mobile systems: Hand gestures and speech input control “virtual menus,” which are displayed as overlays within the camera image. Here we focus on the underlying neural recognition system, which implements the key requirement of an online trainable system—fast adaptation to novel object data. The neural three-stage architecture can be adapted in two modes: In a fast training mode (FT), only the last stage is adapted, whereas complete training (CT) rebuilds the system from scratch. Using FT, online acquired views can be added at once to the classifier, the system being operational after a delay of less than a second, though still with reduced classification performance. In parallel, a new classifier is trained (CT) and loaded to the system when ready. The text was submitted by the authors in English. Gunther Heidemann was born in 1966. He studied physics at the Universities of Karlsruhe and Münster and received his PhD (Eng.) from Bielefeld University in 1998. He is currently working within the collaborative research project “Hybrid Knowledge Representation” of the SFB 360 at Bielefeld University. His fields of research are mainly computer vision, robotics, neural networks, data mining, bonification, and hybrid systems. Holger Bekel was born in 1970. He received his BS degree from the University of Bielefeld, Germany, in 1997. In 2002 he received a diploma in Computer Science from the University of Bielefeld. He is currently pursuing a PhD program in Computer Science at the University of Bielefeld, working within the Neuroinformatics Group (AG Neuroinformatik) in the project VAMPIRE (Visual Active Memory Processes and Interactive Retrieval). His fields of research are active vision and data mining. Ingo Bax was born in 1976. He received a diploma in Computer Science from the University of Bielefeld in 2002. He is currently pursuing a PhD program in Computer Science at the Neuroinformatics Group of the University of Bielefeld, working within the VAMPIRE project. His fields of interest are cognitive computer vision and pattern recognition. Helge J. Ritter was born 1958. He studied physics and mathematics at the Universities of Bayreuth, Heidelberg and Munich. After a PhD in physics at Technical University of Munich in 1988, he visited the Laboratory of Computer Science at Helsinki University of Technology and the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Since 1990 he has headed the Neuroinformatics Group at the Faculty of Technology, Bielefeld University. His main interests are principles of neural computation and their application to building intelligent systems. In 1999, she was awarded the SEL Alcatel Research Prize, and in 2001, the Leibniz Prize of the German Research Foundation DFG.     

A Semantic Web data retrieval implementation with an adaptive model for supporting agent decision structures

This paper proposes an adaptive learning approach that yields decision models that can be applied by a transactions agent. This model can learn effectively with a variety of data distributions. This research uses the Semantic Web as a data access approach. The Semantic Web is a method that sellers can use to publish semantically meaningful information on Websites so automated applications can reliably access that information. We implemented a Semantic Web composed of 30 vendors’ Web pages and a spider to search those pages to obtain product and vendor information. This information was used to train a learning agent, which then provided a decision model to a transaction agent. James Hansen is J. Owen Cherrington Professor in the Information Systems Department of the Marriott School of Management at Brigham Young University. He is an associate editor for IEEE Intelligent Systems and Information Systems Frontiers. His research is in machine learning and planning as model checking. James B. McDonald is Professor of Economics at Brigham Young University. His research interests are in econometrics and quantitative methods. He has recently published in Econometrica, Journal of the American Statistical Association, Management Science, and Journal of Business Conan C. Albrecht is a professor of Information Systems at Brigham Young University. He teaches classes in enterprise development, middleware, and business programming. Conan researches computer-based fraud detection techniques, ecommerce platforms, and online group dynamics. He has published articles on fraud detection and information theory in The Journal of Forensic Accounting, The Journal of Accounting, The Communications of the ACM, Decision Support Systems, Information and Management, and other academic and professional outlets. Conan is currently working on an open source framework for computer-based fraud detection. The core of this research is detectlets, which encode background and detection information for specific fraud schemes. He is researching with the United Nations and the World Bank to use detectlets to prevent and detect fraud in third world countries. In the next few years, he hopes the system will serve as the foundation of a large, online repository of detectlets about all types of fraud. Douglas L. Dean is an Associate Professor at the Marriott School of Management at Brigham Young University. He is also research coordinator for the Rollins Center for E-business. He received his Ph.D. in MIS from the University of Arizona in 1995. Dr. Dean’s research interests include electronic commerce technology and strategy, online communities, requirements analysis, and collaborative tools and methods. His work has been published in Management Science, Journal of Management Information Systems, Information and Management, The DATA BASE for Advances in Information Systems, Communications of the AIS, Expert Systems with Applications, Group Decision and Negotiation, and IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics. Bonnie Brinton Anderson is the LeAnn Albrecht Fellow and an Assistant Professor in the Information Systems Department of the Marriott School at Brigham Young University (Provo, UT). She received her Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University. Dr. Anderson has published in Decision Support Systems; IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics; Communications of the ACM; Journal of Accountancy, among others. She researches in the areas of knowledge management, information systems security, and intelligent agents.     

Using Courseware Discussion Boards to Engage Graduate Students in Online Library Workshops

ABSTRACT

Librarians at Oregon State University (OSU) Libraries used the discussion board features of Blackboard courseware to create an interactive experience for graduate students at a distance who could not attend the on-campus “Literature Review Workshops.” These recently developed workshops have been extremely popular with graduate students across the disciplines and have generated a growing demand from distance education graduate students and faculty to offer similar information online. Reluctant to simply deliver content via an online tutorial, librarians sought to duplicate the workshop atmosphere by making the sessions available for a short time-period online, asking participants to respond to discussion questions at specific points in the workshop, and offering audio-mediated online demonstrations of tools and resources. Student feedback and follow-up requests for more workshops support the perception that this approach offered a rewarding learning experience that addressed their specific adult learning needs.     

Embedding Library Reference Services in Online Courses

SUMMARY

The University of Wyoming has a long tradition of providing library services to distance education students. As technology changed and enhanced the delivery mode of distance education courses, the library altered the ways in which it offered services to distance learners. The institution was an early adopter of Web courses, so offering library support in this new environment was a natural expansion of our services. This expansion supports the goals of the ACRL Guidelines for Distance Learning Library Services and the goals of the University. This article will describe the integration of library reference services into online courses.     

Prediction of Online Students Performance by Means of Genetic Programming

ABSTRACT

Problem: Online higher education (OHE) failure rates reach 40% worldwide. Prediction of student performance at early stages of the course calendar has been proposed as strategy to prevent student failure.

Objective: To investigate the application of genetic programming (GP) to predict the final grades (FGs) of online students using grades from an early stage of the course as the independent variable

Method: Data were obtained from the learning management system; we performed statistical analyses over FGs as dependent variable and 11 independent variables; two statistical and one GP models were generated; the prediction accuracies of the models were compared by means of a statistical test.

Results: GP model was better than statistical models with confidence levels of 90% and 99% for the training testing data sets respectively. These results suggest that GP could be implemented for supporting decision making process in OHE for early student failure prediction.     

I can’t get no satisfaction: How bundling and multi-part pricing can satisfy consumers and suppliers

Bundling and multi-part pricing may save etailers from mortal challenges attacking the music industry. These strategies are attractive to customers, perhaps spelling the difference between pirating and legally purchasing music; they allow “custom pricing” to capture more of the consumer surplus, and just as importantly, they contribute to developing new artists for long-term viability of the music industry. The many ways to bundle include exact firm-selected bundles, category bundling, customer-selected bundles, and mixing these with individual products. Each of these approaches has specific advantages for different market segments, making up for generally lower prices in the competitive online world. Multi-part pricing affords additional opportunities to capture more of the consumer surplus. These ideas are especially relevant to online music because of the ease of packaging products, the low cost of reproducing music on demand, the reduced friction of consumer/firm interaction, the low cost of monitoring complex behavior, and the enhanced measurement of performance. In the online world, content offerings are revitalized when offered as bundles or service packages. Sam Bodily is the John Tyler Professor of Business Administration at The Darden School, University of Virginia. He has published textbooks and an assortment of practical and scholarly articles in journals ranging from Harvard Business Review to Management Science. Several of his publications relate to perishable-asset revenue management, the stimulation of demand from price-sensitive customers through discount pricing. More generally his publications relate to decision and risk analysis, decision modeling and strategy modeling. He has edited a special issue of Interfaces on Strategy Modeling and Analysis. Prof. Bodily teaches a first-year MBA course in decision analysis, and has a successful second year elective Management Decision Models, and has taught eStrategy and Strategy. He is a past winner of the Decision Sciences International Instructional Award. He has taught numerous executive education programs in strategy, risk analysis, and financial decision analysis for Darden and private companies around the world. Before joining the Darden School faculty, Prof. Bodily was on the faculties of MIT Sloan School of Management and Boston University. He has been a visiting professor at INSEAD, Stanford University and the University of Washington. He has Ph.D. and S.M. degrees from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a B.S. from Brigham Young University. Rafi Mohammed is an economist who holds advanced degrees in economics from the London School of Economics & Political Science (Diploma) and Cornell University (Ph.D.). His fields of specialty include applied microeconomics, business strategy, marketing, and pricing. An article from his dissertation on pricing and bundling in the music industry was published in the top academic strategy/economics journal, the Rand Journal of Economics. Most recently, Rafi was a consultant and thought leader at Monitor Group in its Cambridge, Massachusetts and Santa Monica, California offices. He has led business strategy and marketing projects in the consumer package goods, film, media, high technology, and music industries. He is the lead author of the McGraw-Hill textbook Internet Marketing: Building Advantage in a Networked Economy (second edition, April 2003). This textbook has been adopted by over 150 universities (co-authored with Robert Fisher, Bernie Jaworski, and Gordon Paddison). Concurrent to his position at Monitor Group, Rafi was awarded a Batten Fellowship in Strategy at the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia. Rafi currently is an economic/strategy consultant and is writing a trade book on pricing and bundling.     

Librarian Participation in the Online Classroom

SUMMARY

As distance education courses increasingly move to the online environment, librarians are discovering new challenges and opportunities for reaching distant students. Collaboration with faculty is essential in reaching students who may never enter the library building. One such method of collaboration is librarian participation in online courses through “lurking” in Blackboard and Desire2Learn classrooms and monitoring discussion threads devoted to library research. Advantages such as improved access to students, course content, and assessment data are discussed, as are disadvantages, such as time commitment, varying expectations, and privacy issues. Considerations for librarians interested in “lurking” are outlined.     

Preemptive semi-online scheduling with tightly-grouped processing times

This paper investigates a preemptive semi-online scheduling problem on m identical parallel machines where m = 2,3. It is assumed that all jobs have their processing times in between p and rp (p > 0, r≥1). The goal is to minimize the makespan. Best possible algorithms are designed for any r≥1 when m = 2,3.     

Semi-online scheduling with machine cost

For most scheduling problems the set of machines is fixed initially and remains unchanged for the duration of the problem.Recently Imreh and Nogaproposed to add the concept of machine cost to scheduling problems and considered the so-called List Model problem.An online algorthm with a competitive ratio 1.618 was given while the lower boud is 4/3.In this paper,two different semi-onlne versions of this problem are studied‘.In the first case,it is assumed that the processing time of the largest job is known a priori.A semi-online algorithm is presented with the competitive ratio at most 1.5309 while the lower bound is 4/3,In the second case,it is assumed that the total processing time of all jobs is known in advance.A semi-online algorithm is presented with the competitive ratio at most 1.414 while the lower bound is 1.161.It is shown that the additional partial available information about the jobs leads to the possibility of constructing a schedule with a smaller competitive ratio than that of online algorithms.     

Students' experiences with PDAs for reading course materials

 The availability of text reading and editing software for Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) makes it timely to consider whether PDAs are useful tools for reading learning materials. This paper describes a study that evaluated the use of PDAs for reading by students on a Masters course run by the UK Open University. The evaluation consisted of pre- and post-questionnaires, and follow-up interviews. In addition, students discussed their experiences in a computer-based conference. Findings show that while the portability of the device was welcomed by students, and the electronic format was advantageous, limitations such as the small screen size, navigation difficulties, and slow and error-prone methods for entering text, made it difficult to read and interact with documents on the PDA. The paper recommends that further research consider the value of PDAs as reading devices in the context of other potential ways that PDAs can be used as learning tools. Received: 1 March 2002 / Accepted: 24 August 2002 Acknowledgements This evaluation project was funded through the award of an Open University Teaching Fellowship in 2001 to the course and presentation team, `for innovation and excellence in global online course delivery.' We would like to say a special thank you to colleagues in the Institute of Educational Technology who gave us vital technical and logistical support throughout this project: Will Woods, Phil Downs, Helen Cottrell and Liz Burton-Pye. Thanks are also due to Gill Kirkup for providing feedback on an earlier draft of this paper and to Eileen Scanlon and Ann Jones who provided helpful advice during the project.     

