The Search Principle blog

I am reading an excellent book written in 2000, the kind of book that I wish I had written, entitled: The Intellectual Foundation of Information Organization (Digital Libraries and Electronic Publishing). The author, Elaine Svenonius, is not familiar to me, but I couldn’t agree more with her assessment of organizing the world’s information. This book was written pre-web 2.0, but it still resonates in 2008. Below, I include information from the foreword. Read this book! – Dean

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“Instant electronic access to digital information is the single most distinguishing attribute of the information age. The elaborate retrieval mechanisms that support such access are a product of technology. But technology is not enough. The effectiveness of a system for accessing information is a direct function of the intelligence put into organizing it. Just as the practical field of engineering has theoretical physics as its underlying base, the design of systems for organizing information rests on an intellectual foundation. The subject of this book is the systematized body of knowledge that constitutes this foundation.

Integrating the disparate disciplines of descriptive cataloging, subject cataloging, indexing, and classification, the book adopts a conceptual framework that views the process of organizing information as the use of a special language of description called a bibliographic language. The book is divided into two parts. The first part is an analytic discussion of the intellectual foundation of information organization. The second part moves from generalities to particulars, presenting an overview of three bibliographic languages: work languages, document languages, and subject languages. It looks at these languages in terms of their vocabulary, semantics, and syntax. The book is written in an exceptionally clear style, at a level that makes it understandable to those outside the discipline of library and information science.”

In response to concerns by consumer watchdogs, government officials are asking whether Google – today among America’s ten richest corporations, with a market value of over two hundred billion dollars – has too much power? (ExxonMobil, valued at just under five hundred billion, is No. 1.)

Unlike Microsoft, found guilty of anti-competitive behavior in 2000, Google has never been charged with violating anti-trust laws. However, Google’s dominance over the media landscape is growing, and its ability to disrupt existing business models has economists talking. Google’s competitors share a vague worry that Google is more or less out to rule the world. Is this concern borne of facts, or fiction? You decide.

See: The Search Party: Google Squares off With its Capitol Hill Critics
Ken Auletta, The New Yorker, January 14, 2008

p.s. Are librarians worried about Google?? Of course we are.

Hot off the 2008 presses (even though its publication date reads 2007):

Barsky E, Giustini D. Introducing Web 2.0: wikis for health librarians. Journal of the Canadian Health Libraries Association. Fall 2007 28(4): 147-150

Google has revealed a new project aimed at the scientific community called Project Palimpsest.

The site looks like a blog at the moment – research.google.com – but will eventually host ‘terabytes of open-source scientific datasets’. It was originally previewed for scientists last August at Google headquarters. Apparently, Google’s Project Palimpsest will build on the company’s acquisition of data visualization technology, and is to develop algorithms for the examination and probing of information. The new site will have YouTube-style annotating and commenting features.

Theoretically (and this is a BIG hypothetical) these datasets could be combined with semantic technologies eventually as a way to move Google into web 3.0. I know very hypothetical – but a librarian can dream can’t he?

Transitioning to a new interface to search our major databases is never easy, not for users or our staff. One of my major concerns is: what will the new interface mean in terms of reference services and our teaching? How much time will we need to teach the new interface?

Health librarians have been especially busy with OvidSP during the past week, and most of my time as an academic librarian working in a clinical/hospital setting has focused on two prominent (and new) aspects of the interface: explaining basic search – which employs natural language capability in a proprietary algorithm – and OVID syntax (which is simply a new name for advanced search in the retired interface). The jury is still out on <a href=”http://migrator.rab.olt.ubc.ca/googlescholar/2008/01/Irreproducibility?—OvidSP-Basic-search/”>basic search, I think, and whether it will be useful. I’m not sure whether natural language query formulation will ever be widely-used (or understood by users), but we still need to teach the thing.

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I’m a bit of an amateur historian in terms of health librarianship, and the web. The change to the Ovid interface reminds me of other paradigmatic shifts in approach (and philosophy) around finding health information, and our major databases. Remember CD-Rom towers, and the early text-based SilverPlatter interface from the late 1980s? (SP, by the way, in OvidSP is Silverplatter.) Do you remember with fondness the introduction of end-user searching during the early days of CD-Rom searchiing? Remember the acrimony and debate around end-user searching which some health librarians feared would lead to de-professionalization?

I could go on, but I won’t. I admit that it’s frustrating to encounter new interfaces, and frustration can manifest in our users. My approach is to soothe frayed nerves, to point out similarities of the new interface and old, and to show improvements in the new interface. (I still prefer the pre-2005 OVID interface, one of the best ever.) One of the first steps I use is to ask users how they prefer to search, and whether they do ‘quick and dirty’ searches (a few good articles) or if they are more sophisticated in their searching (and understand mapping, field and MeSH searching).

