National Online 2001 InfoToday 2001: The Global Conference and Exhibition on Electronic Information & Knowledge Management 
National Online 2001 — Conference Program 

Pre-Conference Workshops National Online 2001 KnowledgeNets 2001
e-Libraries 2001 Post-Conference Workshops Home

Presentation Links
Tuesday, May 15th  Wednesday, May 16th Thursday, May 17th
Track A Track B Track C Track A Track B Track C Track A Track B Track C

Tuesday, May 15th

West Ballroom
Welcome and Keynote
9:00 a.m. - 10:00 a.m.

Welcome
Tom Hogan, Information Today, Inc.

Managing Digital Objects on the Net
Robert E. Kahn, President, Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI)
All types of information may be structured as digital objects on the net. Some may be subject to rights, value or interests. Some may be personal and require privacy or security. Some may reside behind firewalls and be otherwise inaccessible to typical search engines. A given object may move from place to place and multiple instances may even be present or reside at multiple locations. Authentication may not be available without additional services. Unauthorized instances of these objects and derivative versions, such as language translations, may exist with or without permissions. Some objects may have been created many years ago, with the intent that they be accessible for long periods of time. In the long-term, technology, participants and even institutions will surely change. Yet, old but still workable software and systems may still need to access these objects without change. At present, there is no agreement on how to manage such objects, to effectively control their usage in the network environment and to allow third-party value-added contributions to the overall management of such objects. An overall framework in which to address these issues will be discussed along with its relation to the still evolving Internet architecture.
 

Opening Plenary Session
10:30 a.m. - 11:00 a.m
Highlights of the Online Database Industry and the Internet
Martha Williams, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
This is the twenty–third National Online meeting. Again we will learn more about the current status of the online database industry and the Internet. We will hear from a wide variety of information professionals in industry, government, and academe. Speakers are researchers, educators, and practitioners of many types—developers of new information technologies (IT). For National Online 2001 the topic areas grouped naturally around three general themes: Searching and Search Engines, Content, its Management and Use; and Business Information/Wall Street/Competitive Intelligence.

The program opens with Professor Williams’ review of the status of the online database industry and the Internet. Because the cost of entry into the family of database producers is probably about a tenth of what it was 23 years ago, the number of database startups is ever increasing and a portion of these have not been well conceived and so die within a year or two. Statistics supporting these facts will be given. As we know the internet is continuously growing in size, variety of content, sophistication of technologies, and variety of user communities.
 

10:45 a.m. - 11:15 a.m.
Coffee Break
A Chance to Visit the Exhibits

Tuesday, May 15th

Sutton South
Track A — SEARCHING, SEARCH ENGINES, AND EP
Track Chair: Ev Brenner, Consultant

Session A101
11:15 a.m. - 12:15 p.m.
Benchmarking Search Engines and Finding Content

Helping People Find Content - Preparing Content to Be Found: Enabling the Semantic Web
Joseph A. Busch, Interwoven
Anyone who has spent time searching for information on the Web knows how frustrating the experience can be. More often than not the search returns zero hits, or thousands of hits that must be further sifted manually. Institutions that are authorities in vertical subject areas have a unique opportunity to be major players in transforming content roulette into successful search experiences. This presentation is about the concept of the semantic Web, how it is being built, how organizations can participate in building it, and how it is transforming the Web user experience today and will continue to transform it in the future.

Benchmarking the Advanced Search Interfaces of Eight Major WWW Search Engines
Randy D. Ralph and John W. Felts, University of North Carolina-Greensboro
This presentation is the product of a comprehensive benchmarking of eight of the major WWW search engines that purport to be global in nature. These resources were evaluated on relevancy, recall, and response, using 25 students from a library and information studies graduate class to create and submit 10 subject-specific questions. The results of this benchmarking will be of particular interest to our colleagues in the library community and will help them identify those search engines that will best serve their users’ needs.
 

12:15 p.m. - 1:45 p.m.
Lunch Break
A Chance to Visit the Exhibits
 

Session A102
1:45 p.m. - 2:45 p.m.
Data Mining and Narrowing Searches via Metadata

Data Mining of Online Database Usage Data: The King County Library Systems Case Study
Efthimis N. Efthimiadis and Holly C. Eggleston, University of Washington
Databases and other electronic information resources have become an integral part of library collections. Understanding how these resources are being used is critical for collection development, accountability and library management. Unfortunately, the use statistics produced by the various database vendors are disaggregated. This study developed data mining procedures for analyzing the usage of online databases by patrons of the King County Library Systems (KCLS), the second-largest public library system in the United States. This presentation chronicles the development of data analysis procedures and usage measures (tools) for describing and interpreting the data related to the use of online resources.

Metadata: Enhanced Access to Online Content
Mary Alice Ball, marchFIRST
The exponential proliferation of content on the Internet makes it increasingly challenging to retrieve quality information quickly. Labeling content with appropriate metadata enhances information access and makes the search process more efficient and effective. This presentation addresses the development of a metadata schema suited to a business environment. Building upon Dublin Core, a controlled vocabulary was elaborated to communicate more fully data, e.g., pricing and distribution, about digitized publications. Although this work relates to a particular product, the assumptions and processes that accompanied it have broader application and will be of interest to anyone involved with metadata initiatives.
 

Session A103
3:00 p.m. - 4:00 p.m.
Web Portals for Easing Access and Real-Time Intelligence

Custom Information Portals and the Delivery of Real-Time Intelligence
Michael Gallagher, Hoover’s Media Technologies
Word travels fast. That cliché has taken on new meaning in the world of online information, real-time news and chat rooms. Organizations have ready access to many disparate sources of information — Web content, news and stock information plus newspapers, trade journals, magazine articles, market research reports, technology surveys, and analyst reports. This poses a particular challenge for those charged with monitoring and managing the inrush of information. This presentation will detail several solutions, including one developed and implemented for the seventh- largest PR agency in the world.

UCITA: Shrink-Wrap, Click-Wrap and Portals Use Agreements
Shelly Warwick, Queens College, City University of New York
The Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act (UCITA) is a proposed amendment to the Uniform Commercial Code that would regulate purchases of software and would, among other things, make so called “shrinkwrap” and “clickwrap” agreements binding. This act must be made a law on a state-by-state basis. To date UCITA has been enacted by two states. This paper will discuss the provisions of the act and their possible implications for purchasers, producers, and vendors and what it means when you click okay to the terms of use when you enter a portal site. The strong opposition being mounted by the library community will be explored along with which states have so far adopted this measure and why.
 

Session A104
4:15 p.m. - 5:15 p.m.
Analytical Tools to Refine Search Content

Authorlink: Instant Author Co-Citation Mapping for Online Searching
Xia Lin, Howard D. White, and Jan Buzydlowski, Drexel University
Author co-citation analysis (ACA) has been used to explore the intellectual structure of science and scholarship for the past 20 years. Through analysis of the number of times each pair of authors appears together in selected works, ACA reveals salient linkages among authors. Printed maps of such linkages help the viewer to understand intellectual connections in scholarly fields. Proponents have argued that such maps would also be useful in document search environments where the user needs overviews of author relationships. This presentation describes the development of a successful ACA interface for applied document retrieval. A system called AuthorLink has been created to provide interactive author maps in real time from a non-trivial database—the Institute for Scientific Information’s Arts & Humanities Citation Index (AHCI) for 1988-1997 (approximately 1.26 million records).

