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Theo JD Bothma Department of Information Science
Teaching and research in information retrieval in
LIS Schools in South Africa
15th Information Studies Annual Conference University of Zululand 3 - 5 September 2014
Overview
• Introduction • Teaching
– Basic – Information literacy – Undergraduate – Postgraduate
• Research – Teaching methodologies – Organisation – Retrieval
• Conclusion
Introduction
• Defining the core topics of Information Science is contentious
• Information retrieval – Embedded within the larger framework of information
seeking and information behaviour • Information organisation
– Representation of information – Organising the information itself
• Information that is not organised cannot be retrieved • One organises information so that it can be retrieved
Teaching perspective
• Retrieval and organisation skills – Basic – Intermediate – Advanced
Basic level
• Part of information literacy – whichever framework or model of information
literacy is accepted
• This should be taught to all students entering university – as a “life skill” that is
• needed during university studies • needed at all levels of life, including the work, business
and leisure environments
Retrieval skills / competencies
• Should include searching the internet at fairly advanced levels – including the use of Boolean operators
• Also understanding the different tools available – Standard and specialised search engines – Searching databases, e-journals and e-journal
collections
Organisation
• Students should understand the principles and use of metadata to organise information – e-journals and databases – standard office documents – multimedia
• Including the role of tagging in social media • Basics of structuring documents
– an introduction to information architecture
Library and information science
• Students at – undergraduate level – at postgraduate level
should be taught a deeper understanding of all the issues of the basic level
• As well as extensions
Undergraduate – Retrieval
• More complex searching with Boolean operators
• Specialised search engines • Advanced search interfaces • How to be an intermediary • How to teach retrieval competencies
Undergraduate – Organisation
• An understanding of different metadata schemas • How to combine different metadata schemas • Taxonomies and ontologies • Document collections • An introduction to the semantic web • Depending on the prospective job environment
– “traditional” cataloguing and classification systems • Designing of an information literacy programme
– to students – to all other patrons of libraries
Advanced level
• Theoretical models of information retrieval should be studied, including – set-theoretic – algebraic – probabilistic – feature-based retrieval models
• Relevance theory
Set-theoretic models
• Documents are presented as sets of words or phrases
• Similarities are usually derived from set-theoretic operations on those sets
• Models – Standard Boolean model – Extended Boolean model – Fuzzy retrieval
Algebraic models
• Documents and queries are presented as vectors, matrices, or tuples
• The similarity of the query vector and document vector is represented as a scalar value – Vector space model – Generalized vector space model – (Enhanced) Topic-based Vector Space Model – Extended Boolean model – Latent semantic indexing
Probabilistic models
• Process of document retrieval is treated as a probabilistic inference
• Similarities are computed as probabilities that a document is relevant for a given query – Binary Independence Model – Probabilistic relevance model – Uncertain inference – Language models – Divergence-from-randomness model – Latent Dirichlet allocation
At a more practical level
• Topics such as – cross-language information retrieval – multi-language information retrieval – principles of image, video and sound retrieval
• An understanding of the technologies underlying both the organisation and retrieval of information
• Teaching higher level information literacy skills to all clients, especially researchers
Research
• How to contextualise the teaching of all of these topics within a South African context
• Teaching methodologies, making provision for different learning and thinking styles and preferences – teaching in a so-called Whole Brain way
• Research on cross-language and multi-language information retrieval and experiments with South African languages
• Inter- and multi-disciplinary research should be encouraged, – e.g. Computer Science and interface design and usability
researchers
Cross-language information retrieval
• Corpus-based • Machine translation • Dictionary-based
CLIR corpus-base
CLIR – dictionary-based
Types of relevance
• Objective relevance which is system-based (algorithmic or system relevance)
• Subjective relevance is user-based and can be further subdivided – Topical relevance or topicality – Cognitive relevance or pertinence – Situational relevance – Socio-cognitive relevance – Affective relevance
Innovation
• Disruptive innovation • The adjacent possible • Liquid networks • Recombinant innovation
Innovation overview
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NugRZGDbPFU
Conclusion (1) • Changing role of the information specialist
– Technology literate students, researchers and public – Researchers tend to do own searching
• Scaffold teaching • Information organisation and retrieval
competencies are essential in the information and knowledge society – For all aspects of life
Conclusion (2) • How can researchers be supported? • Incremental improvements (adjacent possible) • Work in multi-disciplinary networks (liquid
networks) • Adapt existing technologies and combine ideas
(combinatorial innovation and exaptation) • Browse, read (serendipity) • Experiment (slow hunch) • Don’t be afraid to fail (error) • Expand existing platforms (platforms)
Think critically about the way forward!
