Report for an Institute of Museum and Library Sciences (IMLS) Grant Partner Uplift Project. This report reviews the tools and software to support interoperability between digital repositories and the Library of Texas federated search. This review will be used for providing recommendations for best practices and workflows for installing software and tools onto Digital Asset Management Systems (DAMS) and selected databases that support search interoperability.

An operating assumption for the networked environment is that many different information systems need to interoperate for users to successfully discover and retrieve distributed resources. Meaningful interoperability is often elusive. In the library community, the Z39.50 standard protocol (ISO 23950/ANSI/NISO Z39.50) for information retrieval promised seamless and transparent networked access to library resources. Too often, the reality has not lived up to the promise. This paper discusses two efforts that offer solution paths to Z39.50 interoperability.

Paper discussing a two-dimensional approach for investigating issues of semantic interoperability in digital libraries.

This paper discusses metadata utilization. This paper reports results of an analysis of a large sample of MARC 21 bibliographic records.

The notion of open access to scholarly information is not new. In recent years, however, it has taken on prominence within the broader context of scholarly work, communication, and publishing. This brief paper intends to highlight and clarify key aspects of open access to assist UNTs initial discussions of the utility of open access for UNT researchers and scholars.

This white paper introduces evaluation concepts and describes outcome-based evaluation. The Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS) logic model is described in the context of developing a program evaluation plan. Four case studies illustrate how outputs, outcomes and indicators can be used to produce programs results.

This paper discusses the findings pertaining to the framework for building good digital collections. This paper is part of the three-year interim project report for the IMLS Digital Collections & Content Project, summarizing major findings October 2002 through September 2005.

This paper discusses Question Answering (QA) combining multiple evidences.

This two-year project will advance understanding of the workflow and processes best able to increase access to and use of digitized biological collection metadata within the stakeholder communities comprised of biologists, natural history museum collections managers, biodiversity standards groups, and the library and information science community.

This paper reports an exploratory study on resources and resource sharing among researchers in Intelligent Information Access (IIA).

This paper discusses assessing descriptive substance in free-text collection-level metadata. This paper reports on a content analysis of collection records in an aggregation of cultural heritage collections.

This document outlines the project plan for the Needs Assessment Study of Texas Academic, Public, and School Libraries.

Article on an innovative partnership to recruit and educate biomedical information professionals.

Paper discussing the use of special diagnostic records in the context of Z39.50 and online library catalogs.

This paper discusses a project to redesign courses on different levels of details. The Texas Course Redesign Project initiated by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB) aims to develop and distribute instructional resources to improve student learning outcomes and lower the costs of higher education.

This paper describes the design and development of a learning object repository for a new statewide higher education initiative.

This paper describes the MARC Content Designation Utilization Project, which is examining a very large set of metadata records as artifacts of the library cataloging enterprise. This is the first large-scale examination of descriptive metadata utilization. Presents an overview of study activities and suggests the study's significance to the broader use of metadata in digital libraries.

This paper discusses interoperability of networked information. Interoperability is a fundamental challenge for networked information discovery and retrieval. Often treated monolithically in the literature, interoperability is multifaceted and can be analyzed into different types and levels. This paper discusses an approach to map the interoperability landscape for networked information retrieval as part of an interoperability assessment research project.

This paper reports the authors' TREC 2005 QA participation. The authors' QA system Eagle QA developed last year was expanded and modified for this year's QA experiments. Particularly, the authors used Lemur 4.1 as the Information Retrieval (IR) Engine this year to find documents that may contain answers for the test questions from the document collection. The authors' result shows Lemur did a reasonable job on finding relevant documents. But certainly there is room for further improvement.

This paper discusses Chinese information retrieval using Lemur, a freely available information retrieval toolkit.

This paper describes our participation in the NTCIR-5 CLQA task.

This paper presents an overview of an exploratory research project to identify, describe, and investigate the applicability of the Web services (WS) approach to access legacy data.

This paper discusses the Z39.50 protocol. The ANSI/NISO Z39.50 protocol for information retrieval addresses the complex challenges of intersystem communication. Original uses envisioned for the protocol look very little like current implementations and uses. In the 1980s, users on one library catalog system would search and retrieve bibliographic records on a remote system. By the late 1990s, there was a need for discovering networked resources and integrating access to them. Yet, the Z39.50 protocol has addressed both these scenarios. This paper provides a portrayal of Z39.50 that explains its flexibility in response to a variety of information retrieval requirements in the networked environment.

This paper proposes a Retrieval Outcome Analysis Framework, or ROA Framework, to systematically evaluate retrieval performance of Cross-Language Information Retrieval systems.