A Novel Approach to Automatic Genre Classification
Kwong-Bor Ng, Queens College, City University of New York
Automatic classification of genre is one of the most challenging areas in natural language processing. In general, natural language processing researchers are finding that statistical methods can do something that it was once thought could only be done by intellectual understanding. In this context, we have looked into the question of distinguishing different genres of text by purely statistical means. To illustrate our approach, we report here on experiments to distinguish news journal articles from government documents using only information about the frequencies of occurrence of word boundaries, sentence boundaries, and punctuation marks.
 

Tuesday, May 15th

Madison Suite
Track B — CONTENT, ITS MANAGEMENT AND USES
Track Chair: Margaret Fischer, Management Decisions

Session B101
11:15 a.m. - 12:15 p.m.
Free Alternatives to Traditional Abstracting Databases
Péter Jacsó, University of Hawaii
Several traditional, fee-based abstracting databases can be fully or partially substituted by free databases on the Web. Many of these free databases serve as complete substitutes, providing free access to the same content as their fee-based counterparts have been offering. Others offer only a subset in terms of retrospective coverage or the number of sources covered, or a less sophisticated information retrieval system, but they may be perfectly appropriate to satisfy the information needs of most users, most of the time.
 

12:15 p.m. - 1:45 p.m.
Lunch Break
A Chance to Visit the Exhibits
 

Session B102
1:45 p.m. - 2:45 p.m.
Web-Based Medical Information for Patients

Being Patient—Consumer Medicine on the Web
Susan Detwiler, The Detwiler Group
Since many attendees at this conference are information professionals rather than end users, this session addresses librarians who are either assisting patrons in their searches, or setting up consumer health pages for their libraries. Teaching patrons how to evaluate health information; checking sources for timeliness, quality references; finding information about diseases; checking physician/hospital/ HMO credentials; finding providers in your HMO/PPO; locating experts—these are all important services that libraries can provide for their users.

Assessing the Quality of Psychotherapy Self-Evaluation Information on the Web
Brian Quinn, Texas Tech University
The Web now offers a vast and growing number of resources related to mental health that patients may utilize to manage their care. For those patients who are able to locate quality mental health information using the Web, this can be an empowering experience. The Web not only represents a powerful tool for patient self-determination, it also has the potential to help relieve some of the growing demand on the medical profession for services. Given the tremendous potential of Web-based mental health resources for patient self-care, how good is the quality, and how easy are the resources to access?
 

Session B103
3:00 p.m. - 4:00 p.m.
Digital Content and SmartIndexing of Electronic Data

Portable Classification Tools
Mark Shewhart, LEXIS-NEXIS
With the advent and popularity of Intranet portals, LEXIS-NEXIS has seen an ever-increasing customer need to simultaneously and consistently search both internal proprietary materials, the Internet, and LEXIS-NEXIS materials.  One approach to this customer demand at LEXIS-NEXIS is to find ways to apply its SmartIndexing technologies to the Internet and Customer-Side data which will allow a single search from a topic hierarchy to return consistent and relevant results from all three sources. The challenge of porting internal LNG intellectual property into a third party system’s format is an interesting endeavor that is the subject of this paper.  LNG’s intellectual property exploits algorithms and operators that are difficult or impossible to duplicate on many third party systems.  The accuracy of LNG SmartIndexing depends upon these novel operators and accuracy is a key before LEXIS-NEXIS will brand Portable SmartIndexing. The heart of this paper is a discussion of the problems and  solutions of taking proprietary algorithms and getting them to run accurately and effectively in a third party’s system within the customer’s firewall.

The Digital Content Market: Shift the Channel and Find Hidden Opportunity
Rick Miller, Copyright Clearance Center, Inc.
The U.S. publishing industries are beginning the shift to digital distribution of content, but this shift raises many questions: What changes must publishers make in the value chain to exploit digital content? Are content consumers ready for digital content? How large is the market for digital content and how fast is it growing? How can publishers mitigate the risks of going digital and find hidden opportunity? Rick Miller examines how digital distribution of content will affect the information value chain and document the market size and market potential for digital content—including the market for hidden opportunity.
 

Session B104
4:15 p.m. - 5:15 p.m.
Marketing, Education and Use of Electronic Information

Looking Toward the Future: The Next Generation of Content Delivery and Applications
Charles W. Terry, COMTEX News Network, Inc.
With the bar for engaging and “sticky” content on the rise, businesses are looking for ways to keep their sites fresh, thereby opening the door for information aggregators who can save businesses time and money by providing them with the news and information they need to attract and maintain visitors. This presentation examines the role of the infomediary in today’s market, considers the future progression of the role of the infomediary, and discusses avenues by which content demands may expand, including greater need for multimedia content as technology and consumers become more sophisticated.

An Analysis of Web Marketing and Educational Activities by Major American Symphony Orchestras
Manuel Prestamo, Oklahoma City Community College
There is a common perception that one can find everything on the Web and that organizations and businesses are using the Web to effectively market their services and products. To determine the extent to which this is true throughout a major segment of the arts community, a study of Web marketing and educational activities by major American symphony orchestras has been undertaken. The study explores how orchestras are using the Web to market their services and educate the public about their activities and programs. An analysis of the findings suggests how orchestras and other arts organizations are using and may improve or expand the use of the Web for marketing and educational activities in the future.

Features and Uses of a Multilingual Full-Text Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) System
Yin Zhang and Kyiho Lee, Kent State University and Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information
As part of ongoing international efforts to construct a networked digital library of theses and dissertations, Korea Research and Development Center (KORDIC) has been developing a digital library for Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) since 1998. The major goal of the project was to construct a full-text database for Korean ETD files and to implement a large-scale document retrieval system on the Internet. This session presents some of the unique features of this multilingual, full-text ETD system.
 

Tuesday, May 15th

Sutton Center
Track C — BUSINESS/WALL STREET/CI
Conscientious managers recognize the need for fresh insights to compete in today’s global and wired business environment. Intelligence professionals and those who support their efforts recognize that they must be at the cutting-edge to enable firms maintain their competitive advantage. Learn from internationally renowned experts about critical information sources and software applications that support the intelligence process. The track concludes with practical advice on how to implement these ideas into strategic decision making.
Track Chair: Jerry P. Miller, Simmons College
 

Session C101
11:15 a.m. - 12:15 p.m.
Competitive Intelligence Overview

Competitive Intelligence: What It Is and Its Current Status
Jerry P. Miller, Simmons College
Conscientious managers recognize the need for fresh insights to compete in today’s business environment. Intelligence professionals can offer recommendations and suggestions to help firms gain and maintain their competitive advantage. These insights can address a broad range of issues well beyond competitors. Dumpster diving and cloak-and-dagger images still appear in the press. Miller will attempt to dispel such images and to set the playing field in clear and accurate terms. Drawing from recent surveys, he will also provide an overview of the status of the intelligence profession both in North America and Europe.
 

12:15 p.m. - 1:45 p.m.
Lunch Break
A Chance to Visit the Exhibits
 

Session C102
1:45 p.m. - 2:45 p.m.
The Web Delivers for CI

The Invisible Web and Competitive Intelligence
Gary Price and Chris Sherman, George Washington University and Searchwise
Many users of the “publicly accessible Web” who search for information often miss the most important sources of material, which are part of the “Invisible Web.” Invisible Web material is valuable for all searchers, but is crucial to Competitive Intelligence researchers who must always strive to find the most accurate, timely, and authoritative information available. While the Invisible Web has been getting more and more attention, many searchers often waste valuable time by searching in the wrong place. For the Invisible Web to be used effectively, searchers must know what is available prior to the search. This can be a difficult task but is very necessary. Just as information professionals have “learned” print resources, the same is true for Web resources.

