Researchers have been studying personal information management (PIM) for many years, but little exists by way of practical advice for how individuals should manage their own information. We employed the Delphi Method to engage PIM researchers with expertise in a variety of relevant areas in a five-round extended dialog about PIM practices. Participants identified key everyday choices of PIM, suggested alternatives, and identified pros and cons of each alternative. Our contributions include: 1) a set of 36 PIM practices, along with pros, cons, and recommendations for or against each practice, 2) directions of future research and development including "near-future" improvements in tool support and 3) a detailed description of how we applied the Delphi Method to study PIM and how it might be used more widely in HCI research as a complement to more established methods of inquiry.

Since the adoption of faceted search in a small number of academic libraries in 2006, faceted search interfaces have gained popularity in academic and public libraries. This article clarifies whether faceted search improves the interactions between searchers and library catalogs and sheds light on ways that facets are used during a library search. To study searchers' behaviors in natural situations, we collected from the servers a data set with more than 1.5 million useful search logs. Logs were parsed, statistically analyzed, and manually studied using visualization tools to gain a general understanding of how facets are used in the search process. A user experiment with 24 subjects was conducted to further understand contextual information, such as the searchers' motivations and perceptions. The results indicate that most searchers were able to understand the concept of facets naturally and easily. The faceted search was not able to shorten the search time but was able to improve the search accuracy. Facets were used more for open‐ended tasks and difficult tasks that require more effort to learn, investigate, and explore. Overall, the results weaved a detailed “story” about the ways that people use facets and the ways that facets help people use library catalogs.

Annotations, in the form of markings and comments on the text, are often part of scholarly work. Digital platforms increasingly allow these annotations to be shared in group and public environments. To explore scholars' current behavior and attitudes toward shared annotations, semistructured interviews with 20 doctoral students were conducted. The findings suggest that sociocognitive processes are integral to scholars' creation and use of shared annotations. However, although scholars clearly support creating and using shared annotations, several sociocognitive hurdles have hampered adoption of scholarly shared annotation systems. This article discusses common themes emerging from the findings and relates them to research on shared annotations.

Abstract In an effort to understand how academic scientists seek information relevant to their research in today's environment of ubiquitous electronic access, a correlation framework is built and regression analysis is applied to the survey results from 2,063 academic researchers in natural science, engineering, and medical science at five research universities in the United States. Previous work has reported descriptive statistics about these scientists' information‐seeking behavior. This study extends that work to examine relationships between scientists' information‐seeking behaviors and their personal and environmental factors. Several regression models, including the Poisson model, the logit model, and the ordered logit model, are built to interpret the correlation among scientists' behaviors. In addition, exploratory factor analysis is used for data reduction. Overall, many factors were found to affect the specific information‐seeking behaviors of scientists, including demographic, psychological, role‐related, and environmental factors. Of the factors having an effect, academic position was the most important determinant of information behavior.

Abstract In the summer of 2008 all University of North Carolina libraries switched from a traditional library catalog interface supporting text‐based searching (TextOnly) to a text and facet‐based interface (TextFacet) to improve users' search experiences. This study seeks to understand the differences between these two interfaces and how they affect the search experience of the novice user. In this study, 40 participants were asked to search for resources using both interfaces. Their search times and accuracy were measured across three types of search tasks (known, partially known, and exploratory). After completing the searches, they were asked a series of questions about their experiences. The data were analyzed in order to identify strengths and weaknesses in both search interfaces. Thirty‐six out of 40 participants preferred the TextFacet interface to the TextOnly interface. Using three dependent variables—time, accuracy, and rating—the two interfaces were compared and interactions were tested with the three task types. Search times for the TextFacet were shorter and participants preferred the TextFacet search interface over the TextOnly search interface. Performances across the three task types were different in terms of search time. The partially known and exploratory task types showed similar distributions for rating and accuracy. These distributions were distinctly different from the known task type. The results of this study may assist libraries in developing improved library catalog search interfaces that utilize facets as well as text searching.

