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Summary

Book titles from the online catalogue of the Royal Veterinary College, London

Act to amend the Protection of Animals (Anaesthetics) Act 1964 Great Britain

Animal liberation

Animal theology

Animal welfare in poultry, pig and veal calf production together with the Proceedings of the Committee, Minutes of Evidence and Appendices. Great Britain House of Commons

Eating with conscience: the bioethics of food

Environmental enrichment for captive animals

Ethical case against fur farming: statement by an international group of academics, including ethicists, philosophers and theologians

Guidance on the slaughter of ostriches welfare

Handbook of primate husbandry and welfare

Humane control of animals living in the wild

Human-livestock interactions: the stockperson and the productivity and welfare of intensively farmed animals

Interdepartmental Committee on Slaughterhouses (England and Wales)

Interim Report. Great Britain Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food

Manual of the care and treatment of children's and exotic pets

Recommendation concerning ratites: ostriches, emus and rheas. Standing committee of the European convention for the protection of animals kept for farming purposes

Report on the welfare of broiler breeders

Report on the welfare of farmed fish

Report on the welfare of laying hens

Report on the welfare of pigs kept outdoors

Veterinary, behavioural and welfare implications of bear farming in Asia Welfare and management of bears in zoological gardens

Zetoc search on journals, including Animal Welfare, Animal Technology and Welfare and Society and Animals (selected from nos 1–200 of 582 results)

Addressing animal abuse: the complementary roles of religion, secular ethics and the law

Alternatives to nose-ringing in outdoor sows

Animal welfare and contraception of zoo and wild animals

Animal welfare aspects of rodeo events

Animal welfare in large dairy herds

Applying animal learning theory: training captive animals to comply with veterinary and husbandry procedures

Are endocrine disrupting compounds a threat to farm animal health

Aspects of animal welfare with regard to the production of farmed fish in aquaculture systems

Assessing pain in animals – putting research into practice

Assessment of the impact of government animal welfare policy on farm animal welfare in the UK

Assessment of the welfare of working horses, mules and donkeys, using health and behaviour parameters

Automated recording of stress vocalizations as a tool to document impaired welfare in pigs

Summary

Introduction

This volume is concerned primarily with portals that are designed for particular institutions. This chapter differs in considering portals – loosely defined – that are general purpose or subject related and available to all through the open web. Broadly these can be divided into two groups: general consumer portals like Yahoo! and more targeted services – often librarian created – such as the academically related UK Resource Discovery Network (RDN).

There are two reasons for including this chapter in the book: first to help information professionals identify suitable portals for reference work, and second to assist them in prospecting web portals as potential models or sources for local services. Librarians may wish to encourage users to personalize one of these sites as a home page or point them to the best starting points. Librarians will continue to want to incorporate appropriate services in their own portal or website and public services staff might want to develop a MyPage as a home page to support reference and enquiry work, or indeed any staff member might wish to use one as a personal home page. Since public libraries may get enquiries on any topic, portals can be useful starting points because of the range of sources covered, though perhaps most libraries now have their own pages pointing to important content.

The notes on content provided in this chapter are intended to permit the reader to disassemble a portal to identify the features they might want to incorporate locally and to compare particular features, e.g. business news, against other independent sources. The notes on the use of partners should help in seeing which sources are perhaps already familiar, but which might be enhanced in the portal compared with the service's own site.

The portals considered are chosen as important examples of the type and their content is analysed in some detail as it is often not clear from a brief inspection what sort of features there are. Of course, it is inevitable there will be changes by the time you read this.

Summary

The promise of libraries

Libraries are places of contradiction. The library many of us still think of when we use the word – the building or place filled with mostly printed material – invites its users to find or ask for an item of recorded knowledge by which they may be informed for their improvement or their harmless entertainment. The invitation has behind it a thrilling and inspiring assumption: that the work of humankind should be freely available for all to share, and that the places for sharing it should be found within every town or city, and essentially within every place of learning. Nevertheless, this free use of our collective intellectual resource is not really free at all. As contributors to our societies, we pay for the service through taxation and, in doing so, we pay for a service based on a distribution ratio of one resource to many users. The use of the resource is therefore constrained by demand, and time-limited. If we breach that condition, we pay a fine, or a replacement item charge. And if we want an item which is not held by our local library, we may well have to pay a charge for the administrative effort of using our library as a user of some larger library somewhere else. The assumption behind the existence of libraries is thrilling and inspiring indeed, but the reality of service is inevitably compromised so that the freedom which they deliver is of course only a limited freedom.