"Multi-Media" to Multimedia
Helene Kassler, Northern Light Technology Incorporated
With estimates of the World Wide Web’s size currently exceeding a billion pages, researchers often face more significant challenges with information overload rather than an information deficit. However, the Internet does offer rewards for competitive intelligence researchers who can quickly and effectively gather clues to rivals’ strategies from the Internet’s far-flung boundaries. A variety of free and inexpensive Web-based services can alert users to useful information, including patent and trademark approvals, job postings, and domain registrations. Attendees will receive a list of Internet resources covered in the presentation.
 

Session C103
3:00 p.m. - 4:00 p.m.
CI Needs and Opportunities

Competitive Intelligence Software Requirements
Brooke Aker, Cipher Systems, LLC
It is simple human nature that makes us want to believe that information technology or software can produce intelligence for us. We want automation. But there is often a misguided notion within intelligence circles that hardware and software will be able to dynamically give us answers to our intelligence questions. Machines cannot understand our questions. Machines cannot understand the information we collect, let alone relate our questions to the information collected. So what is the right role for information technology? IT can support CI with communication, collaboration, and coordination.

Choices in Business, Competitive Intelligence, and Applications
Gregg Reed, Competitive Media Reporting
Choosing the right tool is important for every endeavor. Often, the right tool makes the difference between success and failure. Competitive intelligence tools are no exception. But, with so many choices out there, how do we get it right? Or, more importantly, how do we make sure not to get it wrong? This presentation will focus on how to make the right applications choices for supporting competitive intelligence and similar business initiatives.
 

Session C104
4:15 p.m. - 5:15 p.m.
Knowledge Creation and the Knowledge Value Chain

Knowledge Creation–The Next Frontier?
Wayne Rosenkrans, AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals US
You hear the terms constantly: information revolution, knowledge management, e-business, and whatever raft of new terminology can be crafted next year. But do these tools confer sustainable competitive advantage for the future? How can they, if everybody is doing them? This presentation makes the case that only he who creates knowledge effectively and efficiently creates sustainable competitive advantage for his/her company. Attendees will be presented with new definitions of competition; new thoughts on strategy; knowledge creation; and a vision for the future

The Knowledge Value Chain (KVC): How to Fix It When It Breaks
Tim Powell, TW Powell Co., The Knowledge Agency
Knowledge workers play an active role in finding data and converting it into knowledge. But what happens after the handoff to our client, the decision-maker? Too often, knowledge and information workers do not understand how their work supports the bigger picture—the creation of value by the organization. This lack of understanding typically leads to a “disconnect” between the knowledge process and the ways the business creates value. The Knowledge Value Chain is an analytic tool used to diagnose and fix problems in knowledge-based value-creation processes. It treats the creation and application of knowledge as essentially a type of manufacturing process. You will learn: What is the Knowledge Value Chain (KVC) concept? How does KVC work in practice? How will KVC make our “knowledge factory” more efficient?
 

^TOP^



Wednesday, May 16th

East Ballroom

Special Breakfast Presentation
8:15 a.m. - 8:45 a.m.
Meanwhile, back in the real world ...
Ron Dunn, CEO, Academic Group, Thomson Learning
Now that much of the hype about the Internet has finally subsided, it's time to take stock of what we've learned and figure out how to put the real strengths of new information technologies to work in practical ways.

In this breakfast session, Ron Dunn will reflect on life in the post-Internet information world and explore what the future may hold for information service providers, information professionals and users.

Keynote Speech
9:00 a.m. - 9:45 a.m.
Innovation, Knowledge Management, and Corporate Success
David Snowden, Director, Institute for Knowledge Management, IBM
Innovation is one of those things that all companies want, but few are prepared to tolerate the ambiguity and uncertainty on which its effective management depends. It is also a word that is often confused with creativity, which is a necessary but by no means sufficient condition for innovation.

Snowden discusses approaches that are the opposite of rational behavior, that need organizations to manage a complex, but not complicated portfolio of methods and environments. He draws on ideas from complexity theory and gives concrete examples of how to improve the flow of knowledge within organizations.

Wednesday, May 16th

Sutton South
Track A — SEARCHING, SEARCH ENGINES, AND EP
Track Chair: Stephen E. Arnold, Arnold Information Technologies
 

Session A201
10:00 a.m. - 11:00 a.m.
Web Searching

Vertical Search Engines:  Will Focus Pay Off for Web and Intranet Indexing Services?
Stephen E. Arnold, Arnold Information Technology
In the 1980s, commercial database producers hyped their products with claims such as “more than 1,000 journals indexed and abstracted” or “the full text of more than 650 journals and magazines.” The Web search utilities have fallen prey to puff marketing in a quest for sustainable revenue. The size of the Web and the intense competition for users is creating niche search opportunities. Examples may be found in magazines that use humans to build pointers to useful sites (Business 2.0), startups with administrative interfaces that allow a particular topic or subject to be indexed (Mohomine, Pinpoint, and EoExchange). The large search utilities (Inktomi and FAST) offer subset services as well. The emergence of blended search services, plug-and-play search, built-in search, and many other variations will be discussed along with current trends.
 

Session A202
11:15 a.m. - 12:15 p.m.
Aggregators and Pathfinders

WebFeat: The Boutique Aggregator
Todd Miller, WebFeat
The history of online information goes something like this: First came online aggregators that offered access to hundreds of databases in a single bound, through a single interface and engine. Then came CD-ROMs that spun up on internal servers, gaining cost savings through buying direct, but losing the consolidated interface of the online aggregators. Then came the Web, and the servers went away, but the polyinterface remained. Attempts have been made to re-aggregate interfaces through the introduction of standards, which, if adopted by all or most content providers, would unconfuse the tongues, restoring the interface to its pre-Babel state. The problem, of course, is that very few content providers have adopted standards. The objective of WebFeat is not new in that it seeks to restore a common interface for many disparate sources. What is new is its approach: development of translators, or “Rosetta Stones,” that obviate need for widespread adoption of client-server content standards.

The Invisible Web
Chris Sherman and Gary Price, Searchwise and George Washington University
Most people are unaware that a vast amount of authoritative information accessible over the Internet is virtually invisible to search engines. The phenomenon is called “The Invisible Web,” and it’s a major obstacle for anyone who relies on traditional search techniques alone. Content-rich databases from universities, libraries, associations, businesses, and government agencies are appearing on Web servers around the world, but current search engines can tell you little or nothing about the valuable data they contain. This presentation discusses the nature and extent of the Invisible Web and offers numerous pathfinders that guide searchers to its valuable resources.
 

12:15 p.m. - 1:45 p.m.
Lunch Break
A Chance to Visit the Exhibits
 

Session A203
1:45 p.m. - 2:45 p.m.
Helping Users through Technology

Trends and Hotspots in Content Technologies
Susan Feldman, IDC
Search systems work. They find what you ask for. The problem is that most users don’t ask good questions. How can we help the user ask the right question and navigate through invisible information spaces? Sue Feldman will examine content architecture technologies that improve searching: metatagging, XML, categorization, and automatic query expansion. She will conclude this talk with a list of features that a good search engine should offer.
 

Session A204
3:00 p.m. - 4:00 p.m.
Portals, Vortals, and Search Boxes

Search Boxes for Answers in Context
Tim Mayer, Inktomi Corporation
Every day, terabytes of content are made available in different locations and in multiple formats. In a particular day, an employee might use a plethora of search boxes to search his/her individual e-mail or file system, enterprise’s intranet or CRM relational database, and the Web in piece or at large. Each of these search boxes is producing the same generic “right” answers for a particular file type in a specific location. A shift is taking place in the world of search where a user will have “One Search Box” that, with the help of context, will provide the right answer from the many data sources and types that are relevant to that particular user.

Automatic Dynamic Directories for Portals and Vortals
Christopher Condon, Albert
ZNOW, a Berkeley, California company, has developed proprietary search infrastructure technologies that generate true dynamic directories. Each time a search is made, ZNOW generates, in real time, a unique set of directories associated with the search results. The dynamic directories are not preset and are generated automatically, without manual intervention. Dynamic directories are generated for any document database size and will scale granularly with Web growth, without loss of performance. ZNOW is primarily focused on the portal, vortal (vertical portal) and EIP (Enterprise Information Portal) markets. Portals, vortals and EIPs must either acquire costly, manually built directories from third parties, or develop them in-house with expensive editorial staffs. Both approaches are usually beyond their financial resources.
 

Session A205
4:15 p.m. - 5:15 p.m.
Vertical Search Engines and Knowledge Management

Information Impact: Measuring, Analyzing, Improving
Bob Ainsbury, EoExchange, Inc.
It's time for corporations to understand their information issues in ways that can be measured, analyzed and improved for vital competitive advantage. Today, business leaders intuitively understand the importance of information in the development of their strategies and the execution of their goals. The importance of information and its impact on overall company performance is well understood. Yet, there has been remarkably little effort to quantify the information practices in corporate language. The language of information science, with terms like corpa, precision and recall, does not resonate with most business people. As we learned in management skills and quality management, there is a need to frame information impact into observable and changeable characteristics. EoExchange, Inc. markets and develops transferable information management best practices and technologies. The EoExchange methodology and software platform provide organizations with the ability to measure, analyze and improve the way information is access and used.

Turning Search into Knowledge Management
David Kaufman, KCSL, Inc.
Creating a high-quality search algorithm is more of an art than a science. It’s a balancing act, and like any tightrope walker will tell you, it takes years to master. But when the art of ranking a query against a set of documents is virtually mastered, one has the foundation upon which to build a system that can do more than just search; it can turn information into knowledge. By effectively finding, categorizing, summarizing, and proactively routing information, it’s possible to take total control of the ever-growing mountain of unstructured data in the digital world.
 
 

Wednesday, May 16th

Sutton Center
Track B — CONTENT, ITS MANAGEMENT, AND USES
Track Chair: Carol Tenopir, University of Tennessee

Session B201
10:00 a.m. - 11:00 a.m.
Free Ready-Reference Database Suites on the Web
Péter Jacsó, University of Hawaii
High-quality ready-reference sources have been available free of charge on the Web for some years. The latest development efforts aim at integrating multiple ready-reference databases (encyclopedias, dictionaries, almanacs, atlases) into reference suites. The synergy of these high-quality databases facilitates the answering of the majority of reference questions of users who want current and accurate factual answers to their questions without hopping from site to site. The best of the ready-reference suites will be discussed and illustrated.
 

Session B202
11:15 a.m. - 12:15 p.m.
Fee vs. Free and Teaching Online to Working Adults

The Shifting Electronic Paradigm: From Free to Fee
Kirk Loevner, PublishOne
As the music industry battles to protect the rights of artists, and as dot-coms become increasingly unable to raise venture capital, the entire concept of a free Internet is called into question. No longer able to lure investors with lofty goals and overwhelming mindshare, new companies must present real and viable models for making money. This paper will look at digital media of all kinds, from print to software, music to movies. Looking at the Napster business model and its impact on the music industry, each medium and its potential risk of “napsterization” will be discussed. In addition, case studies of organizations that have successfully transformed their business model to include the protected sale of electronic content will be presented.

Using a Variety of Distance Teaching Methods to Teach Online Search Skills to Working Adults
Ina Fourie, University of South Africa (Unisa)
Distance teaching offers excellent opportunities to teach online search skills to working adults on various levels of study. The success of such programs, however, depends on effective design, the acknowledgement of the needs of adults, the use of innovative teaching and assessment methods, and stimulating students’ interest in the rapid changes that mark the online environment. This presentation will consider the experiences over the past 12 years in teaching online search skills to undergraduate LIS students, as well as to students from other disciplines. Our experiences are of a very practical nature, but they will be linked to the theory of distance teaching and adult learning to make it possible to design effective distance teaching programs in different contexts.
 

12:15 p.m. - 1:45 p.m.
Lunch Break
A Chance to Visit the Exhibits
 

Session B203
1:45 p.m. - 2:45 p.m.
Higher Education and Middle Schools Take to the Net

Metadata for Online Course Selection in Higher Education
Kathleen R. Murray, University of North Texas
By 2007, one-half of higher education students are expected to enroll in distributed learning courses. Higher education institutions need to attract students searching the Internet for courses and need to provide students with enough information to select courses. Internet resource discovery tools are readily available, but users have difficulty selecting relevant resources. In part this is due to the lack of a standard for representation of Internet resources. An emerging solution is metadata. In the educational domain, the IEEE Learning Technology Standards Committee (LTSC) has specified a Learning Object Metadata (LOM) standard.

Testing the Use of the Internet by Children
Dania Bilal, University of Tennessee-Knoxville
This presentation highlights the results of a study that investigated children’s information-seeking behaviors and success in using the Yahooligans! Web search engine/directory for two types of “imposed” search tasks. The main purposes of this study were: (a) to examine and compare children’s success levels in locating desired information on two different types of search tasks; (b) to determine whether children’s information-seeking behaviors vary with the type of search tasks; and (c) to examine children’s affective states in using Yahooligans! Results reveal that children’s success levels varied with the complexity of the search task. They had more difficulty with the research task than the fact-finding one. The results of this study have implications for Web user training and system design improvement.
 

Session B204
3:00 p.m. - 4:00 p.m.
Distance Learning: Virtual Instruction and eClassrooms

It’s Not BI, It’s VI: Virtual Instruction for Distance Learners
Stephanie Race and Rachel Viggiano, Florida Distance Learning Reference and Referral Center
For almost 3 years, the Florida Distance Learning Reference and Referral Center (RRC) has provided library research support to students enrolled in distance learning courses at 73 colleges and universities across Florida. During this time distance learners needing research assistance have been able to contact RRC librarians by toll-free phone, e-mail, and Web form. While results of an ongoing user satisfaction survey indicate that these methods of contact provide satisfactory results, RRC librarians wanted to provide a more innovative way of meeting students’ research needs. In April 2000, the Center began a pilot project to provide real-time reference and instruction using online chat software.

Constructing a Web-Assisted Electronic Classroom for Distance Learning
Bor-sheng Tsai, Pratt Institute
The learning experience and the knowledge base of students could be strengthened and broadened if the space and time of their learning could be optimally expanded. To serve this purpose of enhancing student learning, a Web-based distance learning model called ECEDL3 (electronic continuing education and distance life-long learning) is designed, constructed and implemented. This presentation analyzes the structure of the ECEDL3 architecture, the contents of the selected electronic resources, and the format, the tools, and the approaches that this learning model applies in filtering and managing the instructional resources.
 

