Search

The aerospace industry can benefit from conversational agents that provide efficient solutions for safety-of-life scenarios. This industry is characterized by products and systems that require years of engineering to achieve optimal performance within complex environments. With recent advances in retrieval and language models, conversational agents can be developed to enhance the system's question-answering capabilities. However, evaluating the added-value of such systems in the context of industrial applications, such as pilots in a cockpit, can be challenging. This article presents the design, implementation, and user evaluation of a conversational agent called Smart Librarian, which is tailored to the aerospace domain's specific requirements to support pilots in their tasks. Our results based on a controlled user experiment with flight school students indicate that the user's perception of the usefulness of the system in completing the search task is a good predictor of both task score and time spent. The system's responses to the relevance of the topic is also a good predictor of task score. The perceived difficulty of the search task and its interaction with the relevance of the system's responses to the topic also play a key role in search performance. The mixed-effects models constructed in this study had large effect sizes, demonstrating participants' ability to assess their performance accurately. Nevertheless, user satisfaction with the system's responses may not be a reliable predictor of user search performance. Implications for the design of conversational agents based on the domain's specific requirements are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the interchange between information behavior research and neighboring fields. Topics include the challenges of explaining information behavior to colleagues from the similarities and differences between information behavior research and closely related fields such as user experience, human-computer interaction, and information retrieval; and the need for information behavior researchers to recognize added value they bring to interdisciplinary collaborations.

Purpose: The PICCH research project contributes to opening a dialogue between cultural heritage archives and users. Hence, the users are identified and their information needs, the search strategies they apply and the search challenges they experience are uncovered. Design/methodology/approach: A combination of questionnaires and interviews is used for collection of data. Questionnaire data were collected from users of three different audiovisual archives. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with two user groups: (1) scholars searching information for research projects and (2) archivists who perform their own scholarly work and search information on behalf of others. Findings: The questionnaire results show that the archive users mainly have an academic background. Hence, scholars and archivists constitute the target group for in-depth interviews. The interviews reveal that their information needs are multi-faceted and match the information need typology by Ingwersen. The scholars mainly apply collection-specific search strategies but have in common primarily doing keyword searching, which they typically plan in advance. The archivists do less planning owing to their knowledge of the collections. All interviewees demonstrate domain knowledge, archival intelligence and artefactual literacy in their use and mastering of the archives. The search challenges they experience can be characterised as search system complexity challenges, material challenges and metadata challenges. Originality/value: The paper provides a rare insight into the complexity of the search situation of cultural heritage archives, and the users' multi-facetted information needs and hence contributes to the dialogue between the archives and the users. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Controlled vocabularies such as Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) have been extensively used to organise information resources in the biomedical domain. However, the usefulness of these terms for information access has not been rigorously evaluated in interactive search environments. The objective of this study was to gain an understanding of domain experts’ interactions with novel search interfaces within the context of biomedical information search, with a goal of better interface design of information retrieval systems. An eye tracking study of biomedical domain experts’ interactions with novel search interfaces was conducted, considering user’s individual differences and gaze behaviour. The findings suggest that types of search interfaces have significant effects on gaze behaviour in terms of fixation-based measures of areas of interest, i.e. visual attention to the elements of title, author, abstract and MeSH terms in document surrogates. Significant interaction effects between cognitive style and user interaction with search interfaces were found, specifically the amount of attention to MeSH terms by analytic and wholistic searchers. These findings contribute to our understanding of the relationship between cognitive styles and gaze patterns in information search. Based on these findings, the implications of individual differences and gaze behaviour for search interface design are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Purpose: This exploratory study aims to help contribute to the understanding of online information search behaviour of PhD students from different humanities fields, with a focus on subject searching. Design/methodology/approach: The methodology is based on a semi-structured interview within which the participants are asked to conduct both a controlled search task and a free search task. The sample comprises eight PhD students in several humanities disciplines at Linnaeus University, a medium-sized Swedish university from 2020. Findings: Most humanities PhD students in the study have received training in information searching, but it has been too basic. Most rely on web search engines like Google and Google Scholar for publications' search, and university's discovery system for known-item searching. As these systems do not rely on controlled vocabularies, the participants