Grant Awarded to INFOMINE, the Online Virtual Library and Finding Tool of the University of California

[Julie Mason]

Grant Awarded to INFOMINE, the Online Virtual Library and Finding Tool of
the University of California


   The University of California, Riverside Library is pleased to announce
it has recently been awarded $ 298,000 by the "Fund for the Improvement of
Postsecondary Education"(FIPSE), a section of the U.S. Department of
Education dedicated to the cultivation and dissemination of better ideas in
post-secondary education.  This funding will be used to further develop the
popular academic finding tool and virtual library, INFOMINE
(http://infomine.ucop.edu).  James Thompson, University Librarian, and Dr.
Marek Chrobak, Professor of Computer Science, are the Principal
Investigators of this grant project.  Steve Mitchell, cofounder of INFOMINE
and a science librarian, is the Project Director.  The project is a
collaborative effort between the UCR Library and the UCR Computer Science
Department.
     INFOMINE began over four years ago and was one of the first Web-based,
academic virtual libraries.  The site has received many favorable reviews
and awards.  In the January 2, 1998 issue of Science’s Mining the Web
column it stated "Much of the Web is ephemeral; too many pages just quietly
come and go.  Some sort of award is therefore owed to INFOMINE, one of the
first high-quality information resources on the Web and still going
strong
".  Currently, INFOMINE has over 14,000 links to Internet accessible
databases, journals, textbooks, guides to the Internet for most
disciplines, conference proceedings, and many other types of resources.
Separate virtual collections of INFOMINE exist for most major areas of
university level research and educational interests.  The following
collections are presently on INFOMINE:  1)  Biological, Agricultural and
Medical Resources; 2) Government Information; 3) Maps and GIS; 4) Physical
Sciences, Engineering, Computing and Math; 5)  Social Sciences and
Humanities; 6)  Visual and Performing Arts; 7)  K-12 Instructional
Resources; 8) University Instructional Resources; and  9)Internet Enabling
Tools.  Each of the links to scholarly Internet resources are indexed and
annotated by librarians.
     The grant, entitled "Developing the Next Generation of Virtual
Internet Finding tools for the Academic Community", intends to accomplish
just that by radically increasing the efficiency of INFOMINE by achieving
four major objectives.  The first objective, ProbeSearch, involves
enhancing the existing INFOMINE system with the development and
implementation of a novel and powerful full-text search service via a
Limited Area Search Engine (LASE).  The LASE should offer users the high
quality or precision searching characteristic of most virtual libraries and
the high recall or comprehensive searching characteristic of most large
search engines.  The development of the NetGain program will meet our
second objective of exploring and formalizing model of multi-campus
cooperation in Internet resource discovery, and description and delivery
via INFOMINE among interested librarians, faculty and advanced students.
The third objective of the project is to provide a tool to alert the
academic user of new or updated sites on the Internet in their area of
interest.  INFOMINE Profiles is a current awareness service that will email
new INFOMINE content additions to subscribers.  The development of the
ClassLinxxx model, Web page templates that allow instructors to easily
integrate INFOMINE into their course pages, is the fourth objective.
     INFOMINE hopes to continue being one of the best public domain finding
tools for the academic community and collect and disseminate the best of
electronic information.  The INFOMINE project is also looking for
interested participants in higher education to develop ongoing
collaboration for collecting Internet resources.  Also, any comments or
suggestions are always welcomed.


 Julie Mason :-)
Director of Library Outreach Services
University of California, Riverside
(909)787-3221  FAX (909)787-2255
jmason at ucrac1.ucr.edu