Session B205
4:15 p.m. - 5:15 p.m.
Computer Skills and Training for Virtual Libraries

How Do We Implement a Training Plan for a Virtual Library?
Ron Leonard and Diane Brown, SOLINET
Many libraries struggle with the need to provide equal access to a wide variety of resources, regardless of the end user’s geographic location. To satisfy these demands, more and more libraries are developing virtual libraries that bring together online databases, subject indexes of Internet sites, locally mounted files, and so forth, and making them available via electronic access. Often considerable time and attention are given to the choice of resources, their appearance, and user support. However, the training of library staff on the use of the resources to successfully implement a virtual library is just as essential. This leaves many people wondering, “How do we implement a training plan for a virtual library?”

A Comprehensive Inventory of Technology and Computer Skills for Academic Reference Librarians
Anne Prestamo, Oklahoma State University
The purpose of this study was to develop a comprehensive inventory of the computer and related technology skills required of reference librarians in academic libraries. Using the Delphi Method, the study began by asking the 14 participants this question: “What are the technology and computer skills required of reference librarians in academic libraries?” This open-ended question elicited 848 skill statements. Multiple statements describing the same skill were revised and combined into one uniformly worded skill statement. The remaining 380 statements formed Questionnaire #2.
 
 

Wednesday, May 16th

Sutton North
Track C — BUSINESS/WALL STREET/CI
Instantaneous, global information on Wall Street and other financial corridors around the world is a given these days. Net and Web technologies provide organizations with key tools to facilitate information flow and to enhance the productivity of their eBusinesses. This track focuses on online financial information, intranets, desktop strategies, Net skills, and case studies of successful information services on the street.
Organized and moderated by Jane I. Dysart, Dysart & Jones Associates
 

Session C201
10:00 a.m. - 11:00 a.m.
Content and Enterprise-Wide Delivery
Simon Bradstock, Factiva
Gary Mueller, Internet Securities Inc.
Mark Shewhart, Consulting Software
Leading providers of strategic business information for corporate enterprises share their views of distributing critical information throughout Wall Street and other organizations. Each provider gives a thumbnail sketch of their content in action–a brief case study aimed at providing strategies for information distribution and ideas to apply in your organization.
 

Session C202
11:15 a.m. - 12:15 p.m.
Content and Technology in a Global Enterprise
Carol Ginsburg, Deutsche Bank AG
Tom Baskind, Global Vendor Relations
Alan Paris, Managing Director, Deutsche Bank AG
Web technologies are revolutionizing the way business is done on the street and around the world. On the way to being a one-stop shop for critical content in a global enterprise, Deutsche Bank shares its strategies and challenges in providing access to key content in a fast, reliable way to hundreds of users all over the globe. Speakers discuss their experiences and learnings, as well as suggestions for others embarking on global information access strategies.
 

12:15 p.m. - 1:45 p.m.
Lunch Break
A Chance to Visit the Exhibits
 

Session C203
1:45 p.m. - 2:45 p.m.
Optimizing Information Initiatives on the Street and Beyond
Arthur J. Dimeglio, Salomon Smith Barney
Leading information services at Wall Street firms with global branches are exciting places to be but they are also changing all the time. Our speaker shares his service strategies, discusses his group’s robust intranet Web site with over 1,000 annotated links organized by subject, describes the tools used to continuously update content on the site, and highlights his group’s participation in firm-wide initiatives such as intranet redesign, client management systems, and streaming content to the desktop.
 

Session C204
3:00 p.m. - 4:00 p.m.
Success Strategies from Super Searchers on Wall Street
Amelia Kassel, MarketingBase
This session by a business researcher specializing in market research, competitive intelligence, and worldwide business information since 1984 brings you success strategies from her book of interviews with 10 top Wall Street super searchers. All are experts in the use of critical Internet and online financial information that contributes to the success of their organizations. The Wall Street information and investment professionals hail from investment banks, consulting firms, and academia, and also include specialty vendors and a financial writer. Based on her questions, Kassel reports their revealing answers about strategies and techniques, key financial sites and databases, power tips and wisdom.
 

Session C205
4:15 p.m. - 5:15 p.m.
Online Opportunities and New Roles
Rebecca Jones, Dysart & Jones Associates
Larisa Brigevich, Global Research Librarian, Franklin Templeton
Laura Cash, Lexis-Nexis
This session presents a look at the roles and opportunities that information professionals on the Street are not only taking on but excelling in!  From Internet and intranet librarians, Web trainers and publishers, and content negotiators to information architects and taxonomists, information professionals have key roles on Wall Street.  Hear about a number of examples and one case study in detail.  Franklin Templeton's  'Express Search', created by its Global Research librarian, Larisa Brigevich demonstrates their ability to transform LEXIS-NEXIS into a unique tool for its investment analysts, and highlights the many skills of her team.

Because it is no longer sufficient to provide customers with only a search tool, LEXIS-NEXIS created its Smart Tools and SmartIndexing technologies to enable customers to reduce their information overload, while increasing their access to business critical information.  By definition, Smart Tools are capabilities designed to help the enterprise publish LEXIS-NEXIS content to the Intranet in relevant pieces.  Intranet Links and Intranet Delivery are the key components of Smart Tools.  Smart Tools allow clients to customize content, delivery, or research strategies at every level of the enterprise: corporate, management, departmental, or individual.  SmartIndexing harnesses the latest indexing technologies along with the experience and knowledge of subject experts, to offer customers controlled vocabulary terms for companies, personal names, organizations, geographic locations and thousands of business and industry topics.  Specifically, Smart Indexing can be used to retrieve only those news articles that contain a substantial discussion of a particular issue, topic, industry or competitor.  Consequently, SmartIndexing increases the precision of online news research, while at the same time making searching easier.  SmartIndexing can also cast a wide net to retrieve all potentially relevant news articles to increase the comprehensiveness of online news research.  The Ability to choose to apply NEXIS Indexing to obtain maximum comprehensiveness or maximum precision allows companies to easily obtain the balance between precision and comprehensiveness in the information in responding to particular research needs of their employees
 

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Thursday, May 17th

West Ballroom
Keynote Speech
9:00 a.m. - 9:45 a.m.
Knowledge Management and Beyond
Tom Davenport, Director for Strategic Change, Accenture and author of the forthcoming book, The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business
Knowledge management is just beginning to penetrate the fabric of many businesses. The early, flashy-but-insubstantial applications—best practices and lessons learned, for example—have given way to broadly focused initiatives that are transforming the way organizations work. Davenport describes the types of organizations that are in knowledge management for the long haul, and that are becoming destinations for high-powered knowledge-based solutions.  He then discusses how the handling of enormous amounts of business information has pushed downsized staffs to the brink of an acute attention deficit disorder. To achieve corporate goals, business leaders need their employees’ full attention on critical knowledge-based tasks — and that attention is in short supply. Davenport has studied how companies manage the attention of their employees and their site visitors. He analyzes the components of attention management through three lenses — economic, psychobiological, and technological — and offers guidelines for going beyond knowledge management and keeping employees focused on crucial corporate tasks.