OBJECTIVE: The field of Biomedical and Health Informatics (BMHI) continues to define itself, and there are many educational programs offering 'informatics' degrees with varied foci. The goal of this study was to develop a scheme for systematic comparison of programs across the entire BMHI spectrum and to identify commonalities among informatics curricula. DESIGN: Guided by several published competency sets, a grounded theory approach was used to develop a program/curricula categorization scheme based on the descriptions of 636 courses offered by 73 public health, nursing, health, medical, and bioinformatics programs in the USA. The scheme was then used to compare the programs in the aforementioned five informatics disciplines. RESULTS: The authors developed a Course-Based Informatics Program Categorization (CBIPC) scheme that can be used both to classify coursework for any BMHI educational program and to compare programs from the same or related disciplines. The application of CBIPC scheme to the analysis of public health, nursing, health, medical, and bioinformatics programs reveals distinct intradisciplinary curricular patterns and a common core of courses across the entire BMHI education domain. Limitations The study is based on descriptions of courses from the university's webpages. Thus, it is limited to sampling courses at one moment in time, and classification for the coding scheme is based primarily on course titles and course descriptions. CONCLUSION: The CBIPC scheme combines empirical data about educational curricula from diverse informatics programs and several published competency sets. It also provides a foundation for discussion of BMHI education as a whole and can help define subdisciplinary competencies.

Abstract Science Data Repositories (SDRs) have been recognized as both critical to science, and undergoing a fundamental change. A websample study was conducted of 100 SDRs. Information on the websites and from administrators of the SDRs was reviewed to determine salient characteristics of the SDRs, which were used to classify SDRs into groups using a combination of cluster analysis and logistic regression. Characteristics of the SDRs were explored for their role in determining groupings and for their relationship to the success of SDRs. Four of these characteristics were identified as important for further investigation: whether the SDR was supported with grants and contracts, whether support comes from multiple sponsors, what the holding size of the SDR is and whether a preservation policy exists for the SDR. An inferential framework for understanding SDR composition, guided by observations, characteristic collection and refinement and subsequent analysis on elements of group membership, is discussed. The development of SDRs is further examined from a business standpoint, and in comparison to its most similar form, institutional repositories. Because this work identifies important characteristics of SDRs and which characteristics potentially impact the sustainability and success of SDRs, it is expected to be helpful to SDRs.

Abstract As new technologies and information delivery systems emerge, the way in which individuals search for information to support research, teaching, and creative activities is changing. To understand different aspects of researchers' information‐seeking behavior, this article surveyed 2,063 academic researchers in natural science, engineering, and medical science from five research universities in the United States. A Web‐based, in‐depth questionnaire was designed to quantify researchers' information searching, information use, and information storage behaviors. Descriptive statistics are reported. Additionally, analysis of results is broken out by institutions to compare differences among universities. Significant findings are reported, with the biggest changes because of increased utilization of electronic methods for searching, sharing, and storing scholarly content, as well as for utilizing library services. Generally speaking, researchers in the five universities had similar information‐seeking behavior, with small differences because of varying academic unit structures and myriad library services provided at the individual institutions.

BACKGROUND: Modern, high-throughput biological experiments generate copious, heterogeneous, interconnected data sets. Research is dynamic, with frequently changing protocols, techniques, instruments, and file formats. Because of these factors, systems designed to manage and integrate modern biological data sets often end up as large, unwieldy databases that become difficult to maintain or evolve. The novel rule-based approach of the Ultra-Structure design methodology presents a potential solution to this problem. By representing both data and processes as formal rules within a database, an Ultra-Structure system constitutes a flexible framework that enables users to explicitly store domain knowledge in both a machine- and human-readable form. End users themselves can change the system's capabilities without programmer intervention, simply by altering database contents; no computer code or schemas need be modified. This provides flexibility in adapting to change, and allows integration of disparate, heterogenous data sets within a small core set of database tables, facilitating joint analysis and visualization without becoming unwieldy. Here, we examine the application of Ultra-Structure to our ongoing research program for the integration of large proteomic and genomic data sets (proteogenomic mapping). RESULTS: We transitioned our proteogenomic mapping information system from a traditional entity-relationship design to one based on Ultra-Structure. Our system integrates tandem mass spectrum data, genomic annotation sets, and spectrum/peptide mappings, all within a small, general framework implemented within a standard relational database system. General software procedures driven by user-modifiable rules can perform tasks such as logical deduction and location-based computations. The system is not tied specifically to proteogenomic research, but is rather designed to accommodate virtually any kind of biological research. CONCLUSION: We find Ultra-Structure offers substantial benefits for biological information systems, the largest being the integration of diverse information sources into a common framework. This facilitates systems biology research by integrating data from disparate high-throughput techniques. It also enables us to readily incorporate new data types, sources, and domain knowledge with no change to the database structure or associated computer code. Ultra-Structure may be a significant step towards solving the hard problem of data management and integration in the systems biology era.