often struggle with too many retrieved documents that are not relevant. Most only rarely or never use disciplinary bibliographic databases. The controlled search task has shown some benefits of using controlled vocabularies in the disciplinary databases, but incomplete synonym or concept coverage as well as user unfriendly search interface present hindrances. Originality/value: The paper illuminates an often-forgotten but pervasive challenge of subject searching, especially for humanities researchers. It demonstrates difficulties and shows how most PhD students have missed finding an important resource in their research. It calls for the need to reconsider training in information searching and the need to make use of controlled vocabularies implemented in various search systems with usable search and browse user interfaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Australian Federal Government's Office for Learning and Teaching (OLT) has built an important collection of learning and teaching resources for the higher education (HE) sector, a product of the many projects OLT and its precursors, including the Australian Learning and Teaching Council and the Carrick Institute, have funded over the past two decades. Although these resources are freely available on its website, the OLT considers them underutilised. Hence it has commissioned a project to reorganise the collection using more accurate and consistent metadata. This paper presents the results of the initial phase of the project, in which a new metadata schema for the OLT's repository was developed through a systematic analysis of the collection, users' and prospective users' search needs, and the domain of HE learning and teaching. While the methods used to develop controlled vocabularies, such as subject thesauri, are well established, there has been far less discussion about how schemas for describing particular kinds of information resource should be constructed. This article contributes to this discussion by showing how methods used to build controlled vocabularies can be applied, and combined, to the development of a schema used to support effective access to a scholarly repository of national importance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Resource Description and Access(RDA) stipulates that certain “core” elements should always be included, where applicable, in bibliographic and authority records, due to their importance in supporting the user tasks defined in Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records. However, the elements’ relative importance has not been empirically tested. This study investigates which elements in bibliographic records are currently most used in a university library catalog, by means of think-aloud sessions conducted by expert and non-expert users, who were assigned sets of typical bibliographic tasks. The results indicate that, in this context at least, the most utilized elements are not all core. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Highlights: [•] A real user, real request, real system evaluation approach was adopted to evaluate the performance of a MeSH term suggestion interface for PubMed search. [•] A repeated-measure design was used where search request serves as its own control. [•] Users’ querying behaviors were shown to differ between the baseline PubMed and the term suggestion interface. [•] The term suggestion interface was shown to conducive to better results, especially for unfamiliar searches. [•] A GLM model was created to assess relative impacts of interface, search familiarity, and order effect on performance criteria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building upon previous research on the concepts of inquiring minds and elicitation styles (Wu, ; Wu & Liu, ), this study aims to identify the relationships between the theoretical constructs of elicitation behavior and user satisfaction in terms of the relevance, utility, and satisfaction of search results, search interaction processes, and overall search activities. Descriptive statistical analysis is applied to compare the user satisfaction ratings with respect to the concepts of inquiring minds and elicitation styles. The results suggest that the stereotyped elicitation style received the lowest user satisfaction ratings compared with functionally and situationally oriented styles. It is suggested that the intermediaries take into account the characteristics of search questions and, accordingly, adapt their professional mindsets to search interview situations; that is, using an inquiring mind in the query formulation process as default mode with functional and situational styles of elicitations would be helpful for enhancing the user's satisfaction ratings. Future research is suggested to better understand and to improve professional talk in information services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information behavior and practices (IBP) research has been repeatedly criticized for having little impact on information systems development (ISD). Claiming that there is a complete disconnect would be an exaggeration but it is apparent that it is not always easy to translate findings of IBP research to workable design recommendations. Based on a reading of earlier literature and a closer investigation of three illustrative example contexts, this article underlines that the value of IBP research for ISD lies in its capability to inform ISD of the variety of ways people deal with information beyond individual systems, their own wants and designers' assumptions. Moreover, it highlights that the implications of information systems go beyond their primary users. Instead of overemphasizing the contextuality of findings, a part of IBP research would benefit from an increased focus on explicating its epistemological extents and limits and identifying, which findings are transferable, what distinguishes specific contexts, what are their defining constraints and priorities, and what aspects of their uniqueness are assumptions and simple clichés. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigated the news-seeking and browsing behaviours of young adults, partly in the context of everyday life information seeking (ELIS), in order to explore their perceptions of and attitudes towards print and online news media. The study is significant because traditional print newspapers face a steady decline in their readership with the growth of free online content. Therefore, it is important to understand the online news-seeking behaviours of young adults to try and predict changes and trends in this field. A qualitative (interpretivist) approach was adopted and twenty university students were interviewed. Findings indicate that, contrary to expectations, print newspapers were still favoured by young people in this sample and the most successful online news disseminators were the ones who have attached themselves to a popular website. Finally, the impact of newspaper reading and publishing trends on library reading rooms is also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The interdisciplinary field known as digital humanities (DH) is represented in various forms in the teaching and research practiced in iSchools. Building on the work of an iSchools organization committee charged with exploring digital humanities curricula, we present findings from a series of related studies exploring aspects of DH teaching, education, and research in iSchools, often in collaboration with other units and disciplines. Through a survey of iSchool programs and an online DH course registry, we investigate the various education models for DH training found in iSchools, followed by a detailed look at DH courses and curricula, explored through analysis of course syllabi and course descriptions. We take a brief look at collaborative disciplines with which iSchools cooperate on DH research projects or in offering DH education. Next, we explore DH careers through an analysis of relevant job advertisements. Finally, we offer some observations about the management and administrative challenges and opportunities related to offering a new iSchool DH program. Our results provide a snapshot of the current state of digital humanities in iSchools which may usefully inform the design and evolution of new DH programs, degrees, and related initiatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• We propose a novel knowledge graph alignment model based on deep learning. • The experiments reveal that our model has effectively improved the performance. • We propose a novel negative sampling method, i.e., transformation negative sampling. • We examine the key influencing factors of knowledge graph alignment. • Our research has practical implications for improving the alignment performance. The construction of large-scale knowledge graphs from heterogeneous sources is fundamental to knowledge-driven applications. To solve the problem of redundancy and inconsistency in the process of domain knowledge fusion, this paper reports studies of domain knowledge alignment from the perspective of a knowledge graph. A novel knowledge graph alignment (KGA) model is proposed, based on knowledge graph deep representation learning. To assess the validity of the model, comparative experiments are conducted on the datasets of heterogeneous, cross-lingual, and domain-specific knowledge graphs. Our results of experiments suggest significant improvement on all of these datasets. We discuss the implications for improving the alignment effect of knowledge graph entities, enhancing the coverage and correctness of knowledge graphs, and promoting the performance of knowledge graphs in knowledge-driven applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article details the outcomes of the 'National Learning and Teaching Resource Audit and Classification' project, commissioned by the Australian Government's Office for Learning and Teaching (OLT). The project used a range of methodologies to reorganise the OLT's Resource Library (http://www.olt.gov.au/resource-library), constructing and selecting an optimal set of metadata elements, along with certain vocabularies for these elements, and then reindexing the content of the Resource Library utilising the new schema and vocabularies. This paper reports on a before-and-after evaluation of the Resource Library's search performance through an information retrieval experiment based on searches logged by the repository's content management system. It was found that the reindexing produced a significant increase in average recall from 25.1 to 37.1% and a significant increase in average precision from 37.6 to 50.4%. The paper also describes the construction of a new controlled vocabulary for the 'resource type' element and confirms the importance of clarity, conciseness, structure and scope in research report summaries for accurate document selection. Further, the paper outlines the audit of the OLT collection based on the frequency of particular Australian Thesaurus of Education Descriptors and Australian Standard Classifications of Education used in the reindexing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: There is a paucity of research examining the everyday-life information seeking of young people, especially investigating the role that the news media has in providing information to young people for use in their everyday lives. A qualitative, interpretivist approach is adopted, involving 34 students, ages 18 to 25, from an Australian university. First, 20 students were interviewed about their news seeking (including topics and sources). Then 14 students participated in verbal protocol analysis, which involved a series of tasks concerning online and print newspapers. Lastly, students were interviewed about how they sought everyday-life information and whether they thought that they had incidentally acquired or encountered information on everyday-life topics in online or print newspapers in the recent past. Findings indicated that, contrary to expectations, traditional print media still played a role for young people, and social media were perceived as important for communication with friends, rather than for news gathering. Purposeful information seeking was more likely to occur online, but both print and online newspapers retained an incidental role in providing information to students for their everyday lives. Participants used a range of media to suit their particular needs and purposes. Thus, access to a wide variety of sources is important for everyday-life information seeking (ELIS) by young people. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]