Research
IST faculty and students are committed to exploring new ideas, and advancing the theory and practice of the information profession through research and publication. Listed below are some examples of the diverse areas of research being conducted by IST faculty and students.
The College Awarded Contract for Expert System Development Project
Dr. Lee Scott Ehrhart, an assistant professor at IST, secured the contract. The following describes the project's key objectives and technical approach:
- It will continue work on an expert system--called Design Expert --that will act as an information system design advisor.
- Design Expert will operate on a variety of platforms--Mac, IBM, UNIX--because it features innovative uses of the non-proprietary World-Wide Web (WWW) technologies. Users need only have networking capability to make full use of Design Expert's software, and it's also "less likely to become obsolete 'overnight'," a persistent problem with most current systems.
- Drexel will collaborate with the Rome Laboratory sponsors and two other contractors to develop the 28-month project, which has been funded for $890,000; Drexel's share of the project funding will total $340,000.
- Design Expert builds upon the results of the original DesignPro system developed at Drexel's Center for Multidisciplinary Information Systems Engineering (MISE Center).
- The project will support the collaboration of a team of systems analysts and designers who are often geographically distributed and often use vastly different hardware and software.
- It will present design advice using text and a range of still- and motion-graphic information.
- Rome Laboratory's systems design team will use the accessibility and flexibility of the WWW to create a "virtual" design organization on the Web that may be "visited" by the various designers and other interested parties. Visitors can enter the "lobby" of this virtual organization much the same as a physical one, and get information, leave messages, and even "test-drive" a current demo of the system. The support for fast, easy, inexpensive communication provided through the virtual organization will encourage greater collaboration among all members of the development team.
A recent study concerning the productivity of U.S. library and information science (LIS) faculty as measured by numbers of journal article publications and citations to journal articles places four of IST's individual faculty solidly in the top 33 scholars in the field. This study was conducted by John M. Budd (School of Library and Information Science, University of Missouri) and Charles A. Seavey (School of Library Science, University of Arizona) and reported in the January 1996 issue of The Library Quarterly.
The project's key objectives and technical approach are:
- Advance the state-of-the-practice of computer-supported asynchronous cooperative learning; extend our experience with computer-supported learning to the domains of information and software systems design, and to include access to students pursuing cooperative education
- Simulate the industrial design process via the use of teams, the use of CASE tools, and the "sharing" and "conferencing" of information and software systems design
- Develop special procedures for dealing with "fast forwarding" and "rewinding" students to better understand self-paced learning processes
- Modify and deliver courses in a "mainstream" computing and communications environment to enhance prospects for technology transfer; and evaluate the impact of the course delivery process
Funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
Tom Childers is continuing with a multi-year assessment of reference service in California public libraries, viewing reference performance from both customer and staff points of view. Key variables cover:
- features of the question;
- nature of the response;
- the interaction of user and staff member;
- the reference service environment; and
- success of the reference response.
By the end of 1997, about 80,000 survey forms from nearly 500 library sites will have been processed. A report on two years of the project is scheduled for fall, 1997. The findings will likely be presented at the November 1997 California Library Association (CLA) conference.
Dr. Childers has also conducted two small studies of how California public library customers use reference collections in Vietnamese, Hispanic, and Anglo communities. All studies focus on the individual's knowledge of reference resources; types of materials used; motivation for the question; the level of help received from others; utility and completeness of what was found; and the value that a professional librarian would have added to the search.
For more information about the California public libraries projects, please call Dr. Tom Childers at 215-895-2479, or e-mail childeta@dunx1.ocs.drexel.edu.
Published in October 1995:
White, Howard D. Brief Tests of Collection Strength; a Methodology for All Types of Libraries. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995. ISBN: 0-313-29753-3
"Brief tests almost always yield results that librarians can use. The scores are informative in assessing collections of any size, in any subject, in any type of library." --the author
The Center for Multidisciplinary Information Systems Engineering (MISE) is a Pennsylvania-supported Center for Excellence concerned primarily with the procedures for defining an application before actual implementation begins. MISE is driven by a systems engineering approach toward building and maintaining software-intensive information systems. It emphasizes the specification, methods, and tools for business process re-engineering, specification of user requirements and the satisfaction of those requirements as validated by testing and evaluation, the design and testing of user-computer interfaces, and research and applications in software engineering. The center receives support from government and industry, and students at all levels are involved in its work.
- For more information about the MISE Center, please call Charlton Monsanto at 215-895-1939, or e-mail monsanca@duvm.ocs.drexel.edu.
