Information Scotland The Journal of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals in Scotland ISSN 1743-5471 Issue contents | Journal contents | About the online edition of the journal October 2003 Volume 1 (5)

Current research

Stars for Strathclyde

Alan Poulter gives an update of research at the University of Strathclyde, which is graded as of national importance for research in information and library management.

Teaching and research into librarianship and information science at the University of Strathclyde goes back many years, to the formation of the Department of Librarianship in 1964. This became the Department of Information Science in 1984. Recently, in August 2001, the Department of Information Science moved into the Science Faculty (after previously residing in the Business Faculty) and merged with the Department of Computer Science, to become the new Department of Computer and Information Sciences (CIS). News of this merger has taken time to percolate out into the wider community as the old Departmental websites are still receiving hits and redirecting people to the new site at: www.cis.strath.ac.uk.

A recent addition is the incorporation of the Centre for Digital Library Research (CDLR), which used to be attached to the University Library at Strathclyde but is now an independent research unit within the Department of Computer and Information Sciences.

All undergraduate teaching in the new CIS Department is computer-science based. Existing postgraduate Diploma/MSc courses in Information and Library Studies and Information Management now fall under the banner of the Graduate School of Informatics (GSI), which has been set up to develop and extend the range of postgraduate courses offered: www.gsi.strath.ac.uk/gsi/.

Two new courses have been developed so far for the GSI. MSc Strategic Information Systems is a distance learning course for staff of the Royal Bank of Scotland. It is taught in conjunction with staff from the Business Faculty and is a completely new departure in the type of course offered by UK academic departments offering standard postgraduate library and information science courses. Also new is MSc Computer and Internet Technologies which is designed to equip graduates with the computing skills necessary to work in the exciting world of e-commerce. The GSI is also aiming to provide a series of Continuing Professional Development (CPD) courses aimed at local library and information practitioners who wish to update or expand their skills in particular areas. On offer this year will be two courses: Beyond ECDL: Advanced ICT Skills and Advanced Web Design and Management. More CPD courses will be on offer in 2004. For details email: cpd-enquires@cis.strath.ac.uk.

Teaching and research should go hand in hand. CIS has ten research groups in all, each group consisting of academic teaching and research staff who share a common subject interest. These groups are given at: www.cis.strath.ac.uk/research/res_groups.html.

Most of these groups focus on computer-science related topics but five cover library and information science-related topics.

Each will be covered in turn.

Research groups: Distributed Digital Libraries

This group concentrates on areas such as:

• designing and testing models for the management of digital libraries and related resources;
• identifying and evaluating legal, regulatory and policy issues related to digital information and digital transactions;
• ensuring transfer of research results into the professional and practitioner community.

It is built around the activities of CDLR whose focus is on digital libraries in general and distributed digital libraries in particular. The Centre has a longstanding partnership with the Scottish Library and Information Council, with the view to taking a "whole environment" approach to DDL research and how it impacts on service delivery, looking at a huge range of topics including:

• Interoperability
• Collaboration (e.g. in cataloguing or collecting)
• People and organisation level issues
• Landscaping
• Users and user interfaces
• Content management and delivery
• Metadata, including collection level metadata
• Interactions with Virtual Learning Environments
• Information Policy
• Quality assurance and Evaluation
• Knowledge Organisation Systems and Mechanisms
• Distributed System Architectures

Other threads such as standards and automated assistance and AI are considered to be 'meta-themes' that cut across all of the above.

Current CDLR projects include:
CC-interop: COPAC/Clumps Continuing Technical Cooperation, an investigation of issues of interoperability between physical and virtual union catalogues.
cdlr.strath.ac.uk/projects/ccinterop.htm

GDL: Glasgow Digital Library, the creation of a collaborative, cross-sectoral, digital collection for and about the City of Glasgow.
cdlr.strath.ac.uk/projects/gdlproj.htm

HaIRST: Harvesting Institutional Resources In Scotland Testbed, a development and implementation of a pilot service for access to locally created learning and research resources in HE and FE institutions in Scotland.
cdlr.strath.ac.uk/projects/hairst.htm

HILT: High Level Thesaurus. Phase II, the development of a pilot subject terminologies service and recommendations for a full service.
cdlr.strath.ac.uk/projects/hilt2.htm

