Information Discovery and Retrieval

This is a 19 minute interview with Peter Brantley, new Executive Director of the Digital Library Federation.

The collective expertise of digital libraries in making available the diverse literatures of science and artistic expression, in concert with the increasing sophistication of commercial partners and the development of distributed, interactive forms of publishing, require libraries to chart the engineering of new architectures for teaching, learning, and research. Digital Libraries must work to forge the new collaborations required to enable and build these services. Peter Brantley talk about the digital library landscape and the challenges that lie ahead.

This interview is provided courtesy of CNI and was recorded at their 2007 Spring Task Force Meeting.  The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) is an organization dedicated to supporting the transformative pr

Chmoogle is a new search engine for chemistry-related information. It lets you run searches by entering text or, more interestingly, by drawing a picture of the particular molecule (or molecular structure) that you want to search for. It uses a popup Java applet (JME Molecular Editor, developed by Peter Ertl) that provides a "drawing" interface. Chmoogle then "translates" the image you create into a search query.

I've written about visual search engines before, such as Grokker, but these are visual in the way they present results -- not in terms of actual search techniques. It's possible to view this kind of popular teaching and learning application as the soft, approachable edge of whizz-bang developments in pervasive computing and ambient technology.

CARET used Jmol, an open-source molecular editor (also Java-based), to develop a teaching tool for students of molecular biology.