2.2 Accessing Digital Resources
2.2.3 Access Types and the Access Process
Access is a term that is used in many different ways. For example, the UNESCO Open Educational Resources Community7 lists the following access types and
categories [Com09]:
Awareness, policy, attitude, culture Access in terms of awareness, local pol-
icy / attitude, languages
Legal Access in terms of licensing
Technical: Provision of digital resources Access in terms of file formats,
disability
Technical: Receiving digital resources Access in terms of infrastructure, In-
ternet connectivity, discovery, ability and skills
In the context of this work, access will only be referred to regarding the provi- sion of digital resources in information systems.
In general, two fundamental types of information access can be distinguished: pulling and pushing. These terms are used as follows:
Term 2.4 Pulling refers to the activity of interactively requesting information Pulling
[BYRN99, p.5] in an information system.
Term 2.5 Pushing refers to the activity of automatically pushing information to the Pushing
user without any need for inquiry for the user.
6Wikipedia is a large online encyclopaedia; see Chapter 3 for more information 7See http://oerwiki.iiep-unesco.org
Technology
Pulling
Query-based searching:
Users provide an oral or written representation of their informa- tion need, the most common way is to type key phrases. This is usually enabled by indexing resources. Query-based searching requires users to be able to formulate queries in a syntax required by the respective information system – this can be non-trivial es- pecially for advanced queries, e.g., when Boolean logic shall be applied. Furthermore – like any other pulling technology – users might not be aware that (potentially new) relevant resources exist and thus might not even try to actively search for information. Browsing:
Users browse on a structured corpus of resources. This is usu- ally enabled by linking documents, or by providing directories, taxonomies, etc. When exploring a corpus by filtering available information, this is also referred to as faceted browsing or faceted search.8
Pushing
Static approaches:
Such approaches do not take into account a user’s current con- text or maybe changing interests and needs. Examples are simple techniques such as feeds or search alerts.
Proactive Information Delivery:
This group of technologies aims to provide relevant information without explicit request [Hol02]. A very prominent example is information filtering. information filtering is typically applied to large amounts of data (often streams) and typically focuses on removing data that does not meet certain criteria [BC92]. Such criteria can be, e.g., aboutness, coverage, novelty, reliability, or timeliness [BBC+07]. Usually, information filtering involves com-
paring a user’s profile to the characteristics of digital resources (content-based filtering) or to the characteristics of other users (collaborative filtering). Hanani et al. distinguish active informa- tion filtering systems that actively seek relevant information for a user and passive information filtering systems that filter out irrel- evant information from incoming data [HSS01].
Table 2.1:An overview of pushing and pulling technologies
8Query-based searching can also be combined with filtering technologies. This is sometimes
2.2 Accessing Digital Resources
Please note that this characterisation is different to characterisations that make a distinction between pushing and pulling based on whether an information flow is excepted by a user or not (e.g., [CS01]). Usually, only a selected amount of information that is available in an information system is delivered to the user, so pushing techniques are sometimes also referred to as “Selective Dissemina- tion of Information (SDI)” [Luh61].
Table 2.1 gives an overview of different pulling and pushing techniques.
Whether pushing or pulling technologies are used, one can usually divide the Access process steps
process of accessing resources in the following steps depicted in Figure 2.2 on Page 22:
Step 1 – Resource subset selection: It is usually not possible to manually
check whether every resource that can be accessed in an information sys- tem is relevant for the current information need. Thus, a subset of re- sources has to be selected for further inquiries. Such a subset can be cre- ated using different pull- and push-technologies as presented in Table 2.1:
• A query-based search will usually return a ranked list of resources. • Certain filter criteria can be selected when faceted browsing is applied
(e.g., “only show me documents of user X generated in year Y”). • A user’s feed reader presents new entries from feeds that a user has
subscribed to.
• A recommendation engine automatically suggests a set of resources it considers as relevant for a user.
Step 2 – Resource subset delivery: A view on the resource subset selected in
step 1 is created and presented to the user.
Step 3 – Resource and metadata retrieval: In this step, a user selects a re-
source with the purpose of examining it in more detail. The resource and respective metadata is then delivered to the user by the information sys- tem.
Step 4 – Resource examination: Finally, the user examines the resource and
the respective in more detail. This might include a final decision whether it is considered as relevant or not.
Figure 2.2:The resource access process in information systems
The disciplines information retrieval and information seeking investigate how this process can be supported, and how according information systems can be built.
Term 2.6 information seeking refers to the human-oriented activity of attempting to
Information
seeking find information in an information system.
information seeking includes, e.g., activities such as filtering and browsing. While information seeking is usually more human-oriented, information re- trieval is more technology-oriented and has the function to guide the users to the resources that will best enable them to satisfy their information need [Rob81]. In this work, the definition of information retrieval provided by Salton in [Sal68] is used: