Information for Re-Use

Researchers

• Mark S. Ackerman  Professor
• Francis X. Blouin  Professor, and Director of the Bentley Historical Library
• Yan Chen  Professor
• Michael D. Cohen  William D. Hamilton Collegiate Professor of Complex Systems
• Ixchel M. Faniel  Assistant Professor
• C. Olivia Frost  Professor Emerita
• Margaret Hedstrom  Associate Professor
• Maurita Peterson Holland  Associate Professor Emerita
• John L. King  William Warner Bishop Collegiate Professor of Information
  Vice Provost for Academic Information
• Karen Markey  Professor
• Dragomir R. Radev  Professor
• Elizabeth Yakel  Associate Professor

Current Projects

Past Projects

Archives of the Liberation Movement Eight School of Information graduate students, two professors, and two archivists from the U-M Bentley Historical Library created the Archives of the Liberation Movement at the University of Fort Hare in Alice, South Africa. The results of the U-M team's efforts can be found within the new $10 million National Heritage Cultural Studies Centre at the University of Fort Hare. Contact: Margaret Hedstrom (hedstrom@umich.edu)

Automotive Informatics Research Collaboratory (AIRC) A description of this collaboratory is forthcoming. Contact: John King (jlking@umich.edu)

Beyond Image Retrieval: Bridging Digitization Process and End-User Judgments in a Large-Scale Image Digital Library This project explores the relationships between digital conversion guidelines for Image Digital Libraries (IDL) and end-user judgments about the quality, integrity, and value of IDL content. The research examines collections of digitized surrogates of photographic resources in the Library of Congress's American Memory collection, a very large, internationally significant digital library. The researchers seek to refine a general model of the relationship between digitization processes and end user feedback systems, specificy multiple data models and associated research methodologies to address one or more hypotheses, and design and implement at least four small-scale pilot tests of diverse methodologies. The outcome of the exploratory research will be a report that articulates the elements of a refined model, the findings of the pilot studies, and a plan for expanding the use of the most promising methodologies. Contact: Paul Conway (pconway@umich.edu)

Collaborative Augmentation of Knowledge Production Researchers study the cyclic processes by which the intellectual efforts of many people lead to the valuable accumulations of new knowledge. One familiar example is the "Document Lifecycle": people write books which go into libraries and are found and read by other people, some of whom write more books, etc. Another would be recommender systems where people see movies, give ratings to a software system that combines them with other peoples' ratings to make recommendations for other movies, which people see and rate, etc. The ultimate goal of this research is to devise ways to use information technology to create new social knowledge enhancement-cycles and to better support existing ones. Contact: George Furnas (furnas@umich.edu)

Collaborative Filtering Project This was some of the earliest published works on what is now known widely as collaborative filtering, used, for example, by Amazon.com to make recommendations. Together with Will Hill, Mark Rosenstein, and Larry Stead, the research team focused on electronic streamlined support for allowing a virtual community of users to help each other find things they want. Their test case was a recommender system that was startlingly effective in helping people find videos they would like, based on finding people with similar tastes and combining their opinions in a customized way. Contact: George Furnas (furnas@umich.edu)

Creative Archiving at Michigan and Leeds: Emulating the Old on the New (CAMiLEON) A team of researchers at the University of Michigan and research staff in the United Kingdom from the Cedars project, being run at the universities of Leeds, Oxford, and Cambridge under the aegis of the Consortium of University Research Libraries, won funding from the National Science Foundation in the U.S. and the Joint Information Systems Committee in the UK for an international digital library intiative to investigate the potential role of emulation in long-term preservation of digital resources. The project developed a small suite of emulation tools, evaluated the costs and benefits of emulation as a preservation strategy for complex multi-media documents and objects, and developed models for collection management decisions to assist people in making real life decisions about how much effort and resources to invest in exact replication within preservation activity (as opposed to preserving raw intellectual content). The team developed preliminary guidelines for the use of different strategies (conversion, migration, and emulation) for managing and preserving digital collections. Contact: Margaret Hedstrom (hedstrom@umich.edu)