Efficient Incremental Maintenance of Frequent Patterns with FP-Tree

Mining frequent patterns has been studied popularly in data mining area. However, little work has been done on mining patterns when the database has an influx of fresh data constantly. In these dynamic scenarios, efficient maintenance of the discovered patterns is crucial. Most existing methods need to scan the entire database repeatedly, which is an obvious disadvantage. In this paper, an efficient incremental mining algorithm, Incremental-Mining (IM), is proposed for maintenance of the frequent patterns when new incremental data come. Based on the frequent pattern tree (FP-tree) structure, IM gives a way to make the most of the things from the previous mining process, and requires scanning the original data once at most. Furthermore, IM can identify directly the differential set of frequent patterns, which may be more informative to users. Moreover, IM can deal with changing thresholds as well as changing data, thus provide a full maintenance scheme. IM has been implemented and the performance study shows it outperforms three other incremental algorithms: FUP, DB-tree and re-running frequent pattern growth (FP-growth).     

Centralizing Information About Library Services and Resources

SUMMARY

The School of Information Resources and Library Science at the University of Arizona (UA) has a mix of local and distance students in its program. The librarian at the UA Library who works with this program developed a Web site that centralizes information about several library services and resources that benefit distance learners: online orientation and research guides, chat reference, document delivery, and more. Bringing together this information with a focus on distance learners provides a platform for delivering the library to all users, whatever their distance from the library.     

The S.A.G.E. Project

ABSTRACT

This paper describes the process and creation of a library resources and services Web page within WebCT, a course authoring program that is being used to deliver complete course content over the Internet in a distance education program at The Ohio State University. A librarian at the Prior Health Sciences Library was asked to join a faculty team to teach and provide library services for a series of three courses. The students are working health professionals who cannot attend regularly scheduled classes. Illustrations are included of the WebCT course page and the library resources and services page. The initial process and planning are described, and recommendations for future research are identified.     

A separation method for DNA computing based on concentration control

A separation method for DNA computing based on concentration control is presented. The concentration control method was earlier developed and has enabled us to use DNA concentrations as input data and as filters to extract target DNA. We have also applied the method to the shortest path problems, and have shown the potential of concentration control to solve large-scale combinatorial optimization problems. However, it is still quite difficult to separate different DNA with the same length and to quantify individual DNA concentrations. To overcome these difficulties, we use DGGE and CDGE in this paper. We demonstrate that the proposed method enables us to separate different DNA with the same length efficiently, and we actually solve an instance of the shortest path problems. Masahito Yamamoto, Ph.D.: He is associate professor of information engineering at Hokkaido University. He received Ph.D. from the Graduate School of Engineering, Hokkaido University in 1996. His current research interests include DNA computing based the laboratory experiments. He is a member of Operations Research Society of Japan, Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence, Information Processing Society of Japan etc. Atsushi Kameda, Ph.D.: He is the research staff of Japan Science and Technology Corporation, and has participated in research of DNA computing in Hokkaido University. He received his Ph.D. from Hokkaido University in 2001. For each degree he majored in molecular biology. His research theme is about the role of polyphosphate in the living body. As one of the researches relevant to it, he constructed the ATP regeneration system using two enzyme which makes polyphosphate the phosphagen. Nobuo Matsuura: He is a master course student of Division of Systems and Information Engineering of Hokkaido University. His research interests relate to DNA computing with concentration control for shortest path problems, as a means of solution of optimization problems with bimolecular. Toshikazu Shiba, Ph.D.: He is associate, professor of biochemical engineering at Hokkaido University. He received his Ph.D. from Osaka University in 1991. He majored in molecular genetics and biochemistry. His research has progressed from bacterial molecular biology (regulation of gene expression of bacterial cells) to tissue engineering (bone regeneration). Recently, he is very interested in molecular computation and trying to apply his biochemical idea to information technology. Yumi Kawazoe: She is a master course student of Division of Molecular Chemistry of Hokkaido University. Although her major is molecular biology, she is very interested in molecular computation and bioinformatics. Azuma Ohuchi, Ph.D.: He is professor of Information Engineering at the University of Hokkaido, Sapporo, Japan. He has been developing a new field of complex systems engineering, i.e., Harmonious Systems Engineering since 1995. He has published numerous papers on systems engineering, operations research, and computer science. In addition, he is currently supervising projects on DNA computing, multi-agents based artificial market systems, medical informatics, and autonomous flying objects. He was awarded “The 30th Anniversary Award for Excellent Papers” by the Information Processing Society of Japan. He is a member of Operations Research Society of Japan, Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence, Information Processing Society of Japan, Japan Association for Medical Informatics, IEEE Computer Society, IEEE System, Man and Cybernetics Society etc. He received PhD from Hokkaido University in 1976.