Leveraging the power of aggregation to achieve an enhanced research environment
Date
2010
Authors
Walker, Jenny
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University
Abstract
Paper presented at the Stellenbosch University Library 2010 Symposium / IFLA Presidential Meeting. Knowing is not enough: Engaging in the knowledge economy, 18 to 19 February 2010. With advances in scholarly communication, the academic research world is becoming more
global and collaborative. E-Science, for example, has introduced scientific projects on a whole
new scale in terms of collaborative effort, the dissemination of information, technical infrastructure,
and the amount of data that is generated. In this global environment, scholars’
quest for information transcends borders; indeed, every research document, no matter where
it was created, can be accessed globally and its impact can be felt widely.
Information providers publish a growing quantity of quality materials and disseminate them
to institutions around the world. Institutions, for their part, are striving to offer and facilitate
the searching of as many relevant information resources as can feasibly be provided to their
users, given local resource constraints. Researchers, in turn, are faced with the challenge of
searching in multiple, discrete information repositories or overcoming the limitations of
metasearch systems, which are currently deployed in a large number of libraries. As a result,
new services are emerging that are intended to help users in their research tasks.
An example of such services is vendors’ provision of large aggregations of scholarly materials
from diverse information providers, made possible through recent advances in technologies
and the increasing willingness of most publishers to broaden access to their collections.
Quick to embrace these aggregations, institutions have begun integrating them tightly with
local library collections for the benefit of their users.
With this growing amount of accessible scholarly data, scholars are in need of new tools to
help them home in on the information that they seek instead of wading through masses of
materials. The recent introduction of faceted categorization assists in this task, helping users
refine large result sets intuitively. Other useful tools for researchers are system-generated
recommendations that are based on the search behavior of scholars who previously searched
for similar materials (as on e-commerce sites that tell users that “customers who
bought this item also bought…”). Because research today is conducted with no
regard to geographic location or institutional affiliation, a recommender service
of this kind becomes even more meaningful with the increase in the body of
information upon which it relies.
This presentation will illustrate the power of aggregation in providing tools for
today’s researchers and will draw on library examples to do this.
Description
42 slides created with MSPower Point 2003 and migrated to pdf using Adobe PDF.
Keywords
Collective intelligence, Web usage-based measures, Metrics for scholarly evaluation, Recommender service, Metasearch, Federated search, Primo Central
Citation
Walker, J. 2010. Leveraging the power of aggregation to achieve an enhanced research environment. Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University.