Nonetheless, people love libraries because they are witness to something generous in our collective spirit: like free health care and free basic education, they acknowledge our duty to each other. What sets them apart from health care and education, and other social services, indeed, is that their usage is optional. Alongside museums and galleries, they belong to the category of use we call ‘culture’. They exist in their purest form as public libraries. The libraries we are concerned about here, academic libraries, are less pure because their use is mandated for the students, researchers and staff they serve for which they provide a collective resource pool.

Summary

Introduction

To personalize has been defined as to ‘design or produce (something) to meet someone's individual requirements’. That products and services should be focused on a target community and fulfil the demands, wants and needs of that community is accepted as a truism by marketers in virtually all domains. A successful product, whether it is a car seat, a bar of chocolate or a computer game, tends to be inspired by a deep knowledge of the consumer derived either through systematic market research or expert knowledge via practice. Such products tend to satisfy either a long, thin horizontal niche across a wide population or a deep, narrow niche vertically within a population. Information products and services, although paying lip service to user-centred design, have tended not to be geared to the specific needs of the user. However, current developments in personalization are beginning to lead to information products that can be both generic and specific by being able to adapt to the specific needs of the user.

In the past this ‘consumerist market philosophy’ has only partially penetrated the design and development of information products. Services such as portals as well as libraries, compact discs, online databases, public access catalogues, portals, web-based information services, even the computer desktop itself and most computer applications have tended to be generalized and aimed to meet the common needs of a broad community.

In fact there is still doubt in some quarters about the general value of investing time on personalization. Neilsen (1998), for example, who has gained quite a reputation in the area of human–computer interface design and usability, has stated that it is better to concentrate on general characteristics of good interface design than on personalization. Despite the stress on personalization features in an increasing number of products – portals, online catalogues, virtual learning environments, world wide web search tools, e-messaging services, as well as by e-commerce vendors – few studies have been conducted into the impact of personalization. One exception is in personalized health information provision where Kreuter and Strecher (1996) showed the benefit of personalized information provision. Whether or not this has similar lessons for information products that serve a less focused need is as yet unproven.

Summary

In Appendix 3 you can find the animal welfare vocabulary very roughly sorted into a selection of standard categories which form some crude facets of the subject. I hope you were able to attempt some analysis yourself and found it not too difficult. In this chapter we shall look at how the terms are organized into a more helpful order, so that the precise relationships between terms begin to emerge. The facet of animals will be used to show how this is done, but I shall include some examples from other facets so that you can see that the method can be applied to all categories of terms.

Vocabulary control

At this stage it is not necessary to bring the full range of vocabulary control techniques into play, but we do need to identify synonyms so that we avoid the possibility of having the same concept in different places under different names.

The animals facet contains a number of examples of two kinds of synonym: the first is the existence of common names for animals alongside their Latin equivalents; the second is the presence of different common names in UK and US English. There are four Latin names in our facet, given here with their English equivalents:

giraffa camelopardalis = giraffe

loxodonta africana = African elephant

lutra lutra = Eurasian otter

pongo pygmaeus = orangutan

There are also three synonyms for one animal, ‘hogs’, ‘pigs’ and ‘swine’, and two for another, ‘chickens’ and ‘hens’.

As a preliminary to making any decision about the preferred terms, we can bring these synonyms together so that the concepts they represent are not in two or more places in the list. This also ensures that the preferred and non-preferred terms are kept together so that when a choice is made the USE and UF relations can be assigned speedily.

Synonyms are easily grouped by putting them in a row in the alphabetical sequence. At this stage we don't have to decide on the preferred term, as long as they all sit together.

A section of our amended list would now look like this:

guinea pigs

hedgehogs

hens. chickens

hogs. pigs. swine

horses

Japanese quail

kennelled dogs

laying hens

llamas

loxodonta africana. African elephants

lutra lutra. Eurasian otters

males

mares

Summary

[Captain] Hook and Peter [Pan] are now, as it were, alone on the island. Below, Peter is on the bed, asleep, no weapon near him; above, Hook, armed to the teeth, is searching noiselessly for some tree down which the nastiness of him can descend.Down this the pirate wriggles a passage. In the aperture below his face emerges and goes green as he glares at the sleeping child. Does no feeling of compassion disturb his sombre breast? The man is not wholly evil: he has a Thesaurus in his cabin, and is no mean performer on the flute.