SAPIENS: Scottish Academic Periodicals: Implementing an Effective Networked Service, the development of a centralised electronic journals service for small Scottish publishers.
cdlr.strath.ac.uk/projects/sapiens.htm

SPEIR: Scottish Portals for Education, Information and Research, investigating the distributed information infrastructure requirements of the Scottish Cultural Portal Pilot, and the Public Library CAIRNS Integration proposal, with development of associated pilot facilities.
cdlr.strath.ac.uk/projects/speir.htm

The Victorian Times project, which researches and implements a service providing access to digitised materials relating to social, political and economic conditions, events, people and actions in the Victorian era.
cdlr.strath.ac.uk/projects/victoriantimesproj.htm

The Centre also hosts the BUBL (bubl.ac.uk/) and SLAINTE (www.slainte.org.uk/) services and the WIDWISAWN (widwisawn.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/) electronic journal.

Research groups: I-Lab (Information Access)

The I-lab is concerned with research into the design, implementation and evaluation of advanced interactive information access technology. Information can be textual or multimedia and the modality of access can involve graphical user interfaces, voice, or formal representations of user knowledge. Members of the I-lab are involved in a number of national and international projects and play an important role in the international information retrieval and human computer interaction (applied to information access) communities. The key research themes of the group are:

• Adaptive and interactive information access
• Multimedia and multimodal information access
• User interfaces
• Language-based and multilingual information retrieval
• Data and knowledge modelling in disease management

Its current projects are:
DELOS, on improving the effectiveness of European research in the digital library domain.
delos-noe.iei.pi.cnr.it/

Diogene, to design, implement and evaluate with real users an innovative training web environment for ICT individual training.
www.crmpa.it/diogene/

MIND, to solve the problems faced by users to access and exploit the increasing number of digital libraries available internationally through networks.
www.mind.cs.strath.ac.uk/

ODA/ILRAD Project looks at using generic decision support systems to control livestock diseases in developing countries.

OntoWeb, is an information exchange hub for ontology-based research from academic, commercial and government stakeholders.
ontoweb.aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de/

WebKit, to create an intuitive physical interface to the web, which will enhance the learning process for children.
www.projectwebkit.com/

Research groups: e-Book

The e-Book Group brings together research interests in the field of electronic books and texts. Themes covered by the group include: design and implementation of e-book authoring and reading environments; studies of metaphors for e-books, e-journals and e-libraries; evaluation of user interfaces, e-books, e-journals, and e-libraries; and guidelines for the design, production and publishing of e-books and e-journals. The group has a particular interest in the study of the use of e-books by readers with special needs. The members of the group are involved in a number of national and international projects.

Research groups: Information Strategy

The Information Strategy and Policy Group is involved in development of methodologies for conducting information audits and articulating information strategies. It also has interests in service management and metrics and methodologies associated with business continuity management, outsourcing, benchmarking and service level management.

Research groups: Libraries, Information and Communities

This is the newest group and is concerned with:
"research into all forms of library (including public, national, special and academic), with information use in social and organisational contexts and with communities created by information usage. Information can be textual or multimedia and communities can be real or virtual."

Journal and conference papers have been produced recently on the following topics:

• Beyond ECDL: basic and advanced ICT skills for the new library professional
• Design of a digital dissertation information management System
• Digital libraries and reference services
• Review of research and teaching of metadata in UK
• Thesaurus-enhanced search interfaces
• Towards a methodology for investigating sectarianism online

For more information see:
www.cis.strath.ac.uk/~pjs/lic/index.html

Conclusion

In past Research Assessment Exercises (RAE) Strathclyde has scored a four, meaning research is judged to be of national importance, for research in information and library management (Unit 61 of the RAE). Five and five star are the top grades for research of international importance. With the research currently going on in CIS, and with the potential for future research that lies within the Department, it is to be expected that a higher grade is within reach.

Alan Poulter is Lecturer at the Department of Computer and Information Sciences, University of Strathclyde.

Information Scotland Vol. 1 (5) October 2003

Information Scotland is delivered online by the SAPIENS electronic publishing service based at the Centre for Digital Library Research. SLAINTE (Scottish libraries across the Internet) offers further information about librarianship and information management in Scotland.