Abstract
We describe an experiment that measures the pedagogical usefulness of the results returned by the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) and Google. Eleven public school teachers from the state of Virginia (USA) were used to evaluate a set of 38 search terms and search results based on the Standards of Learning (SOL) for Virginia Public Schools. Evaluations of search results were obtained from the NSDL (572 evaluations) and Google (650 evaluations). In our experiments, teachers ranked the links returned by Google as more relevant to the SOL than the links returned by the NSDL. Furthermore, Google’s ranking of educational material also showed some correlation with expert judgments.
Keywords
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Arms, W., Dushay, N., Fulker, D., Lagoze, C.: A Case Study in Metadata Harvesting: The NSDL. Library HiTech 21(2), 228–237 (2003)
AskNSDL. Response by Melodye Campbell (March 20, 2004), https://ask.nsdl.org/default.aspx?from=srch&id=8337
Bar-Ilan, J.: Methods for Measuring Search Engine Performance Over Time. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 53(4), 308–319 (2002)
Bergmark, D.: Collection Synthesis. In: Proceedings from the second ACM/IEEE-CS joint conference on Digital libraries (JCDL 2002), Portland, Oregon, USA, pp. 253–262 (2002)
Bergmark, D., Lagoze, C., Sbityakov, A.: Focused Crawls, Tunneling, and Digital Libraries. In: Agosti, M., Thanos, C. (eds.) ECDL 2002. LNCS, vol. 2458, pp. 91–106. Springer, Heidelberg (2002)
Can, F., Nuray, R., Sevdik, A.: Automatic Performance of Web Search Engines. Information Processing and Management 40(3), 495–514 (2004)
Chowdhury, A., Soboroff, A.: Automatic Evaluation of World Wide Web Search Services. Proceedings of the ACM SIGIR conference 25, 421–422 (2002)
Chu, H., Rosenthal, M.: Search Engines for the World Wide Web: A Comparative Study and Evaluation Methodology. Proceedings of the ASIS annual meeting 33, 127–135 (1996)
Ding, W., Marchionini, G.: A Comparative Study of Web Search Service Performance. In: Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science, Baltimore, MD, USA, vol. 33, pp. 136–142 (1996)
Fulker, D.: Metadata Strategies to Address NSDL Objectives. In: Proceedings of the 5th Russian Conference on Digital Libraries (RCDL 2003), St. Petersburg, Russia (2003)
Gordon, M., Pathak, P.: Finding Information on the World Wide Web: The Retrieval Effectiveness of Search Engines. Information Processing and Management 35(2), 141–180 (1999)
Hartson, H., Shivakumar, P., Pérez-Quiñones, M.: Usability Inspection of Digital Libraries: A Case Study. International Journal of Digital Libraries 4(2), 108–123 (2003)
Hawking, D., Craswel, N., Bailey, P., Griffiths, K.: Measuring Search Engine Quality. Information Retrieval 4(1), 33–59 (2001)
Lagoze, C., Hoehn, W., Millman, D., Arms, W., Gan, S., Hillmann, I.C., Krafft, D., Marisa, R., Phipps, J., Saylor, J., Terrizzi, C., Allan, J., Guzman-Lara, S., Kalt, T.: Core Services in the Architecture of the National Science Digital Library (NSDL). In: Proceedings from the second ACM/IEEE-CS joint conference on Digital libraries (JCDL 2002), Portland, Oregon, USA, pp. 201–209 (2002)
Leighton, H., Srivastave, J.: First 20 Precision Among World Wide Web Search Services (Search Engines). Journal of American Society for Information Science 50(10), 870–881 (1999)
Ljosland, M.: Evaluation of Web Search Engines and the Search for Better Ranking Algorithms. In: SIGIR 1999 Workshop on Evaluation of Web Retrieval (1999)
NSDL Collection Development Policy Draft v.030715. Accessed 1-18-2005, http://content.comm.nsdl.org/doc_tracker/docs_download.php?id=452
Silverstein, C., Henzinger, M., Marais, J., Moricz, M.: Analysis of a Very Large Alta Vista Query Log. Technical Report 1998-014. COMPAQ Systems Research Center, Palo Alto, CA (1998)
Spink, A., Wolfram, D., Jansen, B., Seracevic, T.: Searching the Web: The Public and Their Queries. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 52(3), 226–234 (2001)
Standards of Learning for Virginia Public Schools, http://www.pen.k12.va.us/VDOE/Superintendent/Sols/home.shtml
Su, L.: A Comprehensive and Systematic Model of User Evaluation of Web Search Engines: I. Theory and Background. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 54(13), 1175–1192 (2003)
Su., L., Chen, H., Dong, X.: Evaluation of Web-based Search Engines from an End-user’s Perspective: A pilot study. In: Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science, Pittsburgh, PA, USA, pp. 348–361 (1998)
Sumner, T., Khoo, M., Recker, M., Marlino, M.: Understanding Educator Perceptions of “Quality” in Digital Libraries. In: Proceedings of the Third ACM+IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL 2003), Houston, Texas, USA, pp. 269–279 (2003)
Zia, L.: The NSF National Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technology Education Digital Library (NSDL) Program: A Progress Report. D-Lib Magazine 6(10) (2000)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2005 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
McCown, F., Bollen, J., Nelson, M.L. (2005). Evaluation of the NSDL and Google for Obtaining Pedagogical Resources. In: Rauber, A., Christodoulakis, S., Tjoa, A.M. (eds) Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries. ECDL 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3652. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11551362_31
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11551362_31
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-28767-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-31931-3
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)