Description: This paper discusses assessing descriptive substance in free-text collection-level metadata. Abstract: Collection-level metadata has the potential to provide important information about the features and purpose of individual collections. This paper reports on a content analysis of collection records in an aggregation of cultural heritage collections. The findings show that the free-text Description field often provides more accurate and complete representation of subjects and object types than the specified fields. Properties such as importance, uniqueness, comprehensiveness, provenance, and creator are articulated, as well as other vital contextual information about the intentions of a collector and the value of a collection, as a whole, for scholarly users. The results demonstrate that the semantically rich free-text Description field is essential to understanding the context of collections in large aggregations and can serve as a source of data for enhancing and customizing controlled vocabularies.

Description: This paper discusses metadata utilization. Abstract: Metadata schemes emerge to meet community and user requirements, and they evolve over time to meet changing requirements. This paper reports results of an analysis of a large sample of MARC 21 bibliographic records. MARC 21 is an encoding scheme related closely to metadata elements occurring in library bibliographic records. The records were analyzed for the utilization of content designation available in MARC 21. Results indicate that less than 5% of available content designation accounts for over 80% of occurrences. The implications of these findings affect indexing policies, system design, and can inform setting requirements for extending a metadata scheme based on a threshold of community requirements.

Description: This paper discusses Chinese information retrieval using Lemur. Abstract: This paper describes our participation in NTCIR-5 Chinese Information Retrieval (IR) evaluation. The main purpose is to evaluate Lemur, a freely available information retrieval toolkit. Our results showed that Lemur could provide above average performance on most of the runs. We also compared manual queries vs. automatic queries for Chinese IR. The results show that manually generated queries did not have much effect on IR performance. More analysis will be carried out to discover causes behind hard topics and ways to improve the overall retrieval performance.

Description: This article discusses copyright issues. Abstract: Copyright infringement is one of the most talked about, yet most misunderstood topics in the curriculum and instructional development areas. The field of copyright protection is fraught with gray areas that undermine an individual's honest ability to discern what might be lawful uses of copyrighted materials. This article begins with a brief history of copyright law in the U.S. and provides examples, references, and discussion of "fair use." Additionally, issues related to the Internet are addressed, including: Web Linking, Framing, Plagiarism, Web-based referencing. Finally, considerations and suggestions for teaching and using ethical practices in the industrial and educational classroom are discussed. Fair use and copyright in educational institutions is largely an ethical issue. Ethics are not dependent on individual's actions. All parties involved must contribute to the ethical nature of an event and must accept both the responsibility for their actions or their non-actions.

Description: This article discusses cross-language search. Abstract: This paper presents a case study of Google Language Tools, especially its cross-language search service. Cross-language search integrates machine translation (MT) and cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) technologies and allows Web users to search and read pages written in languages different from their search terms. In addition to cross-language search, Google Language Tools provides various language support services to multilingual information access. Our study examines the functions of Google Language Tools and the performance of its cross-language search. The results and analysis show that Google Language Tools are useful for Web users. Its cross-language search service provides quality query translation while the automatic translation of result pages needs further improvement. The paper suggests that cross-language search could be used by different types of Web users. The authors also discuss the strategies and important issues with regard to implementing multilingual information access services for information systems.