Thursday, May 17th

Sutton South
Track A — SEARCHING, SEARCH ENGINES, AND EP
Track Chair: John Hearty, OCLC
 

Session A301
10:00 a.m. - 11:00 a.m.
Web-Based Catalogs and an Alternative to EP

Biomimetic Systems for Information Retrieval
Herbert L. Roitblat, DolphinSearch, Inc.
A powerful source of insight for computational intelligence is to examine how biological systems solve problems and then to construct analogous, biomimetic mechanisms.  Following this strategy, dolphin biosonar has been effectively modeled using neural networks.  These networks perform brain-like computations, which are ideally suited to recognizing patterns.  The same kinds of networks can also be applied to recognize the meaning patterns of words and documents. Biomimetic systems are self-organizing; they do not require the laborious construction of rigid, expensive, ontologies or prestructured rule bases.  They discover the meaning of words in the same way that people do, by bootstrapping context.  They allow true fuzzy semantic comparisons. The result is an ad hoc categorization system that adapts itself to the user's conceptual structure rather than forcing the user to adapt to the system. Humans constantly categorize, but their categories are unstable both from individual to individual and from time to time, depending on their needs and interests. Standard information retrieval approaches typically impose a single conceptual structure on their users. In contrast, biomimetic systems emulate the way their users' brains work and work in concert with them. Studies also find that people are poor at remembering the exact words that were used in a document, instead remembering the gist. As a result, document retrieval systems that depend on the presence of exact words fail to retrieve relevant documents. DolphinSearch technology, based on the biomimetic approach, learns the meanings of words from the documents it indexes and can recognize the relevance of documents based on their meaning.

Heroes and Chimeras: A Search for Electronic Citation Standards and the Discovery of Success Through Never-Ending Failure
Stacy Merrill Surla, Aspen Systems Corporation
Informational Web sites tend to accumulate large offerings of online publications. After a point these lists of HTML files, PDF documents, and external links become unwieldy and inaccessible to the user. Webmasters long to bring order to their Publications pages, but there is a paucity of standard or proposed styles for electronic publication links. The ONDCP Clearinghouse is developing a style-sheet to manage its growing collection of documents on drug control policy and related topics. The objective of this stylesheet is to increase the clarity, consistency, and usability of Web site publication links.
 

Session A302
11:15 a.m. - 12:15 p.m.
Living with eJournals and Looking Toward eBooks

One Year’s Experience Without Print at Princeton
David Goodman, Princeton University
Princeton is almost unique among American research universities in receiving some major periodical titles as electronic only. The main group at Princeton comprises Academic Press Ideal, where less than one-tenth of the potential titles were continued in print as well. There are also a small number of society-published titles, and the decision was made not to get both versions of almost all of these. Princeton’s users value the willingness to subscribe to new titles in areas of interest, to purchase a considerable number of books, and to pay for all necessary document delivery. Users now look for current journal articles online first, using the paper versions only if there is no online available.

Bringing Electronic Books (eBooks) into the Digital Library
Lynn Silipigni Connaway, netLibrary, Inc.
One way to enhance libraries with global 24 x 7 access to authoritative information is by use of eBooks. They quickly retrieve and deliver specific content, making research easy, fast and very effective. This session will explore the challenges and rewards related to the incorporation of electronic books into the digital library. The presenter will define the eBook; identify its significance in the digital library; address eBook selection, acquisition, organization, distribution, copyright, preservation, and perpetual access from the librarian’s and publisher’s perspectives. The technology necessary for the delivery and integration of eBooks into the digital library, as well as implementation issues, such as staffing, training, technology, and budget, will also be addressed.
 

12:15 p.m. - 1:45 p.m.
Lunch Break
A Chance to Visit the Exhibits
 

Session A303
1:45 p.m. - 2:45 p.m.
The Digital Object Identifier (DOI) for Networks

Design Considerations and Future Directions for the DOI
Lawrence W. Lannom, Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI)
The DOI (Digital Object Identifier) is being developed and deployed as a means to persistently identify intellectual property on digital networks such as the Internet. In initial deployment, one DOI, which remains constant, was resolvable to one URL, which could be changed over time. It has been evolving from that point in both scope and functionality, and the design now envisions a core of metadata associated with each DOI as well as having each DOI resolvable to multiple instances of multiple types of data instead of just one, and only one, URL. Throughout these changes DOI resolution has been based on the Handle System, development of which was begun by CNRI in an earlier digital library research project.

Business Value and Implementation Considerations for the DOI (Digital Object Identifier)
David Sidman and Tom Davidson, Content Directions, Inc.
Digital Object Identifier (DOI) is an emerging standard within the publishing industry that holds tremendous promise for improving access to content on the Internet–not only for traditional publishing, but for all other forms of intellectual property online: music, film/video, photography, etc. In addition to facilitating transactions of all kinds involving online content (sale, syndication, digital distribution, financial tracking, etc.), the DOI represents an important enabling technology for copyright protection and digital rights management. It also provides a permanent link to the content owner, in contrast to a standard URL, which “breaks” whenever the content is moved to a new location. DOI has been widely embraced in the Scientific Journals sector, where 50 of the largest international journal publishers are tagging every article with a DOI (2 million to date) and are using the DOI to cross-link the world’s journal literature.
 

Session A304
3:00 p.m. - 4:00 p.m.
What Is Fair Use? It Does Not Include Hacking

Protect Your Privacy on the Internet Against Hackers: Issues and Experiences
Sharon Yang, Rider University
Internet hackers are criminals posing threats to the privacy and security of computers on the Internet. Denial of Service Attacks is one of the deadly weapons used by hackers to wreak havoc to computers and networks. Hackers often use victims as shields to hide their real identities. They will break into a victim’s computer and use it as a base for attacks on other systems while hackers hide and watch. Hackers can even fake a victim’s IP and launch attacks under his or her name. The presenters want to share their experiences as victims. There are many ways to defend privacy and security of data on the Internet. This paper will discuss some free software solutions such as TCP Wrappers, Tripwire, Secure Shell (SSH), John The Ripper, etc.

Copyright Issues in Online Education: Over- and Under-Sensitivity to the Doctrine of Fair Use
Tom Walker, University of Southern Mississippi
Educational institutions and other organizations using Web-based instruction should be concerned about maintaining the intellectual property rights of those who contribute to the educational mission of the institution, including authors of textbooks, articles, and Web sites, as well as the instructors themselves. On the one hand, institutions may overreact to the Doctrine of Fair Use by enforcing practices that go beyond the spirit of copyright law; conversely, some institutions may be oblivious to the societal justifications for intellectual property law and not sufficiently protect intellectual property rights. This presentation will discuss issues to be considered by online educators who want to present their students with optimum access to a variety of sources and remain within the boundaries of the law.
 

Session A305
4:15 p.m. - 5:15 p.m.
Virtual Environments: Testing GUIs and Information Architecture

Virtual Libraries on the Web, Dream or Reality? Studying the Impact of Information Architecture on Users in Real and Virtual Environments
Tula Giannini, Pratt Institute
This presentation looks at information architecture in the context of libraries and library users for the purpose of measuring quantitatively and qualitatively the impact of information architecture (IA) on user outcomes in terms of information retrieved as well as environmental factors that effect user experience. User’s interactions with IA through a virtual library on the Web are measured against user interactions with IA in a real library, where the user’s initial information needs are defined in the same manner for both settings. The tension between real and virtual library environments creates a dynamic connection that defines a sense of place for users who move through time and space from one to the other.

