The University of Pennsylvania's Online Computing Magazine
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February 1994 - Volume 10:4 [Printout | Contents | Search ]
By Francesca Seidita Any way you look at Penn's faculty, you'll find that they are a hugely talented and diverse group of scholars. And now you can, almost effortlessly, look at them, individually or collectively, from almost any point of view. How? By taking a quick look at Penn's latest Gopher service, PennExpertise. It offers online access to faculty profiles, with full-text search capability, and it is available to any member of the Penn community. PennExpertise is the standardized, comprehensive database of faculty research interests and expertise at Penn. The information in PennExpertise was collected by Penn's Office of Research Administration in cooperation with Best-North America, and is a subset of the larger database maintained by Best that includes the listing of faculty expertise at leading North American research universities. So far, over 150 universities have agreed to participate in Best-North America. A similar database, covering major research universities in Europe, is also available from Best.
What's available?Profiles collected from over 1,000 Penn standing faculty and research faculty members are currently available. Since the full text of all profiles in the database is searchable, you do not need to learn a complicated query structure or understand how the data is structured in order to perform useful searches.The easiest way to become familiar with PennExpertise is to try a few simple queries. For instance, try searching on the last name of one of the standing faculty or research faculty members. After checking a few names, you'll have a better idea of the type of information available. In addition to data such as name, School, and department, you'll also find faculty qualifications, professional memberships, previous positions, areas of research and expertise, and lists of publications. And, at the bottom of each profile, you will find a list of keywords that can be used to locate faculty with similar interests. Please note that the primary purpose of PennExpertise and Best- North America is to elicit further research inquiry, not to be exhaustively descriptive of research projects themselves. Also note that faculty members have exercised judgment when describing sensitive or proprietary work. Overall, the faculty profiles collected in PennExpertise represent almost 50 percent of the standing faculty and research faculty at Penn, but response rates varied a great deal across Schools. This coverage is expected to improve, and the database will be updated as profiles are collected for the remaining members of the standing faculty and research faculty.
How to access PennExpertisePennExpertise is easy to reach. From the PennNet annex: prompt, first enter telnet gopher.upenn.edu and then press[Screen capture #1]
How to search PennExpertiseIf you've followed the instructions above, you are now ready to search the PennExpertise database. Select the topic "Search PennExpertise " from the PennExpertise menu. Your screen will look similar to the one below.[Screen capture #2]
You can now enter any word or words contained in any of the faculty
profiles. Try a last name. Type smith and press
If you entered "smith" on the search entry form, you'll also note
that not all of the faculty on the resulting list are named Smith.
That's because you are searching the database for any occurrence of
Smith anywhere in the database. Thus, your search results would also
include anyone who attended Smith College, anyone who collaborated with
a colleague named Smith in a publication, or anyone with an office on
Smith Walk.
You can narrow down your search by using multiple words. For
instance, use a first and last name when searching for a specific member
of the faculty. However, when you search using multiple words, you must
be aware of a few search rules that PennExpertise follows.
PennExpertise recognizes the Boolean operators AND, OR, and NOT when you
combine search words. By default, OR is implied.
Thus, a search on the name "Jonah Smith" is equivalent to "Jonah OR
Smith" and would find all faculty profiles containing the word "Jonah"
or the word "Smith" or both. In this particular instance, this would
not be an efficient search. If Jonah Smith were really a Penn faculty
member, the most efficient search would be entered as "Jonah AND Smith."
For more detailed information about searching Gopher servers such
as PennExpertise, take a look at the document "How to compose veronica
queries (NEW June 24) READ ME!!" You can locate this document under the
topic "Veronica Searches of Gopherspace/," which is listed on the main
menu of the central Penn Gopher.
These documents address a variety of issues, such as: who to
contact if you wish to search the entire Best-North America or the Best-
Europe Database; who to contact to gain access to PennExpertise if you
are not a member of the University of Pennsylvania community; and
instructions for Penn's faculty on procedures to add or update their
profiles in PennExpertise.
[Screen capture #3]
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