Our Digital Libraries research began with an NSF award to our proposal entitled Automatic Reference Librarians for the World Wide Web on January 1, 1999.
Abstract: Automatic Reference Librarians for the World Wide Web
By all accounts, the Web is humanity's largest and fastest growing repository
of digital information. Many collections of information are
Internet-accessible, and most will provide a searchable Web interface. While
some collections have a broad array of materials, trends show an explosion in
the number of specialized
collections with narrow but very deep content. Thus a principle challenge
facing users will be the selection of Web information sources capable of
answering their query. In a physical library, users rely on a reference
librarian to help point them at the correct resource, but while human
librarians are becoming increasingly
sophisticated in their use of the Web, they are only part of the solution. We
need more powerful automatic reference tools to help people efficiently
retrieve high quality information from the Web. Typically, reference librarians
are not specialists in the topic of inquiry (e.g., computational fluid
dynamics) but they are expert at identifying relevant resources (e.g., The
International Journal of Fluid Dynamics) and at appropriate strategies for
obtaining the necessary information. The central objective of this proposal is
to create software agents that posses reference intelligence --- a limited
understanding of complex technical topics, but a very sophisticated
understanding of how and where to find high-quality information on the World
Wide Web.
