Colleen Cook

itle:

 Probing user perceptions of service quality: using focus groups to enhance quantitative surveys

Author(s):

Gwyneth H. Crowley, Charles L. Gilreath

Journal:

Performance Measurement and Metrics

Year:

2002 

Volume:

3 

Issue:

2 

Page:

78 - 84

DOI:

10.1108/14678040210429973

Publisher:

MCB UP Ltd

Conducting a user-centered information needs assessment:
the Via Christi Libraries’ experience*
Cathy M. Perley, PhD; Camillia A. Gentry, MLS; A. Sue Fleming, MLS; Kristin M. Sen, MLS
See end of article for authors’ affiliations. DOI: 10.3163/1536-5050.95.2.173

Source: Journal of the Medical Library Association [1536-5050] Perley yr:2007 vol:95 iss:2 pg:173 -181

Enabling Federated Search with
Heterogeneous Search Engines

Stumbled upon this after reading this: http://tags.library.upenn.edu/makerecord/url/31645

Good example of planning process and annual renewal

Linked from society for college and university planning blog

Innovation in Community Colleges, several documents on reinventing the learning process

Learning Abstracts March 2008 Volume 11, Number 3

Stephen Denning

STRATEGY & LEADERSHIPjVOL. 36 NO. 2 2008

STRATEGY & LEADERSHIPjVOL. 36 NO. 2 2008

Robert Allio 

Lancaster University’s Management School is a good source of information about strategy as practice

Proctor and Gamble is now focused on managing its shared services as a business—figuring that exploiting core competencies in brand management and aligning delivery with marketing strategies can create sources of differentiation.

From the website:

Open Repository is a service from BioMed Central to build, launch, host and maintain institutional repositories for organisations. Built upon the latest DSpace repository software the service has been designed to be flexible and cost-effective. BioMed Central's economy of scale makes it possible for organisations that could not otherwise afford to, or lack the infrastructure or technical capacity in-house to run their own repositories. 

From the web site:

Compass is a first class open source Java Search Engine Framework, enabling the power of Search Engine semantics to your application stack decoratively. Built on top of the amazing Lucene Search Engine, Compass integrates seamlessly to popular development frameworks like Hibernate and Spring. It provides search capability to your application data model and synchronizes changes with the datasource. With Compass: write less code, find data quicker.

As of version 0.8, Compass also provides a Lucene Jdbc Directory implementation, allowing storing Lucene index within a database for both pure Lucene applications and Compass enabled applications. Note, when using Compass, using a database as the index storage requires only updating configuration settings.

 

From the website:

Lehigh Lab provides a locus for faculty and students to advance the adoption of innovative technologies and techniques that enhance teaching, learning, and research. The Lab concept is founded upon the idea that the University as a whole is a laboratory in which faculty, staff and students work and experiment together, across departments and disciplines, to advance learning. Central to this effort is the newly-created Technology Resource Learning Center.

Excellent chart of component isolation.  Presentation, business, integration sit on top of the development framework and event logging capabilities.  Seriously, very nice.

Good quick description of serverless backup.  From the website:

Serverless backup over SANs requires three major components:

• The backup application itself
• The Extended SCSI Copy Command standard
• A protocol-aware, intelligent SAN appliance that can recognize protocols from many heterogeneous systems and transmit data at high speeds to the tape and DLT libraries.

With serverless backup, the data flows across the SAN directly from the disk drive to the tape device, with no data moving through the server. The enterprise servers only need to host the backup application, and the backup application determines what needs to be backed up and sends the command to a "copy agent" embedded in an intelligent SAN appliance. The intelligent SAN appliance detects the source and destination parameters, retrieves the data from the storage devices, writes it to the tape or DLT libraries, and reports completion (or status) back to the backup application.

 

From the website:

Web Ontology Language (OWL) is a markup language for publishing and sharing data using ontologies on the Internet. OWL is a vocabulary extension of the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and is derived from the DAML+OIL Web Ontology Language (see also DAML and OIL). Together with RDF and other components, these tools make up the Semantic Web project.

OWL represents the meanings of terms in vocabularies and the relationships between those terms in a way that is suitable for processing by software.

The OWL specification is maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

From the website:

This paper proposes the use of the Unified Modeling Language (UML) as a language for modelling ontologies for Web resources and the knowledge contained within them. To provide a mechanism for serialising and processing object diagrams representing knowledge, a pair of XSLT stylesheets have been developed to map from XML Metadata Interchange (XMI) encodings of class diagrams to corresponding RDF schemas and to Java classes representing the concepts in the ontologies. The Java code includes methods for marshalling and unmarshalling object-oriented information between in-memory data structures and RDF serialisations of that information. This provides a convenient mechanism for Java applications to share knowledge on the Web.

For the website:

Virtuoso is at the core a high performance object-relational SQL database. As a database, it provides transactions, a smart SQL compiler, powerful stored procedure language with optional Java and .Net server side hosting, hot backup, SQL 99 and more. It has all major data access interfaces, as in ODBC, JDBC, ADO .Net and OLE/DB.

Virtuoso has a built-in web server which can serve dynamic web pages written in Virtuoso's web page language as well as PHP, ASP .net and others. This same web server provides SOAP and REST access to Virtuoso stored procedures, supporting a broad set of WS protocols such as WS-Security, WS-Reliable Messaging and others. A BPEL4WS run time is also available as part of Virtuoso's SOA suite.