Cultural Heritage Initiative for Community Outreach (CHICO) The CHICO project provides a broad array of audiences with multicultural heritage materials. CHICO and its partners create online multimedia resources and develop personalized services and programs that incorporate images, sound, and video to enrich museum visits, classroom instruction, and independent research. CHICO projects include the "Flint Timeline Project," chronicling two centuries of history in Flint, Michigan; "Monet at Vetheuil: The Turning Point," a kid's-eye view of the works of the famous impressionist; "Snapshots of Who We Are," students offering a look at their corner of the world through snapshots and stories, and "Stylistic Journey," a virtual gallery created by middle school students. Contact: C. Olivia Frost (cfrost@umich.edu)

Cultural Heritage Preservation Institute (CHPI) The institute was a one-week invitational summer program for middle-school teachers and students from the Navajo Nation and was held at Diné College in Tsaile, Arizona. Participants learned how to use information technology to document and record their cultural heritage and how to use the Internet to share this heritage with each other. Contact: Maurita Holland (mholland@umich.edu)

Data Fusion Across Multiple Text Streams: A Common Theory Researchers are studying representations of collections of text documents that will facilitate the retrieval of information from those collections. The emphasis will be on the automatic discovery of structure in collections and its use for multi-document summarization and navigation. An important component of the research is the investigation of novel applications of information delivery to diverse communities of users. The goal is to facilitate access -- by both casual users and weathered researchers -- to such collections as the Web, newswire services, scientific paper collections, encyclopedias, and multilingual document collections. Contact: Dragomir Radev (radev@umich.edu)

Developing Standardized Metrics: Towards Understanding the Impact of College and University Archives and Special Collections on Scholarship, Teaching, and Learning Contact: Beth Yakel (yakel@umich.edu)

Effect of Internet Filters on Access to Health Information This study assessed the extent to which access to health information is impeded or aided by commercial Internet filters as commonly configured in homes, schools, and libraries. The study focused on adolescents, as they were more likely to encounter filters and more likely to need health information about sexual matters that filtering software might block. Study results have influenced public policy discussions about whether widespread installation of filters is a good idea, and the particular product evaluations could influence the buying choices of families and institutions. Contact: Paul Resnick (presnick@umich.edu)

Effective View-Navigable Structures Certain fundamental properties are necessary for information structures to be effectively view-navigable as they get larger. (View-navigation is essentially the familiar method of moving from one locally visible part of an information structure to another until a target is found.) Fundamental properties needed include: views of the structure must be small, connecting paths must not be too long, and the paths to targets must be discoverable by a navigator. This work explored concepts useful in understanding these constraints, including that of the viewing graph of a structure, as well as to-sets and residue. Contact: George Furnas (furnas@umich.edu)

Google/University of Michigan Library Digitization Project The University of Michigan and Google, Inc. have entered into a partnership to digitize the entire print collection of the University Library. The digitized collection will be searchable by Google, and the University Library will receive and own a copy of all images to integrate into new and existing University Library user services. Contact: John Price Wilkin (jpwilkin@umich.edu)

Hands-on Automated Nursing Data System (HANDS) Researchers from the School of Information, the School of Nursing, and other institutions are dedicated to continuously improving the impact and cost-effectiveness of nursing care on health outcomes. They seek to rapidly create a reliable, automated method of collecting and retrieving a standardized nursing data set for use in planning, documenting, and evaluating nursing care provided to patients in settings that span the continuum of care. Contact: Beth Yakel (yakel@umich.edu)

Health FACTS Health FACTS supports online health communities through mechanisms that facilitate relationship building and information sharing. The primary innovations relate to the collaborative creation of an information archive generated from messages that have been nominated from an ongoing conversation. Key components of the system include the socio-technical process for selecting messages that should be added to the archive, a mechanism for organizing the information, and a pervasive recommender system used to build relationships and find relevant information. Doctoral student Derek Hansen conducts this research. Contact: Derek Hansen (shakmatt@umich.edu)

