Artificial Intelligence/Expert Systems IG at A.L.A. Mid-Winter

[Steve Westman]

The Artificial Intelligence/Expert Systems Interest Group of the Library
and Information Technology Association of A.L.A. is sponsoring a
discussion session on programming knowledge-based Reference systems for
use on the World-Wide Web on Monday, February 17, 1997 from 2:00-4:00 p.m. 
Participants will include Judy Myers, Assistant to the Director,
University of Houston Libraries and Scott Burright, Networked Information
Resources Librarian at Wright State University. 
 
Ms. Myers will speak on the process of moving the U.H. Reference Expert
package from Windows to the Web.  Included in her discussion will be a
look at the current state of the system on the UH Web pages and the
eventual moving to a Web/Visual Basic-based database-lookup platform
to support the application. She will discuss UH's plan to eventually use
a single database to support a number of different knowledge-based
applications.

Mr. Burright will show work that he is doing at Wright State to develop
a knowledge-based system which uses a forms-based frontend to a PERL
script to search a database of reference sources.  He will also speak to
issues of interface design, programming techniques, and future plans for
his system.  There will be plenty of time devoted to discussion.

After the discussion session, the I.G. will hold is mid-Winter business
meeting.  Included in the agenda will be discussions of the upcoming
Annual Program in San Francisco, the progress of the I.G.'s web site,
and selection of officers to take office after the Annual Conference in
San Francisco.  There will an opportunity to discuss current
developments in the areas of AI, Expert Systems, and Information
Retrieval as they relate to libraries.  

We hope that you can join us!