Information Retrieval List Digest 238 (January 1, 1995) URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/irld/irld-238 IRLIST Digest ISSN 1064-6965 January 1, 1995 Volume XII, Number 1 Issue 238 ********************************************************** II. JOBS 1. VTLS Inc.: Customer Services Librarian 2. Illinois Institute of Technology: Two Librarian Positions III. NOTICES A. Publications 1. Standpoints: The Electronic J. of Information Contexts B. Meetings 1. IJCAI '95: Workshop on Context in NLP ********************************************************** II. JOBS II.1. Fr: Katja Moos Re: VTLS Inc. Customer Services Librarian VTLS Inc., a library automation software and services company, has a career opportunity for a customer services librarian. The successful candidate will perform inhouse and onsite customer training and coordinate pre-installation analysis, planning, and scheduling. Candidate will also conduct telephone consultation to assist customers in effective utilization of system capabilities and answer customers' questions. Assist research and development in the design of programs and subsystems and test and review record conversion and other programs and subsystems. REQUIREMENTS: A master's degree in library science from an ALA-acredited library school. Two years of professional experience in library technical services using an integrated library system. Thorough knowledge of the MARC format. Excellent communication skills. Must be willing to travel domestically and internationally. Send resume to Personnel Dept., VTLS, Inc., 1800 Kraft Drive, Blacksburg, VA 24060. VTLS Inc. is an affirmative action, equal opportunity employer. Katja Moos International Customer Support VTLS, Inc. 1800 Kraft rive Blacksburg,, VA 24060 phone (703) 231-3605 fax (703) 231-3648 email moosk@vtls.com ********** II.2. Fr: Arthur Lifshin Re: Paul V. Galvin Library: Two Librarian Positions Paul V. Galvin Library Illinois Institute of Technology INFORMATION SERVICES LIBRARIAN BASIC FUNCTION: Mid-level entry position has primary responsibilities to assist the Head of Information Services in the areas of electronic information access and special collections. Secondarily, the incumbent provides reference, bibliographic instruction, and collection development services as assigned. CHARACTERISTIC DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES: Identifies, selects, and develops electronic resources in text and graphics for the library that are available through the Internet. Develops special collections in the reas of interest to the library's university community. Plans and monitors these collections and the budgets maintaining them in an appropriate balance between local ownership and external access through commercial and consortia channels and electronic networks. Develops databases to access special collections, where appropriate. Provides reference desk service, onoine searching upon request, and bibliographic instruction--both individualy and in formal groups as assigned. Serves as a subject specialist for one or more disciplines and participates in the provision of services to users and faculty of the assigned departments. Serves as the reference representative to ILSCO's operation committee. Keeps abreast of new services and participates in professional functions. Performs related professional duties as assigned. Some night and weekend reference desk duties. REPORTS TO the Head of Information Services. QUALIFICATIONS: An MLS from an ALA-accredited library school. Demonstrated knowledge of the literature and databases in engineering and the sciences. A minimum of three years' experience in a science/engineering, academic/special library environment. A working knowledge of OPACs, CD-ROMs, the Internet, and Word Perfect. A degree in engineering or science is highly desirable. Candidate will be expected to demonstrate well-developed interpersonal and communications skills as well as initiative, flexibility, and the ability to work creatively in a rapidly changing environment. REFERENCE LIBRARIAN BASIC FUNCTION: Entry-level postion with responsibility for reference desk service, bibliographic instruction, online searching, and collection development. CHARACTERISTIC DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES: Provides reference desk service, online searching upon request, and bibliographic instruction--both individually and in formal groups as assigned. Serves as a subject specialist for one or more disciplines and participates in the provision of information services to users and faculty in the assigned departments. Collection development in assigned disciplines including monographic selection, and collection weeding. Keeps abreast of new services and participates in professional functions. Performs related professional duties as assigned. Some night and weekend reference desk duties. REPORTS TO the Head of Information Services QUALIFICATIONS: An MLS from an ALA-accredited library school. Demonstrated knowledge of the literature and databases in engineering and the sciences. A working knowledge of OPACs, CD-ROMs, the Internet, and Word