Photo caption: IU Archivist Phil Bantin teaches archival workshop at Liberian National Archives; Photo credit: Verlon Stone, Director of the Liberians Collections Project
The theme of the Fall 2006 issue of the alumni magazine (SLIS Network, Vol.44, No.2) was "A Global Point of View at SLIS." Below are two of the six vignette stories that convey glimpses of how SLIS alumni, faculty, and students are contributing to the global development of library and information science.
International Visiting Scholars
Every year SLIS welcomes visiting scholars from around the world. They come from various scholarly backgrounds and countries, including Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Denmark, China, France, Germany, Indonesia, Ireland, Japan, Kuwait, Oman, Poland, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Thailand, and the U.K. The visiting scholars teach classes and workshops, give lectures, conduct original research, and consult with SLIS faculty and students.
From August 2005 to February 2006, Dr. Lidia Alvarenga, a professor from Minas Gerais State Federal University in Brazil, worked with SLIS faculty member Elin Jacob on research about Aristotelian categories as a framework for developing ontologies. She also worked on the study "Systems and Methods: Toward an Archeological Model of Classification for LIS," with Jacob, MLS student Thomas Dousa, and SLIS doctoral student Aaron Loehrlein.
Dr. Hyun Kyu Kang, assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at Konkuk University in Chungju, is a current visiting scholar from Korea. He is conducting research in the Web Information Discovery Integrated Tool (WIDIT) Lab with SLIS faculty member Kiduk Yang. The WIDIT Lab explores a fusion approach to information retrieval and knowledge discovery. Dr. Kang's work investigates various query refinement methods that range from word sense disambiguation using mutual information (for example, measuring the strength of association between terms) to query expansion via automatic thesaurus construction.
"One of the key characteristics of his approach is a 'layered fusion,' where he combines multiple methods in a layered fashion," said Yang. "For example, his Automatic Query Term Refiner (AQTR) method first expands a query with related terms (such as synonyms), groups expanded query into term clusters, and selects the best cluster based on mutual information."
Visiting scholars offer different cultural perspectives on library and information science research, which is valuable to SLIS faculty and current students, and provides SLIS work a broader professional and research impact.
Liberian Archival Project
For the 14 years before 2003, Liberia was locked in a tragic civil war that devastated the country. In 2000, Dr. Elwood Dunn, a former Liberian government official and currently a professor of political science in the U.S., discovered that Liberian government documents were still extant and in stable condition but not up to international archival standards. He reported his findings to the IU Liberian Collection Project.
In 2004, Dr. Dunn and Dr. Verlon Stone, Project Coordinator for the Liberian Collections Project, visited Liberia to develop a cooperative preservation project between the Project and the Liberian Government. One objective of the cooperative preservation project is to build partnerships with Liberian archivists.
As part of this project, IU Archivist and SLIS adjunct professor Phil Bantin traveled to Liberia in 2006 to conduct workshops for archivists at the Liberian National Archives – instructing them on current archival and preservation techniques and standards. The workshops assisted the local archivists in their efforts to restore, preserve, and provide access to the archives.
"I presented best practices in archival management, including appraisal of records, arrangement, description, records management techniques, reference services, and electronic records management," said Bantin. "Our goal was to assist them in preservation of the National and Presidential archives by providing on-site training on current archives and records management, with a focus on how it can be applied to their situation."
Every year SLIS students work as interns for the IU Liberian Collections Project. Its mission is to collect, preserve, and provide access to information about Liberia for researchers, students, and teachers, with special emphasis on reaching Liberians in Liberia and in the diaspora. The collections include historical and ethnographic documents, newspapers, government publications, books, journals, dissertations, maps, photographs, audio and video tapes, artifacts, and memorabilia.
The following vignettes convey glimpses of how SLIS alumni, faculty, and students are contributing to the global development of library and information science.
SLIS is Global: United Arab Emirates and Croatia
SLIS is Global: Cross-Cultural Analysis of Information Seeking Behavior
If you did not receive a copy, you can update your alumni address by emailing us at (slisnews@indiana.edu). SLIS Network is produced twice a year.
Posted October 26, 2006