Nylink Reference conference - New York City

Wed Mar 31 14:06:26 EST 1999

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				NYLINK PRESENTS

SEARCHING AND RESEARCHING IN THE WEB
			ENVIRONMENT:
		LOOKING TOWARD THE MILLENNIUM	

JUNE 4, 1999		10:00 AM - 4:00 PM
DONNELL LIBRARY, 53RD STREET, NEW YORK, NY

Wondering about the wonders of the Web? Looking for Web reference resources
in all the wrong places? Need guidance building an electronic reference
collection? Confused about Web retrieval and the technologies behind them?
Ever asked a Web search engine a natural language question?  There are lots
of questions about the World Wide Web - the hard part is the answers!

Our nationally known panel of speakers will address many of these questions.
They will share their experience, expertise and insights to help you
navigate the uncertain waters of change on the Internet. Please plan to join
us!

REVA BASCH
Aubergine Information Services
The Sea Ranch, CA

The Evolution of the Web as an Online Research Environment

It was barely five years ago that the Web first entered our collective
professional consciousness. Yet it has rapidly evolved from a sideshow -
only marginally relevant to serious online research - to an intriguing
supplementary player, to the main attraction.  Reva Basch has watched this
evolution since the beginning, at first skeptically, then with enthusiasm
and respect. She provides an historical perspective on the development of
the Internet and the Web, offers an overview of the state of the online
unions, and speculates on the future of both traditional online and the Web.

Basch maintains that we are still in a period of profound confusion and
uncertainty;  many of our traditional rules for sourcing, pricing,
distributing, and evaluating information, and many of our assumptions about
the research process itself, no longer apply. She points to emerging
solutions such as collaborative filtering, meta-data, intelligent agents,
natural language, the visual representation of information, and the rise of
"ubiquitous computing" as possible pathways through the current chaos,
toward the eventual redefinition of online research, the environment in
which it's conducted, and the information profession itself.

MARYLAINE BLOCK
Associate Directory for Public Services
St. Ambrose University

Finding and Organizing Your Reference Collection on the Web; or Lost in the
Supermarket, I Can No Longer Shop Happily

You know your physical reference collection cold, but when it comes to
cyberspace, you're thinking, "There's too much there. How do I find my way
around this humongous maze? Did anybody ORGANIZE this mess?"  And the answer
is, librarians did. They have built reference desks, created regular web
review sites, and even organized the web in Dewey and LC call numbers for
you. I'm one of them, and I'll show you how to use our work for your
day-to-day reference questions.

Susan Feldman
Datasearch
Ithaca, NY

THE ANSWER MACHINE

Users want answers. Today's information retrieval systems are question
processing machines, not answer machines. Susan Feldman will discuss today's
retrieval technologies and how they work, and then give an overview of
information technologies on the horizon.  These include intelligent agents,
filtering and routing, data mining, question answering systems,
cross-language retrieval, and visualization. We are heading toward an answer
machine. 

This session will present a glimpse of the future while it tries to explain
what information professionals need to know about the present.

Elizabeth Liddy
President/CEO
Textwise
Syracuse, NY

Natural Language Processing for Enhanced Information Access

Improved access to vital information can be achieved by use of Natural
Language Processing (NLP) techniques which improve both the representation
of documents in a system and access to these documents via users' queries.
In the same way that humans rely on the multiple levels of language to
convey meaning, NLP Systems optimize performance by understanding the
content and intention of both producers of documents and seekers of
information. After years of constraining users by requiring Boolean and
structured search statements, NLP has changed the searching environment for
librarians and their clients dramatically.

This presentation will explain and exemplify how all of the levels of
language are optimized by an NLP system and will provide guidance in
understanding how systems which claim to be NLP-based can be appropriately
evaluated and compared.

