A. Before I address your concerns directly, let me provide you with a bit about my motivation for providing you with links to resources, rather than giving you copies of papers directly. First there is the issue of copyright. By providing you with links to resources as I have, I can avoid issues such as needing to get permission from the copyright holder if I am going to use a paper for more than one semester. Second there is a pedagogical benefit to doing it this way. Resources such as the IEEE Electronic Library (IEL) and CiteSeer are ones with which all students in this class (as well as all students in the schools of CS and ECE, most of the students in AME, etc.) should become familiar. Pushing you to use them in homeworks will, I hope, cause all of you take a look at them.

On to your concerns.

You are right to be concerned about such security warnings. There are security holes all over the net in general and I have seen holes in the security of the OU library's web services in particular. My general recommendation is not to enter an important password unless you need to. Fortunately, in this case you don't need to. If you access the IEL from campus using the university's network resources you will be authorized based on your IP address and no password will be needed. (Note that the library web pages do ask for your password if you want to do things like renew your books. This is relatively secure to do from campus but relatively insecure to do from off campus. Personally, I'd recommend using the phone for this activity instead.)

Now that security is addressed, I'll give you some guidelines for how to get what you are looking for. However, I'm not going to give you a simple "click by click" roadmap to getting to this particular paper, since that defeats the pedagogical goal of having to learn about these resources. (If you give a student a paper, he or she can learn for an hour. If you teach a student to find papers, he or she can learn for a lifetime.)

First, there is the issue of determining which paper to locate. You have it easy in this regard, because you have been told which paper to locate, with a nearly complete citation. (Note: Students often provide very poor partial citations with their assignments. This is bad practice because the redundancy inherent in complete citations gives us multiple paths to the same paper, as you'll see below. If you have multiple paths, you should have no problem finding a paper. With incomplete citations, however, the chance of failure goes up dramatically.)

Second, there is the issue of actually accessing the paper. In this case, the two main steps you need to take are (1) getting to the IEL and (2) finding the paper within the IEL. Actually, you had it pretty easy for step (1) as well, since the instructions for getting there were almost "click by click." Nonetheless, since you had problems here, I'll take a minute to introduce you to some of the library's primary resources.

The OU library home page is at <http://www-lib.ou.edu/> (alternately <http://libraries.ou.edu/>). The two primary resources linked to from their home page are the catalog and the Library Online Resource Access (LORA). In fact, because there are such important library resources, there are two links to each of these resources (one along the left side of the page and one along the top) on all the library pages until you jump off into one resource or another. So, finding either the catalog or LORA should be easy. As it turns out, we can get to the paper in question by using either of these resources. Since I suggested getting to IEL through LORA, I'll introduce you to LORA first.

LORA has three main search methods that you can use to find resources. These are Search by Subject, Search by Resource Title, and Search by Alphabetical Listing. As with the catalog and LORA, it doesn't matter which of these you choose - you can get to the IEL through any of them. (It isn't quite all roads leading to Rome but, really, I think NOT finding the IEL is less likely than finding it, if you are really looking.)

To get there through Search by Subject we need to select a subject. There isn't a Computer Science subject listed, so we can't select that. However, CS is in the College of Engineering and IEEE stands for Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (an organization with which I hope every CS student in this school is acquainted but, if you're not, a quick search in Google will help you), so let's select Engineering. This pulls up something like the following results:

 12  Databases
193  E-Journals
  1  Local Resources
  0  Search Engines
 27  Internet Links
  9  Government Documents
 19  E-Books

Now, you might be tempted to look under E-Journals. However, besides what the assignment suggested you do to find this paper, there is the fact that you are looking for a paper in a conference proceedings, not a journal. Still, let's say you look under E-Journals.

You won't find either the IEL or the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation listed under E-Journals. What you will find, however, are over two and a half dozen other IEEE publications among the nearly two hundred publications listed there. (The closest to what you are looking for is the IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine which is NOT the same as the Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.) Click on one of the IEEE publication links. Any one of them. You will find yourself in the IEL! You may not realize that you are in the IEL, as the site identifies itself as IEEE Xplore; however, for our purposes, you are in it nonetheless. (Perhaps we could get technical and say that IEEE Xplore is really a front end to the IEL, which is the repository of the papers themselves, but let's not.)

Okay, let's say instead that you followed the directions on the assignment and looked under Databases, instead of E-Journals. There it is. Click on the link and you're in again! (Admittedly, without the directions, you might not immediately think to look under databases for an electronic library, but that is how the library is organized. The ACM Digital Library also turns up under databases, for example.)

I suppose someone might also think Internet Links was the place to look. It isn't there, so not all paths get you there. Still, two out of three possibilities is pretty good. (I would hope no one would be confused enough to try to find the IEL under Local Resources, Government Documents, or E-Books, since it clearly is none of those.)

To get there through Search by Resource Title, we need to enter a title for our resource. Let's copy and paste "IEEE Electronic Library (IEL)" directly from the homework assignment. Results:

  1  Databases
  0  E-Journals
  0  Local Resources
  0  Search Engines
  0  Internet Links
  0  Government Documents
  0  E-Books

Look under that one result and there it is!

Okay, maybe you didn't think to copy and paste. What if you just typed in "IEEE Electronic Library"? Same results! "IEEE Library"? Same thing!

Other variations, such as just "Electronic Library" or "IEEE" or "IEL" also turn up the IEL among the results but there is more chaff along with the wheat, just as you would expect when you provide less complete information.

