Yay!

This came in the mail to my brother's house a while ago, and he just forwarded it to me at my Mom's. It feels good to see the piece of paper.

Can Kids do Boolean?

I think so. As long as the concepts are added one at a time, simply. Here is a five-minute tutorial I created about the difference between AND and OR in searching:

http://gallery.me.com/jwevans01#100000

You mean it takes a Master's Degree to shelve books?

Today is the due-date for my e-portfolio work for the semester. I have to prove fifteen competencies, and I have ten written, and seven passed (I'm waiting to hear about three).
I'll have to finish the other five next semester. These are the pieces of evidence I've submitted so far:

Information Transfer at Cisco Systems — by juliaevans — last modified 2008-01-26 10:44
A power-point presentation created to present the results of an interview with an information architect at Cisco Systems. This was a group project with Meriam Smith.

Observations at a Public and Academic Library — by juliaevans — last modified 2008-01-26 10:48
A report on my observations of the reference desks of the Santa Cruz Public Library and the University of California Santa Cruz Library

Market Summary of Service Catalogs — by juliaevans — last modified 2008-01-26 10:49
A value-added deliverable I created for my seminar in Competitive Intelligence

CI in Latin America — by juliaevans — last modified 2008-02-06 10:05
A summary of a podcast that describes the unique qualities Competitive Intelligence practices in Latin America.

LIBR 202 Group Database Project — by juliaevans — last modified 2008-04-05 19:43
A group project in which we created a database for an inventory of a pet store.

LIBR 202 Group Query Project — by juliaevans — last modified 2008-04-05 19:48
A group project in which we created, based on several journal article abstracts, a keyword list, stop word list, and stemming algorithm. We then applied Boolean queries to our keyword index and simulated machine retrieval of relevant documents.

Evaluation of Ujiko Search Engine — by juliaevans — last modified 2008-04-05 19:49
An evaluation of a new search engine, Ujiko.

Thesis Proposal — by juliaevans — last modified 2008-04-06 13:02
My Thesis proposal created for Research Methods in Library and Information Science investigating the correlation of seeding a wiki to its growth.

Quicktime Movie of Narrated Power Point Presentation — by juliaevans — last modified 2008-04-09 09:56
A narrated critique of a case study presented in Research Methods for Library and Information Science.

Group Project for Reference Services — by juliaevans — last modified 2008-04-09 10:04
This was a group project in which we posed the same reference questions to eight different online sources, and compared the results.

Online Searching Assignment: Dialog Transcript and Summary — by juliaevans — last modified 2008-04-09 18:08
This assignment, for Online Searching, required me to conduct searches in Dialog and record the results.

Toward a Definition of Relevance — by juliaevans — last modified 2008-04-13 19:09
A paper written for Information Retrieval, in which I compare several definitions of relevance.

Vine's Information Model — by juliaevans — last modified 2008-04-13 19:11
A documented search using Rita Vine's suggested information model for search instruction.

Budget — by juliaevans — last modified 2008-04-14 13:20
A sample budget for a corporate library, cut by 20%

TQM Diet — by juliaevans — last modified 2008-04-14 13:21
A paper comparing different management methodologies.

Blogs vs. Wikis — by juliaevans — last modified 2008-04-14 13:22
A summary comparing blogs and wikis as library marketing tools.

Multiculturalism in Libraries: A Critical View — by juliaevans — last modified 2008-04-17 16:12
A paper written for Information and Society, exploring the issue of multiculturalism in libraries.

Copyright — by juliaevans — last modified 2008-04-17 16:15
A paper written for Information Organizations and Management, summarizing the copyright issues facing modern librarians.

The Legal and Ethical Boundaries of Misrepresentation — by juliaevans — last modified 2008-04-17 16:28
A paper written for my seminar in Competitive Intelligence, exploring the ethical issues of misrepresentation.

XML Assignment — by juliaevans — last modified 2008-04-21 06:55
These are three files for an XQuery assignment: evans_modsRecords.xml is the xml file with the sheet music records evans_mod.xq is the XQuery file evans_htmldoc.html is the out put of the XQuery displayed in a web page.

Screencast of website built for LIBR 240 — by juliaevans — last modified 2008-04-21 07:08
This is a screencast of a website I built as my final project for LIBR 240, Information Tools and Technologies.

Accessibility Assignment for LIBR 240- Iformation Tools and Applications — by juliaevans — last modified 2008-04-21 12:23
This is a review I made of two websites for principles of accessibility and cultural awareness.

Documented Search for LIBR 244, Online Searching — by juliaevans — last modified 2008-04-21 12:26
A search in which I documented my strategies for finding an answer to the question: What effect does music have on studying?

References Services Quiz — by juliaevans — last modified 2008-04-21 12:28
A quiz for Reference Services, in which I was required to find the best reference source for a variety of reference questions.

Who Needs a Librarian?

Remember what your mother always told you..

So it's about two weeks until the due date for my e-portfolio and I have a lot of last-minute writing to do. (I'm the Queen of Procrastination) I also have my new job to work at as well.

So after a 15-hour day, Rob and I come back from getting something to eat (at 4AM- I love this city), and I'm getting ready for bed, and I realize that I have my underwear on inside-out.

Good thing I wasn't hit by a car tonight.

Filed Under: Why didn't I think of that?

Libraries and the occult - Boing Boing: "Cecile Dubuis wrote a master's dissertation for University College London titled 'Libraries & The Occult.' I've only read bits of it, but the challenge she identifies is that occult books are, by their nature, anomalous and hard to categorize, much like the phenomena discussed in their pages. As a result, they are often unsearchable in the context of traditional library classification systems."

Ethnography and Collaborative Systems

Here's a link to a short review I wrote about:

Crabtree, Andy. (2003). Work Studies and Design. In Designing Collaborative Systems: A Practical Guide to Ethnography (pp.87-125). London: Springer

Crabtree advocates using a pattern language (based on Christopher Alexander's work) as a lingua franca between ethnographers and designers. However, his adapted pattern language does not include a solution.

Link

Thesis Methodology

Methodology

Research Question: What features contribute to a wiki's growth?
The proposed methodology for this project will be a quantitative analysis that compares the growth rate of different wikis with differnt features.

Growth rate might be measured using the following: (These metrics are taken from Jakob Voss: Measuring Wikipedia)

1. Database size (combined size of all articles including redirects in bytes)

2. Total number of words (excluding redirects and special markup)

3. Total number of internal links (excluding redirects and stubs)

4. Number of articles (at least contain one internal link)

5. Number of active Users (contributed 5 times or more in a given month)

6. Number of very active Users (contributed 100 times or more in a given month)

Possible Hypotheses to Test

Exclusive Content: wikis that provide a place for content that is not easily available from other places will grow faster than wikis that replicate easily available content.

How to measure: Measure the difference in growth rate between:

1. A set of wikis whose common feature is that they offer a unique place for content, with
2. A set of wikis whose common feature is that they replicate already available content.

Competitive magnets: Contests will result in contribution flurry. But do they lead to an increase in overall contributions?

How to measure:

1. Compare the contribution rate of a single page before a contest solicitation, and after the end of the contest.
2. Compare the overall growth rate of the wiki before and after the contest

Seeding: wikis that are seeded with content grow faster than wikis that expect users to create content from scratch.

How to measure: compare the growth rate between:

1. A set of wikis whose common feature is that they were pre-seeded with content.
2. A set of wikis whose common feature is that they were started from scratch.