Workshops for CoLIS5

All workshops are sponsored by The British Computer Society Information Retrieval Specialist Group

Workshops chair: Jonathan Furner, UCLA

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Workshop 1: Developing a metadata lifecycle model
Workshop 2: Evaluating user studies in information access

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DEVELOPING A METADATA LIFECYCLE MODEL

Workshop homepage

WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION
Despite substantial investment in the development of digital repositories and services based upon their content, there is as yet little understanding of how they interoperate beyond a technical level and there is a marked absence of a conceptual framework of such interactions. Without such a framework, development of aggregated services takes place with little understanding of the implications of the immediate context in which repositories are being developed. Similarly, individual repositories derive little benefit from services that utilise their content. With the establishment of such a framework, there are potential benefits for repository management, metadata quality, co-ordinated workflow and funding allocation throughout the model, both upstream and downstream, as they understand and exploit their interacting contexts.

The objectives of the workshop are to move forward the understanding of the relationships between digital libraries, institutional repositories, and learning object repositories which operate on local or national scales and the services or libraries that harvest, aggregate, or in other ways use their content. This will be achieved thorough the development of prototype conceptual models of the ‘ecology of repositories’, the object lifecycle within such an ecology, and the metadata lifecycle in relation to each of these. This workshop will provide a forum in which to gather illustrative examples from relevant communities of practice, outline a framework for discussion, and develop prototype models of the interactions of repositories, the lifecycle of objects within them, and the lifecycle of metadata associated with these objects. Any adequate and useful model of the metadata lifecycle has to be developed communally and as such is ideally suited to the workshop environment as it allows a rapid articulation and refinement of models through the interaction of participants.

WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION
The complexity in designing, running and analysing a user study is substantially more time consuming and challenging than a simple comparison of empirical measures such as precision and recall. As a result many researchers shy away from the user studies. However, it is only with real user studies that the impact of state of the art research can be truly assessed and the merit of such research validated. As to how a user study should be performed in the context of information access, remains a challenge and those researchers wishing to perform such a study a re faced with many issues to ensure that the research is carried out in an appropriate and unbiased manner.

This full-day workshop aims to:

• assess current user based studies in Information Access; discussing the advantages and disadvantages of their methodology,
• to provide a forum of discussion for proposed user studies submitted to the workshop, and
• to draw up a list of guidelines for future user studies.