To get there through Search by Alphabetical Listing, you could select Databases, E-Journals, or Other Resources. As with the previous experiences, you can actually get there through all of these paths. As I have pointed out, Databases was the path I expected you to follow (either asking for All Titles or selecting I for IEEE Electronic Library or IEL, then searching within the results returned) but if you looked under E-Journals you'd find all those IEEE publications again and could get to the IEL by selecting any one of them. Other Resources would present you with more options but, again, I hope you'd be able to quickly rule out things like Search Engines and Government Documents.

Okay, but what if you completely ignored the directions for finding the IEL and jumped into the catalog instead of LORA? Then you'd be presented with an entry blank for the catalog's search function.

You have a nearly complete citation to the paper you want, what part do you enter? I hope no one is silly enough to try to find a publication by searching solely on its month, year, place, or page numbers. So what about the author's name or the paper's title? NO! Why not? Because catalogs don't contain information about every title or author of a collected work. Even if you've never used a catalog in a University library (and I hope you have!), you should know from other libraries (public, high school, etc.) that the titles and authors of books are there but for collected works of many authors (such as magazines, newspapers, encyclopedias, etc.), only the title of the entire work and sometimes its editor are included. What is left? The title of the conference. Let's enter that.

Suppose you copy and paste the entire conference title. Depending on whether you click on Search Everything or just Title you'll get a different number of results but none of them looks quite right. In particular, the date and location look wrong for most of them. What do you do? You could broaden your search or just choose one of them anyway. Unfortunately, broadening your search won't get you any better results, just more of them. However, as it turns out, like so many things we have seen here, all it takes is a little persistence.

Let's try choosing one of the results given, even though it is not quite right. This entry:

    #1 TJ 210.3 .I14 2000 
    Proceedings : 2000 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation
    April 24-28, 2000, San Francisco Hilton Hotel, San Francisco, California
    IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation 
    (2000 : San Francisco, Calif.)

has the closest year. If we select VIEW for it we get a complete record for it with the following very interesting field:

    Electronic access:     http://connect.ou.edu/access.asp?id=1709

Click on the link and we're in the IEL again!

There are other ways to get there as well but I think you get the idea: If the first thing you try doesn't work, try something else.

Okay, so you have found the IEL through one of the many paths that get you there. Now what? You still have step 2, finding the paper within the IEL, to go.

Regardless of how you got to the IEL, you'll see several options across the top and down the left side of the page. You should be able to quickly rule out things like "SHOP" and "Member Services." Some links that may mislead you are "SEARCH IEEE," "Publications/Services," and "Conferences." These all look reasonable but, as it turns out, all links above the IEEE Xplore banner take you to IEEE sites outside the IEL. Pass them by.

Given that, some of the more promising links below the IEEE Xplore banner are Conference Proceedings (since that is what you are looking for) and Search (with sub-categories By Author, Basic, and Advanced). As with the OU library, many paths will work to get you there.

Let's say you try Conference Proceedings. You are prompted to "Enter a keyword to quickly locate conference titles containing that keyword." You should be able to rule out words from the title such as "IEEE," "International," "Conference," "on," and "and." That leaves "Robotics" and "Automation." Either one alone will get you a list of conferences with the one we're looking for among them. So will the key phrase "Robotics and Automation." The only difference in these search results is how many pages you have to go forward through the results before you find the right one.

Once you have selected the link for ICRA'99 (as it is informally known), you are presented with a set of four links corresponding to the four volumes in which the proceedings were published and another search box.

Unfortunately, the citation I gave you didn't include the volume. However, it did include the pages (2006-2013). Hmmn. Not too many books have 2000, or even 1000, pages to them. Let's try volume four. Ooops! We see that volume four starts with page 2495. Let's back up to volume three. A little searching in that volume will find the paper for us.

Isn't there a better way? Yes! We had a search box option that we passed by previously. The box says:

    To quickly search the abstract and citation records of this publication:
    1) Enter a keyword, phrase, or Boolean expression.
        Example: acoustic imaging
        Example: Jones and 1998
    2) Click Search. 

What should we put in? The location? Year? Conference title? No, no, and no. Those are common to all the papers in this publication. We need something more unique. How about the paper title? Well, that is more than a key word or phrase. Let's try just "Traversability Index." No luck! It must not be there! Let's give up and go home!

No, wait, we learned that persistence paid off. Let's try again.

Let's try "traversability index." There it is!

Wait, what just happened? Did the IEL just show that it was foolish enough to be confused by the capitalization. It did.

(Well, sort of. Some people argue that search functions should work as follows: If a user enters a term in just upper case or just lower case, do the search without regard to case; if a user enters a term in mixed upper and lower case, pay attention to case in the search. The reasoning is that it takes effort to change case within a term, so if the user enters a term in mixed case, he or she must care. However, if he or she enters just one or the other, he or she might not care. It isn't unreasonable to do things this way, although it ignores possibilities such as copying and pasting from someone else's style format. However, a site SHOULD warn you that it is doing this. Unfortunately, the IEL doesn't give any such warning.)

Okay, but what if you didn't think to try the search term in lower (or upper) case? Try the author's name: Seraji. There it is again!

Searching by author also works if you didn't try looking under Conference Proceedings to start out. Using the top level Search: By Author button and entering "Seraji" gives you a few Seraji's to choose from, one with the first initial "H" which matches with the citation that I gave you. Following this link gives you a few dozen papers, many on the traversability index concept, including the one for which we are searching.

Searching using both Search: Basic and Search: Advanced get similar results, with the same caveat about using "traversability index" rather than "Traversability Index" as we had looking user a particular publication. Note that we have fewer results to search through if we limit these searches to just IEEE conference proceedings.

Again, many ways to get there, if you persist a bit.