Internationale Kulturwissenschaften International Cultural Studies Etudes culturelles internationales
Sektion IV:		Kulturwissenschaften und neue Informationsprozesse
Section IV:		Cultural Studies and New Information Processes
Section IV:		Etudes culturelles et nouvelles formes d’information

Manuel Durand-Barthez (Toulouse) [BIO]

French

The perception of the data flows through the information methodology

The individual retrieval and exploitation of information generate themselves information. The coherence of that cycle is made possible through the information methodology, the main aspects of which will be hereafter described.

1. to formulate a subject: the semantic structure of the representation of a subject in free or controlled language (thesauri, indexes) implies the retrieval of the synonyms and the exclusion of all equivocal context which would result in non- pertinent records. Information systems effectively work on strings of characters and a searcher should know how to formulate his question rationally.
   
   
2. to define the appropriate documentary typology: books, articles, proceedings, administrative documents, pictures (moving or not), sounds, museological pieces etc.. Every medium or group of thematically combined media will generally correspond to specific data bases. Specialized directories or Web hyperlinks oriented towards the pertinent topics will help in defining the targetted data bases.
   
   
3. to select the data bases:
   a) according to the interface:
   -- "on line" classical bibliographical data bases, mostly charged per minute or per record (examples in the Social Sciences, Arts & Humanities Search, MLA, Psycinfo, Francis). Since the end of the 80's, these bases are frequently available on CD-Rom, exportable in ASCII standard format. These CD-Rom can be consulted in most of the big libraries and are sometimes available through the Internet.
   -- international preprint data bases allowing the anticipated consultation (even the assessment) of a scientific document, generally on the Web.
   -- non-specific Web sites, i.e. those the contents of which do not globally belong to any of the categories mentioned above.
   The meta-engines generate simultaneous searches on several engines. Some meta-engines transcribe the search syntax used by each engine: that helps checking whether the juxtaposition of the terms in the search has been interpreted by the engine as an alternative or as a combination (cf. infra § 4)
   b) according to the administrative supervision: academic (universities etc.), state or other official organizations or communities (archives...), associative or private (foundations...)
   
   
4. to conceive a search strategy: the logics of combination (boolean operators AND, OR, NOT, XNOT) and the field labels or tags (AUthors, TItles, DEscriptors, PY [publication year] etc.) in association with the use of the appropriate vocabulary (cf. supra § 1), help avoid noise (overabundance of useless information) as well as silence (abnormal absence of records on a well-known subject)
   
   
5. to assess the results: objective criteria of pertinence inherent in the data bases are to be considered:
   a) qualtitative criteria: controlled and uncontrolled information. The growing mass of information circulating on the Web should be scientifically assessed insofar as most of this has not been previously analyzed by experts.
   b) quantitative criteria: some systems or engines allow for measurement of the occurence ratio of the search terms.
   
   
6. to localize the records: that is essentially done on the Web, in particular through the Z 39-50 gateways, regarding the collective library catalogs.
   Publishers' electronic catalogs may also be consulted. In addition, the opportunity is offered on the Web to complete electronic transactions regarding interlibrary loans, the purchase of books, transmission of special copies or offprints of articles or communications issued by the authors themselves.
   
   
7. to manage the products:
   a) to organize, with software, one's own database, through the standardization of tagged fields and the removal of doubles (e.g. twice cited records). Reformatting and removal of the doubles are an essential aim of the bibliometric systems, which generate the statistical analysis of information on a corpus of about a thousand records issued from heterogeneous data bases.
   b) to create a personal electronic net of human resources regarding the information, built on an E-mail directory so that authors may be contacteddirectly. In the same way, personal files may be provided and exchanged with them.

Such are the different components of the information cycle, the user of which is as well final as original.

		Internationale Kulturwissenschaften International Cultural Studies Etudes culturelles internationales
Sektion IV:		Kulturwissenschaften und neue Informationsprozesse
Section IV:		Cultural Studies and New Information Processes
Section IV:		Etudes culturelles et nouvelles formes d’information