J. M. Barrie,Peter Pan,Act IV Reproduced with kind permission of Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children,London

The nature of a thesaurus

The ‘reference book’ thesaurus

The thesaurus as a reference tool dates back to 1852, and the publication of Roget's Thesaurus ; this, or some modern equivalent, is probably what the majority of people have in mind when they think of a thesaurus. Captain Hook's thesaurus in the quotation at the top of the chapter is almost certainly a reference to Roget. But Roget's Thesaurus has a fundamentally different purpose from the sort of thesaurus which will be discussed in this book.

Most information professionals would consider Roget to be a type of classification scheme because it organizes its vocabulary in a systematic manner. In other words, it is a list of concepts or ideas, which are arranged so that similar concepts are next to each other. The example in Figure 2.1 (overleaf), taken from a digital version of Roget,1 shows part of the list of conceptual classes; these are from the section on language. Underneath is the complete and detailed entry for one of these classes; as you can see, this consists of a list of synonyms or near-synonyms for the headword gathered together and arranged by parts of speech.

A thesaurus of this type is a guide to the English language organized conceptually, and incidentally it makes a map of knowledge.

Summary

Choosing between synonyms or near synonyms usually involves choosing between two or more quite dissimilar words. When this has been done, decisions also have to be made about the precise form of a word as it will be entered in the thesaurus. Aspects of the exact form of an entry term cover a range of problems, including spelling, punctuation, and the linguistic form of the entry term. From the indexer's point of view, decisions made here do not have quite the same implications for searching as the selection of synonyms, but they are important for the sake of consistency and predictability in the design of the thesaurus. Much of what follows is accepted convention rather than a theoretically based system. Nevertheless there is a strong element of common sense involved, as well as awareness of user searching behaviour.

Grammatical forms Nouns and noun phrases The majority of terms used in thesauri (and in other sorts of subject tool) are nouns or noun phrases. In noun phrases the noun is qualified by an adjective or another noun, or more unusually a preposition links two nouns – very, very occasionally an adverb may occur:

Female emancipation

Black magic

Professional wrestling

Vegetarian cookery

Medicinal herbs

Atomic weight

Penal colonies

Boundary management

Prisoners of war

Rites of passage

Balance of trade

Payment in kind

Hunting with dogs

Highly charged ions

Very high energy phenomena

Adjectives and adverbs

Except where they form part of an adjectival or adverbial phrase of this kind, adjectives and adverbs are not used as entry terms in the thesaurus, and they can never stand alone.

Verbs

A great number of the terms in the thesaurus will be activities or actions of some sort. The verbs necessary to represent them can be used in a restricted way, that is in the form of verbal nouns and gerunds. The infinitive form of the verb (to organize, to manage, to operate, to cook) and the past and present participles (organized, organizing, managed, managing, operated, operating, cooked, cooking) are never used, except where participles are used adjectivally in phrases (Organized crime, Managed learning environment, Operating systems, Cooked meats).

Conversion to the appropriate noun form is necessary for inclusion in the thesaurus.

Summary

Having decided that you need to build your own thesaurus, the first stage in the process is to gather the vocabulary. There are several ways in which you can do this, and which method you choose may depend on the use to which the thesaurus will be put. Further on in this chapter we will look at the factors that may affect this decision. You do need to keep in mind the fact that the thesaurus will be used for indexing, object description, or document management of some sort, and not for making a theoretical study of the subject itself. You should therefore always consider whether individual terms are useful for the purpose of information retrieval, and whether they correspond to the material to be organized.

There are a number of potential sources that can be mined for terms. They fall into two groups: sources of actual terms and sources of document titles. Collecting document titles is an essential part of assembling vocabulary, but some additional work will be required to derive terms from the titles.

Existing vocabularies

The most obvious and most accessible source of terminology will be published vocabulary tools. These can be divided into two categories:

Summary

Introduction

During the mid- to late-1990s, portals were public websites: the first page displayed when connecting to the internet. They were simple and the same for all users. Typically, they represented the front page of search engines or the default home page automatically set by ISPs (internet service providers) for their subscribers. Portals were in effect gateways to a subset of websites selected from the world wide web as a whole. In this sense, the metaphors of ‘portal’ or ‘gateway’ were apt and readily understood.

Today, portals are private websites: personalized interaction between individuals and organizations. They are complex and customized to the individual user. This complexity is evident in the myriad portal services that have been established using numerous portal systems. The quantity and variation is now such that portals can be classified into various types, as identified by Ovum in their taxonomy of portals: Specialized Portals, Public Web Portals, Enterprise Portals, Workspace Portals and Knowledge Portals (Winkler, 2005).

