 |
Next issue | 
|
Chris Armstrong
I thought it would be interesting to review the year in terms of scholarly activity - as indicated by publishing - in the area of quality or evaluation and databases or the Internet. For this little experiment I decided to use the new LISAnet: Library and Information Science Abstracts from Bowker-Saur on their new Web interface. This is a very good implementation with "in-your-face" thesaurus searching! In both the simple and advanced search modes, the right-hand side of the screen is given over to a browsable thesaurus with lemmata that can be clicked to offer broader and narrower terms and an easy paste into the search form (consisting of both term boxes and a free text area for entering a complete search) on the left.
The first problem was the Boolean complexity of my simple search.
(SUBJECT =(QUALITY OR EVALUATION)) AND (SUBJECT =(DATABASE OR INTERNET OR "WORLD WIDE WEB")) AND DATE OF PUBLICATION=1999How was this to be entered? A short e-mail correspondence later, this was resolved and I discovered 51 references plus one I had discovered by chance on the previous day which was indexed under "Performance measures" but not quality: 52 in all. If we discount the four book reviews and two false drops, there are apparently 46 articles which I might find interesting. The search was carried out in late January 2000 so we have to expect that things will change as further 1999 issues of journals are indexed and added to LISA.
Simple analysis first! The 46 articles were written by 73 authors and appeared in 29 different journals and 3 conference proceedings. Only 5 journals (including a Chinese one) appeared more than once but there were five references to CALIBER 99: Academic Libraries in the Internet Era: Proceedings of the 6th National Convention for Automation of Libraries in Education and Research and two to Internet Librarian and Libtech International 99. Three of the journal-published papers started life as conference papers at WWW8: the 8th International World Wide Web Conference. Seventeen articles were by multiple authors but only 2 authors (including me!) appeared more than once. Only four were in a language other than English (two in French, two in Chinese, one in German and one in Icelandic).
When we begin to look in more detail at the references, it soon becomes evident that several are not of interest - blame the searcher for using such general terms! 11 had to do with the evaluation of, or the indexing techniques used by, search engines. This leaves 35 which were concerned with the quality of Web resources or databases - actually only 5 were to do with online or CD-ROM databases, the rest were Internet oriented.
The search term, "evaluation" won hands-down over "quality"! Eight references dealt with the need to evaluate (one on educating users on the need); seven with evaluation criteria and five with the results of various evaluations. There were also two on usability testing and two on pre-coordinate evaluation as performed by gateway services. Three articles dealt with library Web sites and four with Web site development (one Boolean AND there for the development of a library Web site!). The topic was viewed from the searcher's viewpoint in two articles and a further two articles looked at the badging of sites (Best of Web Awards or Bobby).
On the database side (as opposed to Internet) two articles were to do with database evaluation and two with quality control; the fifth had to do with a medical network. Only one article out of 35 compared Internet with conventional access: this in terms of cost savings between the free Web and charged-for CD-ROMs. Four out of the complete set of 35 had to do with the medical/health area.
Other topics which cropped up (single articles only) were metadata, human factors engineering, electronic journals, evaluation by means of a server log, networks, and scholarly communication.
I am afraid that this little evaluation does not really offer any huge insights! There seems to more emphasis on the practical approach (evaluation) than on discussions of quality per se with a significant emphasis on the need to evaluate and evaluation criteria - just under 43% of all articles. A few articles dealt with quality and evaluation from the point of view of Web developers and one of these related to library sites ... so that is good news! Unsurprisingly, the only subject area to have any dominance is medical or health services but surprising (at least to me) is the fact that only one article compared Internet with "conventional" access.
|
Next issue |
|