Usability Testing of Interface Design in the Virtual Library Environment
Maryellen Allen, University of South Florida
Carlene Jaworowski, Florida Distance Learning Reference & Referral Center
Jeremy Bullian, University of South Florida and
Merilyn Burke, University of South Florida
The University of South Florida’s Virtual Library (VL) made its debut in November 1997. The VL serves as the single on-campus and remote access gateway to all of the resources (both print and electronic) offered by the USF Libraries. As a university that serves a large student population, remote access to library resources is critical. Over the years, the number of resources available to users has grown from just over 20 electronic databases, to over 400 today. With this growth, it has become necessary to continually update and evaluate the VL’s user interface in order to maintain easy navigability of provided resources in an increasingly complex environment. This presentation highlights a usability study planning process, development of the testing instrument, details associated with conducting the study, as well as conclusions drawn and subsequent recommended changes.
 

Thursday, May 17th

Sutton Center
Track B — CONTENT, ITS MANAGEMENT AND USES
Track Chair: Don Hawkins, Information Today, Inc.
 

Session B301
10:00 a.m. - 11:00 a.m.
Creating Your Own Vertical Search Portals
Péter Jacsó, University of Hawaii
Bookmarks were nice, hyper-link collections served their purpose, subject gateways helped to get to the most promising sites effectively, and Web portals allowed some degree of customization. The latest software tools go much further, allowing the creation of vertical portals (vortals) that combine the convenience of portals, offering a limited number of predefined sites with the appeal of customizing the set of searchable databases that are the most relevant to you in a subject specialty. These vertical portals allow the creation of launch pads to initiate searches directly from a single page.
 

Session B302
11:15 a.m. - 12:15 p.m.
eJournals and Databases for Research

Developing a Distance Learning Course on Using the Internet for Research
Srivalli Rao and Carol Ickowitz, Mercy College and Dominican College
Mercy College offers undergraduate degrees in Business and Psychology entirely online over the Internet. Library service to these students has been non-existent so far. Most of the students live in the U.S. and use their neighborhood public and academic libraries. In the Fall of 1999, a small group of students living and working in Israel registered for these online degree programs. It was important to provide research assistance and instruction in using the Library’s full-text databases and finding quality information resources on the Internet to support the courses for which these students were registered. The course “Using Internet for Research” was developed to meet these needs. This presentation describes the development and delivery of this course, the revisions that have been incorporated each semester, the trials and tribulations experienced by both the instructor teaching and the students taking the course.

Scientists' Use of Journals: Differences (and Similarities) Between Print and Electronic
Carol Tenopir, Elizabeth McSween, Christopher Ryland, and Erin Smith, University of Tennessee
Donald W. King, Consultant
Randy Hoffman, Oak Ridge National Laboratories
Studies conducted over the last 3 decades demonstrate that scientists read widely from scholarly journals. Scientists consistently rank journal articles high in value compared to other forms of scholarly communication and read (or reread) on an average between 100-120 articles per year. Scientists who win awards or are high achievers read more than their peers. The forms of journals are changing and scientists in all fields have access to many digital journals or articles through e-print servers, library subscriptions, personal subscriptions, or other full-text databases. Has this new widespread availability of electronic journals also changed how scientists use journal literature and how they value the information found in journals? Do scientists place different values on different forms of journals?
 

12:15 p.m. - 1:45 p.m.
Lunch Break
A Chance to Visit the Exhibits
 

Session B303
1:45 p.m. - 2:45 p.m.
Digital Collections: Digital Reading Packs and Hypertext for Management

The Nuremberg Trial Collection - Managing a Large Document Collection
William Fray, Yale Law School
The Avalon Project is about to complete digitizing and mounting on the Web the complete 22 volumes of the Nuremberg Trials of the major German World War II criminals. The document collection, which includes many other trials; related pieces, demonstrates the use of hypertext technology to navigate and annotate the documents. Also to be shown are the use of Dublin Core Meta Tags to facilitate searching and indexing.

Creating Digital Reading Packs from the ProQuest Digital Vault with the SiteBuilder Software
Péter Jacsó, University of Hawaii
Providing reading packs of current articles, newspapers, and conference papers for students has been the bane of administering courses. Complying with copyright required the instructors to follow a lengthy and cumbersome procedure and to have a generous budget to pay for fees. Bell & Howell set a landmark in digital librarianship when it opened its Digital Vault and made available on the Web the page image (PDF) version of more than half a million articles from scholarly and professional journals for subscribers of the ProQuest service. Introducing the SiteBuilder tool allowed faculty to select the documents appropriate for their courses and to create a reading list with direct links to the documents for instant display and printing, preserving the original layout, typography, and including charts, tables and photographs.
 

Session B304
3:00 p.m. - 4:00 p.m.
Digital Libraries: DL Development and New Uses

Project I-DLR: Development of an Interactive Digital Library Resource Information System
Thomas R. Kochtanek, Ahmad Rafee Che Kassim, Howard Fenster, Karen Hein, Qhryrrae Michaelieu, Liang Lei Qi, and Johannes Strobel, University of Missouri-Columbia, University of Nebraska-Omaha
The goal of this project is to develop an integrated resource where selected information sources on the topic of Digital Libraries (DL) may be consolidated into an information storage and retrieval system that promotes and supports improved access to these digital resources. This integrated resource has a target audience that includes those new to the rapidly developing field of Digital Libraries. Based on a prior “proprietary” implementation using the Microsoft Access database management system, this new version focuses on content, organization, and access. The resulting implementation will be a self-contained DBMS application running on the Web.

Digital Technology and Libraries: Collaborating with the Scientific Community
Patricia Morris and Elaina Norlin, University of Arizona
Digital technology has completely changed the way we communicate with the world. However, faculty members, research scholars and professionals have taken digital technology one step further. Many are using the Web along with video, photographs, images and text to not only communicate but collaborate new ideas, new projects and recent discoveries to their students, associates and colleagues. Academic libraries have responded to this new trend by creating digital library centers to support faculty members, departments and research scholars. The University of Arizona has created a separate team called the Digital Libraries Initiatives Group (DLIG), whose main objectives are to identify and explore knowledge bases existing or being created at the University of Arizona and to design, develop and implement electronic publication of knowledge products.
 

Session B305
4:15 p.m. - 5:15 p.m.
Building Digital Collections and Managing End-User Development of Resources

Building Digital Collections: A Library Community Approach at the University of Wisconsin Madison
Jaquelina Alvarez, Sue Dentinger, and Lee Konrad, University of Madison-Wisconsin
The Campus Image Database Project, a component of the UW-Madison Digital Library, as well as its administrative, technical and organizational issues related to its development, are showcased in this presentation. Faculty and staff at the university were invited to contribute their own images to a collection designed to serve as an online repository for the instructional and research needs of the campus community. The library system provides the technical infrastructure as well as staff resources for the digitalization of selected images. Once the technical infrastructure was established, it was important to develop clear guidelines and procedures to bridge the gap between the technical infrastructure and database contributors. Toward this end, a working group was formed to examine available metadata schemes and to develop a model in the context of this project.

Managing End-User Development of Digital Library Resources to Support User Communities
Robert R. Downs, Columbia University
Providing access to online learning resources offers students, educators, scientists, and knowledge workers an
opportunity to learn and conduct research remotely, independent of time and place. Potential end users of such Web-based services can themselves contribute to online development efforts, resulting in the creation of digital library resources that directly address the needs and expectations of user communities. Projects that actively involve end users in participatory design have been encouraging. The presenter proposes ways that educators can engage in end-user development of digital library resources to improve available learning opportunities.
 

