browsing vs. searching and access rights

["Megan R. MacMillan" <mmacmillan@solista.com>]

Just wanted to respond with what I've found so far with respect to "browsing
vs. searching" and how access rights might tie into metadata.

1.  "Browsing vs. Searching"
I haven't found any specific, quotable statements about what browsing is vs.
what searching is.  There may be one in the new book "Modern IR" but it's
not all online and I don't have a copy of the book.  How do we want to
phrase the two options that should be available in a reg/rep spec?  I have a
definition I wrote up and then a couple of glossary items from the Modern IR
book.
========
Browsing and Searching are two of the ways of locating and retrieving
information.  Browsing is the examination of information that presented in
predetermined categorization structures grouped in a hierarchically arranged
manner.  These hierarchically arranged groupings are often called
directories. A user starts with a category that seems to contain the
information they are looking for and continues down through hierarchically
grouped subcategories until they find the information that they are looking
for.  Browsing is most often used for finding general information.

Searching matches user input keywords to an index that is built either by
using full document text, titles and abstracts, or metadata associated with
the document.  In this method, a user inputs a variety of keywords that
describe the information they are looking for (and keywords of information
that should not be included) and a search engine will retrieve the
information that matches those keywords.  Searching is most often used for
finding specific information.

For the Reg/Rep Group, Megan MacMillan, 10/2000
====
Browsing
interactive task in which the user is more interested in exploring the
document collection than in retrieving documents which satisfy a specific
information need.

Scather/Gather
a browsing strategy which clusters the local documents in the answer set
dynamically into topically-coherent groups and presents the user with
descriptions of such groups.

No "search" or "searching" entry into the glossary.

From
Modern Information Retrieval. Baeza-Yates, R. and Ribeiro-Neto, B. Addison
Wesley Longman Publishing Company, May 1999.

==================================
2.  Access Rights
It looks like the Dublin Core has a pretty good implementation of access
rights.  They seem to use it in at least two ways:  charging for viewing
some or all of the information and access rights for evidence in record
keeping.  The second is more used for what we're thinking of access rights
and is in the Terms and Conditions Layer.  This layer "invokes security
measures controlling the potential use of a record".  It has pieces for
charging (or not) for content also.  Links to these two types of use for
access rights are:

a.  charging for viewing:
http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/project/metadata/dublin.html
b.  evidence in record keeping:
http://purl.oclc.org/dc/workshops/dc1conference/resources-bearman.htm

I'll be happy to talk more about either of these uses on the next call.

Megan