Virtuoso has a built-in WebDAV repository. This can host static and dynamic web content and optionally provides versioning. The WebDAV repository is tested to interoperate with WebDAV clients built into Windows XP, Mac OSX and others and makes Virtuoso a convenient and secure place for keeping one's files on the net. Further, Virtuoso provides automatic metadata extraction and full text searching for supported content types.

Open Virtuoso supports SPARQL embedded into SQL for querying RDF data stored in Virtuoso's database. SPARQL benefits from low-level support in the engine itself, such as SPARQL aware type casting rules and a dedicated IRI data type. This is the newest and fastest developing area in Virtuoso.

From the website:

BigOWLIM is a high-performance semantic repository, implemented in Java and packaged as a Storage and Inference Layer (SAIL) for the Sesame RDF database. BigOWLIM uses the TRREE engine to perform RDFS, OWL DLP, and OWL Horst reasoning, based on forward-chaining of entailment rules. The most expressive language supported is a combination of limited OWL Lite and unconstrained RDFS. BigOWLIM can manage billions of explicit statements on server hardware. A principle limitation of BigOWLIM is the relatively slow delete operation. The upload, reasoning, and the query evaluation proceed fast even against huge ontologies and datasets. 

It's all about tools, baby...

The Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) Library is a set of utilities and controls, written in JavaScript, for building richly interactive web applications using techniques such as DOM scripting, DHTML and AJAX. The YUI Library also includes several core CSS resources. All components in the YUI Library have been released as open source under a BSD license and are free for all uses.

Educause:

The week-long program, led by a faculty of senior professionals with extensive experience in managing and leading IT-related organizations within higher education, has limited enrollment, resulting in a learning environment that is highly interactive and personalized.

More tools...

While writing this blog a small library of reusable components based on YUI has been started. The library was namespaced YAHOO.ext (short for Yahoo! UI extensions), and already has a few very useful classes that make day to day development with YUI much easier. All of the classes are well-documented and there are some examples of using them found in the posts on this blog. The code is of course free and has the same unrestrictive (BSD) license as Yahoo! UI.

Education Commons is a virtual community of academic systems users, designers and systems implementers sharing knowledge, experiences and best practices.

The goal of the community is to create an open and transparent system of communication between diverse groups committed to advancing the state of education worldwide. It's meant to be a virtual commons, where sharing and participation are key. We encourage you to contribute your thoughts, ideas, programs and projects.

More tools...

While writing this blog a small library of reusable components based on YUI has been started. The library was namespaced YAHOO.ext (short for Yahoo! UI extensions), and already has a few very useful classes that make day to day development with YUI much easier. All of the classes are well-documented and there are some examples of using them found in the posts on this blog. The code is of course free and has the same unrestrictive (BSD) license as Yahoo! UI.

It's all about tools, baby...

The Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) Library is a set of utilities and controls, written in JavaScript, for building richly interactive web applications using techniques such as DOM scripting, DHTML and AJAX. The YUI Library also includes several core CSS resources. All components in the YUI Library have been released as open source under a BSD license and are free for all uses.

Interesting Penn site that is "the first just-in-time provider of strategic expertise to college and university leaders".  Further,

The Learning Alliance is a provider of educational research and leadership support services to presidents of accredited, non-profit two- and four-year colleges and universities. The Learning Alliance serves the mission of higher education institutions by providing its senior administrators with timely access to expertise, current research, and market data. 

Interesting service from Microsoft.  Looks like they would help indexed licensed content too.  Maybe this is the federated search engine we are really looking for.  Here's what they say: 

Windows Live Academic is now in beta. We currently index content related to computer science, physics, electrical engineering, and related subject areas.

Academic search enables you to search for peer reviewed journal articles contained in journal publisher portals and on the web in locations like citeseer.

Academic search works with libraries and institutions to search and provide access to subscription content for their members. Access restricted resources include subscription services or premium peer-reviewed journals. You may be able to access restricted content through your library or institution.

We have built several features designed to help you rapidly find the content you are searching for including abstract previews via our preview pane, sort and group by capability, and citation export. We invite you to try us out - and share your feedback with us.

“Will a spiky-haired, camera-toting super-heroine... restore decency and common sense to the world of creative endeavor?” -Paul Bonner, The Herald-Sun

“Bound By Law lays out a sparkling, witty, moving and informative story about how the eroded public domain has made documentary filmmaking into a minefield.” -Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing.net

“Bound by Law translates law into plain English and abstract ideas into ‘visual metaphors.’ So the comic's heroine, Akiko, brandishes a laser gun as she fends off a cyclopean 'Rights Monster' - all the while learning copyright law basics, including the line between fair use and copyright infringement.” -Brandt Goldstein, The Wall Street Journal online

I love lists!  Here's a nice list of how to program.

1. Do not expect a detailed specification.
2. Do not spend your time polishing a detailed design.
3. Keep your eyes on the real problem.
4. Have a team of smart guys.
5. Keep the complexity of your decisions down.
6. Do not optimize your code without solid reliable data.
7. Do not code "till it's done".
8. Start debugging while designing.
9. Do not flatter yourself that your system is bug-free.
10. Do not expect to create a perfect documentation.

Article about how to design a homepage.  Start on the inner pages first so that the container pages articulate well with the results pages