Health Information Technology to Support Safe Nursing Care (HIT) To enhance safety culture and reduce errors in hospital units, lessons from high-risk industries can increase effectiveness of health information technology (HIT)-supported nurse care-planning and record-keeping. This three-year project supports the care planning process by standardizing and structuring the activities surrounding it, and making it transferable between nurses on one unit, between units, and among health care settings. Contact: Beth Yakel (yakel@umich.edu)

Humanities Text Initiative (HTI) The Humanities Text Initiative was an umbrella effort for the creation and maintenance of online texts through UMLibText. The initiative primarily developed and maintained text resources in SGML (standard generalized markup language) and provided support for other text and multimedia collections in SGML. Contact: John P. Wilkin (jpwilkin@umich.edu)

Incorporating "Born-Digital" Records into a FOIA Request Processing System Researchers analyzed the state of federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) processing for records that are "born-digital" and surveyed current technologies that may enhance the search, retrieval, and processing of these records. Contact: David Wallace (davwal@umich.edu)

Internet Public Library (IPL) The Internet Public Library represents a vision of the useful roles played by libraries and librarians on the Internet. The IPL challenges the notion of what libraries are and should be in a distributed world, and to demonstrate the value of that perspective in a chaotic and dynamic -- but exciting and liberating -- environment. The IPL observed its 10th anniversary in March 2005. Contact: Maurita Holland (mholland@umich.edu)

iOPENER: A Flexible Framework to Support Rapid Learning in Unfamiliar Research Domains The increasingly interconnected nature of real-world tasks often requires experts in one area to quickly learn about other areas. Examples include cross-disciplinary research projects that require scientists in one domain to become conversant in another, or funding priority decisions in which government decision-makers must learn about a range of scientific fields. Researchers on this project are developing a tool -- iOPENER (Information Organization for PENning Expositions on Research) -- that addresses these issues by generating readily-consumable surveys of different scientific domains and topics targeted to different audiences and levels, such as expert specialists, lay people or scientists from related disciplines, educators, government decision makers, and citizens at large. The tool will be built on three currently available technologies: (1) bibliometric lexical link mining that exploits the structure of citations and relations among citations; (2) summarization techniques that exploit the content of the material in both the citing and cited papers; and (3) visualization tools for displaying both structure and content. iOPENER will link these three technologies and evaluate different forms of presentation for rapid learning in unfamiliar research domains. Contact: Dragomir Radev (radev@umich.edu)

Journal Storage (JSTOR) The project creates an archive of core academic journals with full-text searching capabilities. JSTOR also allows evaluation of changes in user behavior vis-a-vis older journals and changes in library behavior vis-a-vis storage of back volumes of these titles. Contact: John P. Wilkin (jpwilkin@umich.edu)

KatrinaHousing.Net: The Housing Information Gateway In the days after Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, a team of faculty and students set about building a system to aggregate all of the temporary housing offers dispersed across the Web into one site with an easy-to-use map interface built on the Google Map API. Contact: Paul Resnick (presnick@umich.edu)

Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) This work addressed the vocabulary disagreement problem by trying to construct automatically a semantic space in which words could match documents semantically instead of literally. It used advanced statistical techniques (SVD) to build a kind of semantic to place terms and documents in a high (100-200) dimensional space so that terms were near the documents they tended to occur in. This resulted in also placing similar documents near each other and similar terms near each other. A user's query would be mapped into the semantic space at the centroid of the terms it contained, and the nearby documents retrieved, even if they did not literally contain the query word. Contact: George Furnas (furnas@umich.edu)

LexRank: Lexical Ranking LexRank is a method for natural language processing. It can be used for multi-document summarization, classification, and many other tasks. Contact: Dragomir Radev (radev@umich.edu)