				ABOUT OUR SPEAKERS

REVA BASCH is a writer, researcher and consultant to the online industry.
She has written four books, most recently Researching Online for Dummies and
Secrets of the Super Net Searchers. She has also authored numerous articles
and columns, including the Reva's (W)rap column for ONLINE magazine. Her
feature articles have appeared in Computer Life, Online, Database, and
Searcher among others. Reva is a past president of the Association of
Independent Information Professionals, a member of the Northern California
Chapter of the Southern California Online Users Group (SCOUG) and a founding
member of Information Bay Area.
She has a degree in English Literature, summa cum laude, from the University
of Pennsylvania and a Master's degree in Library Science from the University
of California, Berkeley. Reva began her career as a corporate librarian and
has been president of her own company, Aubergine Information Services, since
1986.

MARYLAINE BLOCK is Associate Director for Public Services at O'Keefe
Library, St. Ambrose University, where she created the site formerly known
as Where the Wild Things Are, and now, after threatening legal noises from
Maruice Sendak's agents, known as Best Information on the Net (BIOTN).
Marylaine is a former English teacher. She grew up in Michigan, earned an
undergraduate degree in English at Northwestern University, and an M.A. in
American Civilization at the University of Iowa. She received her M.A. in
Library Science at the University of Iowa in 1977. 
A longtime book reviewer for Library Journal, Marylaine has also become a
regular columnist at Fox News Online.  Currently, she plans to forsake
librarianship in favor of life as a struggling writer.

SUSAN FELDMAN is President of Datasearch, an independent information
consulting firm which evaluates and writes about new information
technologies and products, including search engines, intelligent agents, and
interface designs. She is a frequent contributor to such publications as
Searcher Magazine, Online, Information Today, and The Information Advisor;
she wrote the article on search engines for the Encyclopedia of Library and
Information Science. She is past president and founding member of the
Association of Independent Information Professionals.
Sue earned a Master's degree in Library Science from the University of
Michigan, and also a B.A. in Linguistics from Cornell University. She worked
in government, public and college libraries before starting Datasearch in
1981. while Datasearch was originally a full spectrum information company,
collecting information and writing reports on a variety of topics, it began
to specialize in Internet and information retrieval-related work in 1993.
This led to further writing about search engines, interfaces and user
information seeking behavior. The startling and widespread interest in
search engines since the advent of the World Wide Web has Sue collecting
frequent speaker miles this year, discussing search engines and other new
information technologies and how to use them.

DR. ELIZABETH LIDDY is President/CEO of TextWise, LLC, a research and
development company whose technologies:
		*DR-LINK - a document retrieval system
		*KNOW-IT - a question-answering system
		*CINDOR - a cross-language system
		*EVA - an adaptive web-agent system

are in use by government and corporate organizations to improve access to
both internal collections for knowledge management and external collections
for strategic intelligence. TextWise technologies are based on full NLP,
which has been scaled to production level capabilities to offer new levels
of information access and analytics.
Dr. Liddy is also a Professor at Syracuse University's School of Information
Studies, where she teaches Information Retrieval, Natural Language
Processing, and Data Mining. Her doctoral dissertation, which was completed
in 1988, received three awards, both national and international. She is the
author of more than 60 technical papers and the recipient of more than 30
research contracts.

---------------------------------------------------------------------	
		Searching and Researching in the Web 
					Environment:
		Looking Toward the Millenium 

				- Registration form -

		New York Public Library, Donnell Library
				53rd Street, New York City
				June 4, 1999

		Registrations due June 1st, 1999; 
		Contact the Network by May 28th, 1999 for a refund. 

      Cost (includes program, lunch is on your own): 
        	$75 - Full Network members 
        	$95 - All Others 

    ______Payment:Bill institution(Nylink members) _______OCLC symbol
    ______Check, payable to Nylink 
    ______Purchase Order, payable to Nylink

  Please provide the following information:

        Name:_______________________________

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        Institution:________________________

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		Registrations to:
		Carol Donato
		Nylink
		State University Plaza
		Albany, NY 12246
		Phone: (518) 443-5444 or
		800-342-3353
		Fax: (518) 432-4346