This maturation reflects a progression from serving audiences to serving individuals. In focusing upon the individual – the customer – the concept of a portal has developed from being a gateway through which information services located elsewhere are accessed, to being an environment within which information services are consumed, whether located elsewhere or not. In this way, the portal is recognized as a destination in its own right and no longer strictly a gateway through which other services are accessed. In effect, the terms portal and intranet have become largely synonymous in many cases.

For those managing a portal service, the focus needs to be on the word ‘service’ rather than ‘portal’. The aim of a portal service can be expressed as ‘meeting the information needs of customers in pursuit of the organization's objectives’. It follows that while a portal service is dependent upon the systems (i.e. technologies) that underpin it, it is the organization's stakeholders who are the manager's primary concern. Specifically, this concern should be focused at the intersection of the customers’, suppliers’ and organization's interests. This is where a portal service is differentiated from the systems underpinning it. To be effective, the manager needs to maintain a certain distance from each of the three interests and, in particular, the underlying systems.

Summary

Introduction

There are many types of portal: from library portals, institutional portals, subject portals and community portals to virtual research environments with portal functionality. This chapter focuses on the national portal developments at the UK's Joint information Systems Committee (JISC) and looks at the new standards that have come into recent prominence that allow embedding of portal services at a local level.

We must first acknowledge that the word ‘portal’ is not a straightforward term; it is used to cover a rather broad spectrum of products and information use scenarios. And in an environment that has grown richer in networked services a clear definition of what a portal is and does is not easy to articulate. It is difficult to predict where we might end up, but from current developments we can try to make some educated guesses and also look to what might be needed for this future.

JISC developments

The JISC has concentrated on the development of portals on a national level and focused on how to discover national resources. We could say this has so far been more of a top-down approach as opposed to the bottom-up approach of supporting portal developments within a local institutional environment. The JISC Portals Programme has so far developed portal projects in media, subject and community formats. The associated Presentation Programme aims to investigate and discover how different types of resources can be presented within a variety of web environments in ways that best benefit users. A number of studies have also been conducted in this area. Both of these programme areas aim to address the presentation and fusion layers of the Information Environment Architecture developed by UKOLN.

The portals developed within the JISC programme have a number of key features, encapsulated in a Baseline Portal Functional Specification. Thus, portals within the Information Environment are primarily discovery tools; they hold no content locally but provide access to dispersed content; they provide a common means of access to varied content sources; and they have a focus on the presentation of information to the user. All additional functionality should, in principle, be delivered by systems other than the portal itself. A range of JISC portals, each with its own emphasis (for example, subject based), has been developed to support access to information. Three strands exist within the programme, each addressing a particular emphasis.

Summary

The thesaurus is only one of a variety of tools that are used to index or tag documents for the purpose of information storage and retrieval. The term ‘thesaurus’ is often applied fairly loosely to a number of these, with the general sense of some kind of a subject-related vocabulary. In this chapter I shall try to identify the main types of vocabulary tool which you may come across, and to determine their significant characteristics. Despite the existence of published standards for many of these tools, in practice the terminology is not applied very precisely, and it is easy to be confused by the different understanding of these names. We have already mentioned classification schemes and subject heading lists used in conventional library and document collections, and keyword lists used for post-coordinate indexing, as well as the thesaurus proper. More recently conceived types of subject tool include the taxonomy, the concept map, and the ontology. These sorts of system are sometimes referred to collectively as controlled vocabularies, or controlled indexing languages, to contrast them with the use of natural, or uncontrolled, language in subject indexing. They may also be described as knowledge organization systems, or knowledge organization structures, by those whose primary interest is in the analysis and structure of subject fields or domains, and the conceptual relationships between subjects.

Like natural languages such as English, Chinese or Arabic, the indexing language has a vocabulary (the terms used for indexing) and syntax, or operating rules. The ‘control’ is imposed by the compiler of the vocabulary, and consists of limits placed on the number and form of words or terms that can be used in indexing. This enables synonyms and variant forms of words to be managed in a way that supports more efficient indexing and retrieval, and avoids overlap and confusion in the use of similar concepts. Strictly speaking, vocabulary control refers only to this process of linguistic management, but controlled vocabularies commonly exhibit other features, such as the identification of relationships between terms, and rules for combining terms when necessary (the system syntax mentioned above). The advantages of using controlled languages are discussed in Chapter 5.

Summary

In the early development of the thesaurus, when it was essentially still a keyword list, the keywords or terms were usually drawn from the documents to be indexed. Later on this casual approach to term selection and use was abandoned in favour of much more control over the vocabulary. This was because there are some considerable advantages in using a controlled indexing language rather than ‘uncontrolled’ or natural language.