Multitrees Multitrees are a new class of structures for information access and reuse. They are between trees and DAGs in generality, and have the property that although they themselves are not trees, the sets of ancestors and the sets of descendents of any node are both trees. In an information setting, these structures can be used to represent both varied contents (descendants) and varied contexts (ancestors) of a node. Since both sets of descendants and ancestors are trees, they support many familiar tree interface strategies for graphical viewing and browsing. Multitrees also serve as a model for reuse of hierarchical structure, since they can be conceived of as unions of trees that share subtrees: each user picks a set of subtrees of a large hierarchical resource and then spins a customized hierarchy above those pieces for his or her own purposes (e.g., various professors putting together course syllabi from the materials in the library). Contact: George Furnas (furnas@umich.edu)

New Approaches to Sustainable Infrastructure for Information Sharing This research includes a series of preliminary studies that aid in the design of a more systematic attack on the information-sharing issues. Excellent study sites are available as a result of a series of prior collaborations among the principal investigator, students at the School of Information, and agencies delivering social services to elderly citizens of central Detroit. Some of these agencies are now using ASPs (application service providers) and various open-source software applications. The researchers hope to develop insights on creating and maintaining sustainable infrastructure through these new approaches. Contact: Michael Cohen (mdc@umich.edu)

News In Essence: Interactive, Multi-source News Summarization Researchers have developed and continue to refine a Web-based service that automatically collects and summarize multiple, related news stories about any event or topic you choose. Contact: Dragomir Radev (radev@umich.edu)

Patient Handoffs Between Physicians Elizabeth Yakel and Michael Cohen of the School of Information, Sandy Lim and Fiona Lee of the Department of Psychology, and Rajesh Mangrulkar, Christopher Kim, and Michael Kramer of the School of Medicine studied the information exchanges occurring between hospital residents as shift-departing physicians brief oncoming doctors about patients being transferred into their care. The researchers collected documents handed on during these conferences, along with patient outcomes and questionnaire data provided by patient-receiving physicians after care events occurred, that involved patients who had been "handed-off." The project's outcome could affect recommended procedures and training as well as provide input to the design of "sign-out reports" produced by online patient record systems. Contact: Michael Cohen (mdc@umich.edu)

Polar Bear Expedition Digital Collections SI students and faculty, in coordination with U-M's Bentley Historical Library, have created the Polar Bear Expedition Digital Collections Web site, which features digitized collections on the history of an American military intervention in Russia at the end of World War I. The Bentley has collected materials related to this event since the 1960s and now has amassed more than 50 individual collections of primary sources, including diaries, maps, correspondence, photographs, ephemera, printed materials, an oral interview, and a motion picture. The site represents the first example of SI's Next Generation Finding Aids Project, an effort aimed at creating innovative approaches to presenting archival content online. Contact: Beth Yakel (yakel@umich.edu)

Text Summarization Researchers developed text summarization systems that automatically identified salient concepts in a text narrative, conceptualized the relationships that exist among those concepts, and generated a concise representation or summary of the input text that preserved the gist of the original document (or documents). An example of a project that has come out of this research is NewsInEssence, a free, Web-based service that automatically collects and summarizes multiple, related news stories about any topic or event you choose. Contact: Dragomir Radev (radev@umich.edu)

U-M Digital Library Advanced User-Interface Group: NaviQue Information Gathering Environment (NaviQue) What are basic desiderata of information gathering environments? In what different ways can we combine navigation-based and query-based access (NAVI+QUE)? Researchers developed design considerations for the construction of advanced information environments, and a prototype interface that attempted to respond to them. The design considerations came from task analyses of information gathering activities, from changes in the global information environment, and from advances in human-computer interaction. These led to a number of desired design properties that guided the prototyping efforts, including a system called NaviQue, a visually rich environment for information gathering and organizing based on a navigable, fractal structure of information, ubiquitous queriability, lightweight interaction with ad hoc sets, and information visualization. The resulting interaction paradigm smoothly integrated more than a half dozen synergies between querying, navigation, and organization. Contact: George Furnas (furnas@umich.edu)