Abstract The information seeking behavior of academic scientists is being transformed by the availability of electronic resources for searching, retrieving, and reading scholarly materials. A census survey was conducted of academic science researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to capture their current information seeking behavior. Nine hundred two subjects (26%) completed responses to a 15‐minute Web‐based survey. The survey questions were designed to quantify the transition to electronic communications and how this affects different aspects of information seeking. Significant changes in information seeking behavior were found, including increased reliance on web based resources, fewer visits to the library, and almost entirely electronic communication of information. The results can guide libraries and other information service organizations as they adapt to meet the needs of today's information searchers. Simple descriptive statistics are reported for the individual questions. Additionally, analysis of results is broken out by basic science and medical science departments. The survey tool and protocol used in this study have been adopted for use in a nationwide survey of the information seeking behavior of academic scientists.

Abstract Researchers have traditionally used bibliographic databases to search out information. Today, the full‐text of resources is increasingly available for searching, and more researchers are performing full‐text searches. This study compares differences in the number of articles discovered between metadata and full‐text searches of the same literature cohort when searching for gene names in two biomedical literature domains. Three reviewers additionally ranked 100 articles in each domain. Significantly more articles were discovered via full‐text searching; however, the precision of full‐text searching also is significantly lower than that of metadata searching. Certain features of articles correlated with higher relevance ratings. A significant feature measured was the number of matches of the search term in the full‐text of the article, with a larger number of matches having a statistically significant higher usefulness (i.e., relevance) rating. By using the number of hits of the search term in the full‐text to rank the importance of the article, performance of full‐text searching was improved so that both recall and precision were as good as or better than that for metadata searching. This suggests that full‐text searching alone may be sufficient, and that metadata searching as a surrogate is not necessary.

UNLABELLED: Investigators conducting studies of the molecular genetics of complex traits in humans often need rationally to select a set of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) from the hundreds or thousands available for a candidate gene. Accomplishing this requires integration of genomic data from distributed databases and is both time-consuming and error-prone. We developed the TAMAL (Technology And Money Are Limiting) web site to help identify promising SNPs for further investigation. For a given list of genes, TAMAL identifies SNPs that meet user-specified criteria (e.g. haplotype tagging SNPs or SNP predicted to lead to amino acid changes) from current versions of online resources (i.e. HapMap, Perlegen, Affymetrix, dbSNP and the UCSC genome browser). AVAILABILITY: TAMAL is a platform independent web-based application available free of charge at http://neoref.ils.unc.edu/tamal. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: http://neoref.ils.unc.edu/tamal/.

Abstract Bioinformatics is a rapidly growing field, and educational programs for bioinformatics are increasing at a similar pace to answer the demand for qualified professionals. Here we survey currently available bioinformatics programs. We have compiled summaries of these programs, including university, state, degree type, department, entrance requirements, degree requirements, links to course Web pages, research interests, and funding. Complete details are presented in the Web version, and an abbreviated listing of the primary attributes of all programs is included in this article.

In this ultrasound field study, patients were examined by a technologist in a separate room from the radiologist. Two-way audio and the NTSC video signal from the ultrasound probe were provided to the remote radiologist. Data were collected using observation, surveys, and interviews. Of particular interest was how often the radiologists felt it clinically necessary to walk to the examination room and interact directly with the patient, indicating a failure of the technology. The system was judged viable with no cases requiring hands-on viewing during the last 3 weeks of the 5- week study. Based on this experience, such video technology has been purchased and is currently in use in the clinic. Similar pilot studies are recommended during introduction of remote consultation facilities to improve technology interaction, develop new organizational procedures, and insure minimal interpersonal conflicts.