Natural language indexing means the selection and assignment of indexing terms, usually taken from the titles or text of the documents themselves, without any reference to a standard list of terms. The indexer chooses whatever seems appropriate for the material in hand (or in automatic indexing systems text analysis software identifies important terms based on their frequency and position, terms in the title or near the beginning of the document scoring more highly than others). Natural language can be seen to have several advantages: it is easy to use; no one has to be trained to use it; no one has to spend time compiling or maintaining an indexing vocabulary; the indexing terms match closely the vocabulary of the subject; new terms will be adopted naturally as they occur in the literature, and out-dated terms will equally naturally fall out of use; and there is reason to believe that the terms will match those chosen by searchers, particularly in technical or research literature.

Nevertheless, these advantages can be more than offset by the disadvantages of natural language use, and the effect it has on the efficiency of retrieval. For most people, the most familiar sort of searching in an uncontrolled environment is internet searching. Although retrieving some information is not difficult, performing an effective search can be tiresome and time-consuming, if not impossible. Usually search engines can only match search terms against the textual content, and all the possible forms and variations of a search term, including variant spellings and synonyms, must be entered individually if every relevant item is to be retrieved.

Added to this problem at the search stage is a comparable problem at the indexing stage, namely a lack of general agreement as to what individual documents might be about. Determining the content of documents (sometimes referred to as the aboutness of an item) is a very subjective process.

Summary

Many writers who have written about portals have been worried by the difficulty of defining exactly what the term itself means. The authors in this book again tussle with the issue. The evidence of the book seems to be that however diverse the meanings attached to the word, it does seem to encapsulate important issues for those working to support the use of information. Thus information professionals are likely to find themselves not only explaining to users what different forms of portal are and how they work, but also developing online services which work within wider organizational portal frameworks, and perhaps actually helping to develop or manage their own portals.

This chapter starts the reader thinking about some of the key questions, explored in greater depth in subsequent chapters, and also provides a guide to some of the relevant literature.

Definitions

The reader might take a moment to consider which (if any) of the following they would consider to be a portal:

Summary

Today the thesaurus is a widely used retrieval tool, chosen by many information workers, particularly those concerned with the management of electronic resources. There is an abundance of technical papers about specific aspects of thesauri and their applications to retrieval in the journal literature, but there is a real dearth of more basic reading material on the subject. This is a book about the principles and practice of thesaurus construction with rather more emphasis than is usual on the latter. It is intended to serve as an introduction to the topic for students of library and information science (LIS), and also to provide a relatively simple manual for practitioners who need an indexing tool for a specific local situation and have little option but to create their own. These practitioners may be librarians, knowledge managers, records managers, or indeed anyone who needs to organize information in any format. It should be of particular interest to the archive community whose professional education possibly covers less of the area of vocabulary building and maintenance than do traditional LIS courses.

It is difficult to know how to identify the members of this diverse group in an economical manner. Throughout the text I’ tended to refer to the practitioner as ‘the indexer’ and you may understand this to mean anyone concerned with the job of document analysis, description,and organization for retrieval.The term ‘document’ is also used in the widest possible sense to mean any kind of information-carrying item, in manuscript, print, or digital format, and in the form of books, papers, articles, reports, letters, websites, physical objects, and so on.

Although the book is entitled Essential Thesaurus Construction,because of the necessary preliminary of building a taxonomic structure from which to extract the thesaurus,there is an implicit subtitle … and essential taxonomy construction. Users will find that the book provides a basic method for building a structured vocabulary that can be used in more than one format for a range of subject retrieval purposes.

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Appendix 1 - Sample titles for thesaurus vocabulary

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7 - Ready to use: consumer, subject and other public portals

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Appendix 4 - Facets at stage 2 of analysis

8 - Portals and university libraries

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4 - Personalization initiatives in the public and academic domains

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Frontmatter

Appendix 2 - Sample terms for the thesaurus

14 - Building a thesaurus 4: introducing internal structure

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2 - What is a thesaurus?

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19 - Managing and maintaining the thesaurus: thesaurus software

10 - Vocabulary control 2: form of entry

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8 - Building a thesaurus 1: vocabulary collection

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6 - Managing portal services

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15 - The future of portals?

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3 - Tools for subject access and retrieval

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5 - Why use a thesaurus?

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Glossary

1 - Definitions and debates

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1 - Introduction

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Appendix 6 - Thesaurus entries for sample page

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