Perfect. An undergraduate degree in engineering or science is highly desirable. Candidate will be expected to demonstrate well-developed interpersonal and communications skills as well as initiative, flexibility, and the ability to work creatively ina rapidly changing environment. CONTACT: Applicants should send letters of application, resume, and the names, addresses, and phone numbers of three references to: (code 200), Illinois Institute of Technology, Office of Human Resources, 3300 S. Federal, Chicago,IL 60616. ********************************************************** III. NOTICES III.A.1. Fr: Rebecca Pressman Re: Standpoints: The Electronic Journal of Information Contexts Call for Manuscripts Standpoints: The Electronic Journal of Information Contexts Editors: Kathleen Burnett and Hur-Li Lee Technical Editor: Rebecca Pressman The theme of the 1994 ALISE (Association of Library and Information Science Education) conference in Los Angeles, "Intellectual Diversity: Cross Disciplinary Connections and Perspectives," reflects the growing interest library educators have in acknowledging the urgent need for broader and more diversified approaches to library and informations studies. Among the topics discussed at the conference were various perspectives--such as multiculturalism and feminist standpoint theory--and alternative research methodologies-- such as ethnography. While these perspectives and approaches are not new to the field, the converence amplified voices which were previously only whispers buried in the chatter. With the publication of Standpoints: The Electronic Journal of Information Contexts, we hope to address at least one of the barriers that prevent researchers from generating such scholarsh--lack of incentive. Positivist models still dominate the research paradigms of the field. Researchers are reluctant to engage in projects that employ alternative perspectives due to perceived difficulties in obtaining funding and scholarly recognition. Qualitative studies may not be valued by positivist reviewers and therefore be rejected for publication. Tenure committees may not look favorably on less well-established methodologies and may be suspicious of interdisciplinary efforts. Some of us who attended the 1994 ALISE conference see the need for creating a new forum that will provide an open environment for different voices representing a variety of points of view on and approaches to a wide range of concerns in the library and information field. This refereed elecronic journal will be interdisciplinary, rather than disciplinary, and inclusive, rather than excluxive, in nature. It welcomes any sound research that deals with issues related to information contexts. The preference will be given to those studies taking nontraditional perspecties and/or approaches; to studies asking questions starting from lives of a wider variety of people; and to studies exhibiting interdisciplinarity. It is the sincere hope of the editors that the publication of this journal will add diversity to our field and contribute to its scholarly development. Standpoints: The Electronic Journal of Information Contexts is a new forum for different voices representing a variety of pojnts of view on approaches to a wide range of concerns in information contexts. Our vision of the journal is an expansive one. We wish to support an open, interdisciplinary, and inclusive environment devoted to the development of theory and publication of research about information and its contexts. Some examples of the relationships we would like to see this journal support include: interpersonal communication in information contexts; gender studies in telecommunications; research in the communication of information about "taboo" subjects; intercultural communication of information; critical theory as applied to information systems design; information culture and counter- cultures; analyses of contemporary technological responses to the "information gap" and building a conceptual framework for the organization of electronic information. We welcome contributions from all standpoints and methodologies. We prefer submissions in html markup format. These can be emailed in binary form to: kburnett@gandalf.rutgers.edu. We will also accept plain ascii files at the same address. If you do not have access to an email account, you may submit in disk format to the following address: Kathleen Burnett, Rutgers University, SCLIS, 4 Huntington St., New Brunswick, NJ. We can handle both Mac and IBM/'DOS formats, including most common word procesing software programs. Dr. Kathleen Burnett Director, Information Media Design Group, SCILS Rutgers University New Burnswick, NJ phone (908) 932-9760 fax (908) 932-7917 internet burnet@zodiac.rutgers.edu ********** III.B.1. Fr: Lucja Iwanska Re: IJCAI95 Workshop on context in NLP IJCAI-95 Workshop on CONTEXT IN NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING August 19, 20, or 21, 1995 Montreal, Canada The goal of this workshop is to investigate the nature of context in natural language, its role in natural language processing, and shed some light on this largely unexplored