Visualized Subject Access for Open Access Archives

[Gerry Mckiernan]

           _Visualized Subject Access for Open Access Archives_

    With the completion of my latest mansucript on "New Age Navigation:
Innovative E-Journal Interfaces" [soon to appear (I hope) in a library serial journal near you [:-)], I now turn my Eyes [:->]toward a Most Timely Topic:

                  Subject Access to Open Access Archives

   At the 2nd Workshop on the Open Archives Initiative (OAI): Gaining Independence with E-prints Archives and OAI

                [http://library.cern.ch/Announcement.htm ]

the topic of *Subject* access permeated several presentations

[http://documents.cern.ch/AGE/current/fullAgenda.php?ida=a02333  ]

and one break-out session on OAI Services, in particular

   [http://documents.cern.ch/cgi-bin/setlink?base=agenda&categ=a02333&id=a02333s9t13/text ]

   While I (and others) saw a role for traditional Abstracting and Indexes services in providing a Value Added Subject Overlay to:

OAI Data Providers[http://www.openarchives.org/Register/BrowseSites.pl ]

and/or
OAI Service Providers
[ http://www.openarchives.org/service/listproviders.html ]

it has occured to me that it may be more appropriate to exploit the inherent potential  of the digital environment to provide topic- and subject- based access to these respective sources through technologies that Visualize the Information, instead of the conventional A&I process (automated or otherwise which we had in mind.

 My forthcoming paper  profiles several information visualization technologies and visual interfaces for e-journals, and include:

1)   Kohohen Self-Organizing Maps (SOM) 

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/3540679219/qid=1041536283/sr=2-1/ref=sr_2_1/104-9724355-6538317
[for examples, see

Astrophysical Joournal 
[http://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/ApJ/map.pl ] 

and/or
Astronomy & Astrophysics 
[http://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/A+A/map.pl ]

2) SPIRE(tm) of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
[ http://www.pnl.gov/infoviz/spire/spire.html ], notably ThemeView(tm)


3) AquaBrowser [http://www.medialab.nl/engels/index.html ] for MediaLab 
For examples, see eLibraryHub (http://aqua.elibraryhub.com/)
[Type 'Iowa' as a search term :-)]

4) Concept Space 
For examples see _D-Lib Magazine_ 
[http://www.dlib.org/dlib/october02/zhang/10zhang.html ]

[ http://ella.slis.indiana.edu/~junzhang/dlib/IV1.html ] 

   For a future paper (Yes, Yes, Yet another paper)[:-)], I would appreciate Any and All contributions, queries, comments, critiques, questions Cosmic Insights, revised earnings statements, etc. on the Matter of Visualized Subject Access to Open Access  Archives. Current or planned efforts to visualize *any* resource that is Dublin Core coded
[ http://dublincore.org/ ] is also of interest.

NOTE: For background information on the Open Access Initiative see:

                             [http://www.openarchives.org ]

   Regards,

/Gerry 

Gerry McKiernan
Open Librarian 
Iowa State University 
Ames IA 50011

gerrymck at iastate.edu 

                                                 "Happy New Year!"