Adaptive Information Visualization for Personalized Access to Educational Digital Libraries

Personalization is one of the emerging ways to increase the power of modern Digital Libraries. The Knowledge Sea II system presented in this paper explores social navigation support, an approach for providing personalized guidance within the open corpus of educational resources. Following the concepts of social navigation we have attempted to organize a personalized navigation support that is based on past learners’ interaction with the system. The study indicates that Knowledge Sea II became the students' primary tool for accessing the open corpus documents used in a programming course. The social navigation support implemented in this system was considered useful by students participating in the study of Knowledge Sea II. At the same time, some user comments indicated the need to provide more powerful navigational support, such as the ability to rank the usefulness of a page

Digital Preservation and Access of Natural Resources Documents

Digitization and preservation of natural resource documents were reviewed and the current status of digitization presented for a North American university. It is important to present the status of the digitation process for natural resources and to advocate for increased collections of digital material for ease of reference and exchange of information. Digital collections need to include both published documents and ancillary material for research projects and data for future use and interpretation. The methods in this paper can be applied to other natural resource collections increasing their use and distribution. The process of decision making for documents and their preservation and inclusion in ScholarWorks is presented as a part of the Forest Sciences Commons as a subset of the Life Sciences Commons of the Digital Commons Open Network launched and maintained by bepress. Digitization has increased the roles and skillsets needed for librarians and from libraries. This creates new challenges and opportunities for the library as publisher and as an advocate for open access. Digital curation melds together digitization and knowledge management and enhances community engagement. Digitization of collections are reviewed and natural resource documentation presented for faculty publications, Research Projects and Centers, eBooks, Journals, Galleries and electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs). Recommendations are made to increase the digital curation of the collection by encouraging community participation and use. Digital archives are important to natural resource professionals as society-ready natural resource graduates need to deal effectively with complex ecological, economic and social issues of current natural resources management. Natural resource research for the future needs to ensure that professionals have a greater breath of knowledge as they interpret and apply new knowledge, understanding, and technology to complex, transdisciplinary social and biological issues and challenges

New wine in old bottles: current developments in digital delivery and dissemination

The purpose of this paper is to identify and assess current developments in scholarly publishing in Europe. Current models for disseminating content have limitations and Open Access models of publishing have been endorsed by the European Universities Association. The Harvard mandate for the deposit of materials in Open Access repositories is a bold new development, and the community is watching it with interest. It is possible that e-books may be the next large form of content to be made available to the user. Users certainly express interest in using this form of material. However, current library systems need to be developed in order to cope with this mass of new content. E-theses, available in Open Access from institutional repositories, are a form of content that is made much more visible than the paper equivalents. The DART-Europe portal, supported by LIBER (Association of European Research Libraries) currently provides access to 100,000 research theses in 150 European Universities. At an institutional and academic level, however, much remains to be done to embed Open Access into the landscape: the current situation is described in a new report for UCL (University College London), produced by RAND Europe

Evolutionary Subject Tagging in the Humanities; Supporting Discovery and Examination in Digital Cultural Landscapes

In this paper, the authors attempt to identify problematic issues for subject tagging in the humanities, particularly those associated with information objects in digital formats. In the third major section, the authors identify a number of assumptions that lie behind the current practice of subject classification that we think should be challenged. We move then to propose features of classification systems that could increase their effectiveness. These emerged as recurrent themes in many of the conversations with scholars, consultants, and colleagues. Finally, we suggest next steps that we believe will help scholars and librarians develop better subject classification systems to support research in the humanities.NEH Office of Digital Humanities: Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant (HD-51166-10

Visual Information Retrieval in Digital Libraries

The emergence of information highways and multimedia computing has resulted in redefining the concept of libraries. It is widely believed that in the next few years, a significant portion of information in libraries will be in the form of multimedia electronic documents. Many approaches are being proposed for storing, retrieving, assimilating, harvesting, and prospecting information from these multimedia documents. Digital libraries are expected to allow users to access information independent of the locations and types of data sources and will provide a unified picture of information. In this paper, we discuss requirements of these emerging information systems and present query methods and data models for these systems. Finally, we briefly present a few examples of approaches that provide a preview of how things will be done in the digital libraries in the near future.published or submitted for publicatio

How can heat maps of indexing vocabularies be utilized for information seeking purposes?

The ability to browse an information space in a structured way by exploiting similarities and dissimilarities between information objects is crucial for knowledge discovery. Knowledge maps use visualizations to gain insights into the structure of large-scale information spaces, but are still far away from being applicable for searching. The paper proposes a use case for enhancing search term recommendations by heat map visualizations of co-word relation-ships taken from indexing vocabulary. By contrasting areas of different "heat" the user is enabled to indicate mainstream areas of the field in question more easily.Comment: URL workshop proceedings: http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1311

A Taxonomy of Data Grids for Distributed Data Sharing, Management and Processing

Data Grids have been adopted as the platform for scientific communities that need to share, access, transport, process and manage large data collections distributed worldwide. They combine high-end computing technologies with high-performance networking and wide-area storage management techniques. In this paper, we discuss the key concepts behind Data Grids and compare them with other data sharing and distribution paradigms such as content delivery networks, peer-to-peer networks and distributed databases. We then provide comprehensive taxonomies that cover various aspects of architecture, data transportation, data replication and resource allocation and scheduling. Finally, we map the proposed taxonomy to various Data Grid systems not only to validate the taxonomy but also to identify areas for future exploration. Through this taxonomy, we aim to categorise existing systems to better understand their goals and their methodology. This would help evaluate their applicability for solving similar problems. This taxonomy also provides a "gap analysis" of this area through which researchers can potentially identify new issues for investigation. Finally, we hope that the proposed taxonomy and mapping also helps to provide an easy way for new practitioners to understand this complex area of research.Comment: 46 pages, 16 figures, Technical Repor

Personal Touches, Public Legacies: An Ethnography of LGBT Libraries and Archives

Personal touches, Public legacies: An ethnography of LGBT libraries and archives examines lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) information organizations in Vancouver, Canada and surrounding areas. In order to develop a deeper understanding of the diversity in, changes to and challenges for LGBT information organizations, a multi-sited ethnography was conducted between June and September 2014. Organizations featured in the study include: two autonomous LGBT information organizations (the BC Lesbian and Gay Archives and Out on the Shelves Library), two LGBT information organizations founded within universities (the Archives of Lesbian Oral Testimony at Simon Fraser University, the Transgender Archives at the University of Victoria), an LGBT-focused collection within Vancouvers public municipal cultural milieu (the Ken Brock collection at the City of Vancouver Archives and the Museum of Vancouver) and, a temporary, autonomous home library with a queer mandate (the STAG Library). This study puts feminist, LGBT and queer studies in dialogue with archival studies and library and information studies (LIS). The chapters are organized by overarching themes associated with information organizations and address specific theoretical discussions that accompany those themes: location (Chapter 2), collection development (Chapter 3), organization and dissemination (Chapter 4) and mandate(Chapter 5). The findings not only explore how LGBT information collections and organizations interrogate and reimagine the definitional boundaries of what constitutes an information collection and information organizations more broadly but also examine how concepts of gender, sexuality and queerness are understood in the realm of the information organizations under study. The divide between normative and non-normative information collection and organizational practice is not simple or stable, but, like the concept of queer, is ever shifting. The findings demonstrate that queer information organizing persists in LGBT information organizational contexts, but not in ways necessarily anticipated by existing literature on the topic. This study also highlights how the relationship between the LGBT communities and the public is in great flux as some LGBT communities become increasingly considered a part of the mainstream public. It is precisely this oscillation and tension between concepts of the personal and the public that define LGBT information organizing activities in this current moment