area of great theoretical and practical importance. Dialogue and text processing are two application domains where the lack of good theories of context impedes significant progress in applying and developing new technologies. As speech technology matures, it becomes technically feasible to build dialogue systems. However, understanding dialogues, and especially multimodal dialogues, is not possible without some account of the role of context. Similarly, with today's text processing technology it is feasible to automatically create knowledge bases from fairly unconstrained texts such as newspaper archives. Ignoring context in such texts, however, results in knowledge bases that are not only very incomplete, but also dramatically different from knowledge bases created by humans, based on the same texts. We invite papers from researchers active in the fields of natural language processing, knowledge representation, and other related areas addressing theoretical aspects of context and their implications for designing practical NLP systems. We are interested in reports on implemented NLP systems utilizing contextual information. We are also interested in knowledge representation systems, inference methods, and algorithms that would allow one to computationally handle specific aspects of context. AGENDA: I: ROLE OF CONTEXT IN NATURAL LANGUAGE II: CONTEXT-DEPENDENT INTERPRETATION OF NATURAL LANGUAGE III: COMPUTABILITY WORKSHOP FORMAT: I: Role of context in natural language II: Context-dependent interpretation of natural language III: Computability IV: General discussion PRE-WORSHOP ACTIVITIES: A pre-workshop mailing list will be established; please, indicate whether you want to be included; In order to facilitate interaction and focus the discussion, two months before the workshop, we will provide all the participants with specific examples and data illustrating various aspects of context. Authors+titles+abstracts of the accepted papers, but NOT the papers themselves, will be available on-line to everybody. The papers will only be available to the workshop participants. We hope that this will encourage people to make strong claims even if the support for them is not quite there, report on partial, ongoing, promising research, be frank in evaluating existing approaches and their own accomplishments, openly comment on limitations, in short, say all those (very) informative things that are sometimes difficult, if not impossible, to communicate in "official" publications. Shared data, references, papers and the mailing list are to allow the participants to: - Sort out as many as possible things before the workshop - Help focusing the workshop discussion on the hardest and most controversial issues - Raise objections and bring up controversial claims early on in order to prepare well thought of answers and constructive critique PARTICIPANTS: A limited number, 30 or so, active participants will be selected on the basis of submitted papers. A small number, 5 or so, of no-paper-attendance-only participants will also be considered; such persons should submit a one page research summary and a list of relevant publications. Attendees are required to register for the main IJCAI-95 conference. SCHEDULE/DEADLINES: Very soon Mosaic home page for the workshop set 3.15.95 Papers received 4.03.95 Selected papers accepted Participants chosen 4.05.95 Acceptance notifications sent to authors Sent to IJCAI Selected papers to be included in the working notes List of confirmed participants Request for equipment/room 4.15.95 Mosaic home page for the workshop updated e-mail discussion begins 5.01.95 Distributed to the participants Final list of specific issues to be discussed at the workshop References to the existing work on context Examples and data illustrating various aspects of context 7.15.95 Final list of participants sent to IJCAI 8.19.95 Workshop takes place 12.01.95 Written review of the workshop ready PAPER FORMAT: Same as IJCAI-95: 12 pt article latex style * 15 pages maximum, including title, abstract, figures, and references. The first page must include: title * author's name(s) * affiliation * complete mailing address * e-mail address * phone/fax number(s) * abstract of 200 or so words * keywords SUBMISSIONS. Electronic submissions are strongly preferred. As the last resort, four hard copies of the paper can be snail mailed to Lucja Iwanska Department of Computer Science Wayne State University Detroit, MI 48202, USA (313) 577-1667 (phone) (313) 577-2478 (secretary) (313) 577-6868 (fax) Info about the workshop and the abstracts of the accepted papers is available via a Mosaic home page at http://www.cs.wayne.edu/context FOR COMPLETE INFORMATION, CONTACT: Lucja Iwanska Department of Computer Science Wayne State University Detroit, MI 48202 lucja@cs.wayne.edu (313) 577-1667 (phone) (313) 577-2478 (secretary) (313) 577-6868 (fax) ********************************************************** IRLIST Digest is distributed from the University of California, Division of Library Automation, 300 Lakeside Drive, Oakland, CA. 94612-3550. 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