Thursday, May 17th
Sutton North
Track C — BUSINESS/WALL STREET/CI
Track Chair: Morris Blatt, OnTrac Solutions
 

Session C301
10:00 a.m. - 11:00 a.m.
The Internet: A Goldmine of CI Resources

Mining the Internet for Market Intelligence: Strategies for Marketing, Market Research and Competitive Intelligence
William J. Comcowich and Amelia Kassel, CyberAlert, Inc.
Internet monitoring has become a corporate necessity. Businesses must be able to tap this endless source of market intelligence if they are to remain competitive, and they must be in a position to protect corporate assets—sales, reputation, product branding, trademark and patent rights. A well-conceived Internet monitoring strategy essentially provides businesses with an early-warning system, enabling a quick response to rapidly changing conditions. Today, there are literally millions of Web sites where crucial information can appear, available for instantaneous viewing by over 100 million wired consumers. The potential of this mass to ruin a successful company dictates the critical need for fast, comprehensive Internet-monitoring solutions. Internet monitoring and clipping service providers, a new class of application service provider, have emerged to deliver a highly automated, sophisticated means to mine the Internet for information critical to the success of the company.

Know Your Internet International Business Resources
Victoria Platt, Willamette Management Associates
Corporate personnel and corporate librarians are sometimes charged with the task of obtaining financial and economic information on foreign companies and the countries in which they conduct business. The subject company may be a well-known conglomerate doing business in several countries including the U.S., or a thinly traded public company in an emerging market. This presentation will cover Internet-based resources that provide financial and economic information on foreign companies and the countries in which they do business. The differences in price and content will be addressed among databases provided through traditional online service providers, government-sponsored Web sites, and the Internet. Sources utilized in completing research requests from actual engagements will be provided to illustrate the availability of valuable resources on the Internet.
 

Session C302
11:15 a.m. - 12:15 p.m.
CI Gathering Data and Ensuring Data Integrity

Improving Competitive Intelligence (CI) Data Integrity and Its Impact on Strategic Decision Making
Morris Blatt, OnTrac Solutions
In today’s fast-paced, digital world, project deadlines are becoming shorter, while the number of data sources is constantly increasing. This is causing data gathering, competitive intelligence (CI), and strategic planning professionals, as well as senior management, to function in a “time compression” environment. That business atmosphere may not allow sufficient time to identify the appropriate data sources, the time to verify or validate CI data, or enough time to develop efficient business strategies. This presentation discusses: 1) The differences between accuracy and precision, and their impact on data gathering, competitive intelligence, and strategic decision making; 2) Identification of global competitive intelligence data sources; 3) Identifying pitfalls (and recommendations to resolve) encountered in gathering global CI data; and 4) The impact of increased secondary source data integrity on strategic decision making.

Efficient Data Gathering and Effective Competitive Intelligence (CI) Processes
Morris Blatt, OnTrac Solutions
Many companies are quickly establishing data gathering and competitive intelligence organizations. However, they may not understand the necessary relationships between the data gathering and competitive intelligence organizations, nor the implications of the CI function’s organizational placement. This presentation discusses: 1) A definition of an effective CI process from data gathering through decision making; 2) The differences between data gathering, competitive intelligence, and competitive analysis; 3) The different skills sets required for data gathering and competitive intelligence professionals; 4) The different types of data sources that data gatherers and competitive intelligence professionals tend to use; 5) The importance of the organizational location of the CI function; and 6) The importance of added value, flexibility, and timeliness in the data gathering and competitive intelligence processes.
 

12:15 p.m. - 1:45 p.m.
Lunch Break
A Chance to Visit the Exhibits
 

Session C303
1:45 p.m. - 2:45 p.m.
CI Tools

Tools and Resources for Competitive Intelligence: An Overview of Web-Conferencing and Collaborative Software
Howard Rosenberg, NetSearchers, Inc.
Conferencing over the Web has grown in popularity as a mechanism for delivering virtual meetings, presentations, eLearning, for work on collaborative projects, and as a resource for competitive intelligence. This trend, coupled with greater access to broadband technologies, should see continued evolution of Web-conferencing software, in both the types of platforms offered and in the complexity of content delivered. This presentation will examine several Web-conferencing offerings available and will focus on how these technologies can best be leveraged in conjunction with new technologies.

Creating Intelligence from Data: Resources and Techniques for Leveraging Patent Information for Competitive Advantage
Geeth Vijay-Rao, Derwent Thompson Scientific Inc.
In today’s competitive world, analyzed information, which we call intelligence, is critical for strategic business decisions. Competitive intelligence as a product and a process focuses on collecting and analyzing information about customers and competitors based on the organizational needs. A good intelligence system is built on solid technical, financial, and marketing data. This session provides a review of the resources available both on the Web as well as on commercial online systems to build such a business intelligence system. A case study approach will illustrate the best use of the resources for competitive intelligence. Special emphasis will be given on using patent data for monitoring competitors.
 

Session C304
3:00 p.m. - 4:00 p.m.
Business Information Markets: Trends and Strategic Partnerships

Emerging Trends Driving Growth and Change in the Business Information Markets
Ken Marlin, Veronis Suhler
Mr. Marlin will review some interesting trends in the business information sector (financial, marketing, technology, health, and general). For example, more than $44.2 billion was spent on information in this segment in 1999, up 7.7 percent from $41.1 billion in 1998. From 1995-99, spending on business information services grew at a 7.7 percent compound annual rate. The increasing use of new media technology continues to be a tremendous opportunity for some firms, and a serious threat to others—opening the business information services market to new end users and allowing some firms to take market share from established but slower—moving players. Where does the marketing power lie in the business information sector, and how is power shifting? In the new world, does scale still matter or is it a disadvantage?

Strategic Partnerships— Opening New Markets and Revenue Opportunities
Patricia Sabosik, Factiva
Relationships and strategic partnerships form the core of the new economy. Companies have to move quickly and smartly to build relationships to leverage proprietary resources while drawing upon the specialized offerings of other companies. The Internet has changed the way people do business, and the consequences are enormous. The marketplace is changing constantly with three major trends: Companies are facing intense competition, they need to operate globally, and they are facing industry convergence. This presentation will indicate ways in which companies can expand markets and increase revenues through strategic relationships.
 

Session C305
4:15 p.m. - 5:15 p.m.
CI for Reducing Overload

Taming the Information Overload Tiger
Perry Copus, Coreintellect, Inc.
How is your organization coping with the “information overload”? What is it costing your company to find the right strategic and competitive information? How can you grow market share and maintain a competitive edge with precise business intelligence? Information overload is a common problem among workers across professions today, but especially among knowledge workers in fast-paced industries who use and create business information from both the visible and “invisible Web.” As business professionals embark across the vastness of the Web in search of information they need relevant content, a user-friendly experience and a blend of the right personal information. According to Forrester, Web delivery of business information will be an $11 billion market worldwide by 2004.
 

CI Wrap Up
Morris Blatt, OnTrac Solutions
Morris Blatt will summarize the salient observations of speakers in the Thursday Track C Sessions. He will stimulate discussion among speakers and attendees by questioning the speakers and looking for consistencies and areas on which they differ.
 
 

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