Quite apart from the interface, though, does the move to OvidSP represent a paradigm shift of some kind for our proprietary tools? What kinds of business pressures have led Ovid to spend time and money on radical interface changes? What does OvidSP mean in terms of web 3.0 (or web 2.0 for that matter)?

These are some of the issues I’d like to hear debated and discussed over the next while. Let’s hope we can generate some more in-depth analysis of the kind by Krafty, once we all have a chance to learn where Ovid put our favourite features in OvidSP.

In my list of the Five (5) Pros & Cons of OvidSP, one caught the eye of rising health librarian,
Jeff Mason, from Saskatchewan:

Jeff: “I’m wondering why you think basic search results won’t be reproducible. …if a search is completely documented (exactly what you typed in, what options you had checked off etc.) and OVID’s algorithms stay the same over time (questionable) the search could easily be reproduced.”

Questionable is right, Jeff. OVID’s basic search in OvidSP is not the same as it was in the OVID Gateway. However, irreproducibility is not a significant problem generally, unless we are asked as health librarians to perform (and document) searches for grants, clinical trials or other types of systematic reviews.

There are a number of tools that wreak havoc on reproducibility: all search engines, Google scholar, OvidSP Basic Search (and, indeed, any tool or algorithm that interprets a search based on links or term relevance). Read the section on how OvidSP’s feature How Relevancy is Calculated works. (Librarians have disliked features like this since they were introduced for books@OVID several years ago.)

To me, this feature is heuristic (and iterative) but not reproducible over time.

A new book called Wikipatterns has been published by Wiley.

I like the idea of a how-to guide for growing wiki use in organizations with practical advice from wiki experts. The book is apparently inspired by the vibrant wiki community @ Wikipatterns.com.

“Ten case studies give ample evidence of how the Wikis pull people into a knowledge-and-solution camp that runs rings around email for speed, effectiveness, cohesion and intellectual rigor.” – Allan Cox

“Create an idea-sharing environment where incomplete can be linked together and from this, solutions emerge.” – Ward Cunningham, from the foreword

Loaded with case studies from organizations big and small such as Sun Microsystems, Johns Hopkins, LeapFrog, Red Ant and National Constitution Day.

Written to answer questions such as:
* How an organization’s wiki differs from Wikipedia
* The best ways to get started
* How wikis streamline and simplify day-to-day activity
* How to encourage participation and make the wiki “stick”

About the Author
Stewart Mader is Wiki Evangelist for Atlassian Software Systems, makers of the award-winning and widely used Confluence wiki software. Stewart has worked with business, academic, and non-profit organizations to grow vibrant collaborative communities. He also publishes Blog on Wiki Patterns (www.ikiw.org), and recently wrote an online book on how the wiki is transforming education and research.

ps. Check out this ***new OVID-SP podcast tutorial***, courtesy of Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University School of Medicine. Nice. (See the advanced tutorials.)

Pros of OVID-SP

1. A simpler, more compact OVID interface, and top layer navigation. (However, why do I long for the bright colours of the pre-2005 interface?)

2. Natural language queries and keyword searching are front and centre, what 80% of users want. (We’ll still have to teach the power users MeSH searching.)

3. Basic search is just fine; features more forgiving search functionality for users (yes, Googlization). Ideal for those users who want a few good articles.

4. Citation management (printing, e-mailing, saving) is not buried at the bottom as it was in the old interface. (See left sidebar)

5. Top five tabs allow for easy navigation to ‘targeted’ citation and field searching.

…more strengths to come….

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Cons of OVID-SP

1. Debate about ‘basic search’ default vs. “OVID syntax’ – this is unresolvable. Both are needed. The question is what is needed more?? I agree that OVID syntax is confusing. Why, OVID, do you keep changing terminology?

2. Is OVID SP googlization or PubMed-ization? Actually, it’s neither. That’s a problem for users, and librarians. It means that users won’t know what they are doing unless they read the user guides.

3. Will Basic Search searches be reproducible? An emphatic no. Field searching will be, but not basic searching. This is a problem for users, and librarians.

4. Screen space for “Search Aid” and “OVID-SP Tip” – this is a big waste of important real-estate. Users and librarians will get annoyed with these features, after a while, and see them as OVID adverts. (Bring back automatic search history and limits as icons.)

5. “How Relevancy is Calculated” feature – too complicated. OVID’s mapping feature is best of breed, but I dunno about this feature.

…more weaknesses to come….

This is an excellent example of how librarians can use web 2.0 technologies to communicate with their user communities. My only suggestion is for the librarian to talk a bit about herself and the class this youtube.com video is targeted at: access, critical appraisal, lots of good information literacy going on here. Bravo!

Here is my updated wiki entry on Google scholar (January 13th, 2008)