Saturday, January 07, 2006

Bibliomining

LIS research has both gained and contributed a new term to the universe of knowledge - bibliomining - coined by Scott Nicholson, an assistant professor at Syracuse University's School of Information Studies. Bibliomining is fully described in Scott's signature piece on the topic, published in Information Processing & Management, and self-archived preprint "The basis for bibliomining: Frameworks for bringing together usage-based data mining and bibliometrics through data warehousing in digital library services". Scott wants to help librarians take advantage of data that exists in their systems and he does this through the bibliomining process, which combines concepts from data warehouse, data mining and bibliometrics to power evidence-based decision making. I asked Scott, who incidentally, is a member of the dLIST Advisory Board about his bibliomining research and here's what he wrote me: "One challenge is creating methods that protect the privacy of users while still maintaining the historical data needed for effective library administration and management. I am currently working on the development of a stronger theoretical base through concepts from information seeking in context and understanding the impact of different methods of protecting patron privacy on the types of patterns available through the bibliomining process." An active OA supporter, Scott self-archives regularly and you can find all his research preprints, besides those on bibliomining, in dLIST.

No comments: