"Stuff goes into the computer and doesn't come out": a cross-tool study of personal information management

This paper reports a study of Personal Information Management (PIM), which advances research in two ways: (1) rather than focusing on one tool, we collected cross-tool data relating to file, email and web bookmark usage for each participant, and (2) we collected longitudinal data for a subset of the participants. We found that individuals employ a rich variety of strategies both within and across PIM tools, and we present new strategy classifications that reflect this behaviour. We discuss synergies and differences between tools that may be useful in guiding the design of tool integration. Our longitudinal data provides insight into how PIM behaviour evolves over time, and suggests how the supporting nature of PIM discourages reflection by users on their strategies. We discuss how the promotion of some reflection by tools and organizations may benefit users

Systematising Learning and Research Information

This paper considers the ways in which information of relevance to the learning and research communities is organised and used. It contends that there is considerable overlap between the different types of online resources and information currently available within education. It describes some of the structured environments and data stores that have emerged in recent years, along with standards which are attempting to define the properties of discrete learning objects, through the specification of Learning Object Metadata (LOM). The paper contends that current developments of structured learning environments such as Managed and Virtual Learning Environments (MLEs and VLEs) are occurring on the whole in parallel to resource data stores, such as information gateways and portals. This discrepancy has arisen in part because these developments have occurred independently of one another and in part because there has to date been no rigorous definition of the underlying theoretical models. Furthermore, it argues that these predefined structured environments are unlikely to be sufficient to meet the information needs of users in different contexts. The paper goes on to describe an information toolkit, which provides a way of systematising information handling in learning and research, which helps users articulate information plans within specific contexts. The paper concludes with a description of two case studies which illustrate how this toolkit can be used

A grid-based infrastructure for distributed retrieval

In large-scale distributed retrieval, challenges of latency, heterogeneity, and dynamicity emphasise the importance of infrastructural support in reducing the development costs of state-of-the-art solutions. We present a service-based infrastructure for distributed retrieval which blends middleware facilities and a design framework to ‘lift’ the resource sharing approach and the computational services of a European Grid platform into the domain of e-Science applications. In this paper, we give an overview of the DILIGENT Search Framework and illustrate its exploitation in the field of Earth Science

Deriving query suggestions for site search

Modern search engines have been moving away from simplistic interfaces that aimed at satisfying a user's need with a single-shot query. Interactive features are now integral parts of web search engines. However, generating good query modification suggestions remains a challenging issue. Query log analysis is one of the major strands of work in this direction. Although much research has been performed on query logs collected on the web as a whole, query log analysis to enhance search on smaller and more focused collections has attracted less attention, despite its increasing practical importance. In this article, we report on a systematic study of different query modification methods applied to a substantial query log collected on a local website that already uses an interactive search engine. We conducted experiments in which we asked users to assess the relevance of potential query modification suggestions that have been constructed using a range of log analysis methods and different baseline approaches. The experimental results demonstrate the usefulness of log analysis to extract query modification suggestions. Furthermore, our experiments demonstrate that a more fine-grained approach than grouping search requests into sessions allows for extraction of better refinement terms from query log files. © 2013 ASIS&T

USER PERCEPTION OF THE USE OF INTEGRATED LIBRARY SOFTWARES FOR SERVICE DELIVERY IN FEDERAL UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES IN THE NIGER DELTA, NIGERIA

Like many countries, Nigeria’s university library services are affected by the integrated software used for service delivery. This study (conducted in 2021) examined the priorities and barriers for users perception of the use of integrated library software for service delivery in federal university libraries in the Niger Delta, Nigeria and the type of integrated software used by the Federal university libraries in Niger Delta, Nigeria, including what type of services rendered with the use of integrated library software to users, ease of use of integrated library software and benefit derived from the use and factors affecting the use were evaluated. A structured questionnaire was the instrument for data collection and was distributed to the respondents face to face at their various offices across all the university libraries in the Niger Delta, Nigeria. The populace of the study was sampled using the total enumeration sampling technique because of the smaller and manageable size of the population. There are 489 responses (83% response rate) from six federal universities in the Niger Delta. The findings reveal that the University of Uyo, Akwa Ibom has the highest rate of respondents -90 (18.40%) followed by Federal University Otuoke, Bayelsa State -88 (17.99%). It could deduce that the Federal Universities in Niger Delta are dominated by male in Nigeria, from 24-26 years are doiminated in the university system, students in 500 and 600 levels are majority of the respondents that participated in this exercise, Koha integrated software (402) had the highest response rate, majority of the respondents agreed that they used ILS to render the following services ; user registration, changing and dischanging of library materials, referral service,e-reference service,internet service,electronic library service, OPAC and book reservation, majority of the respondents agreed that ILS is easier for user interface, accessing personal account is easy and straightforward,users can independently interact well with ILS and its OPAC user interface, users can easily search on their own, users can query the ILS using the keyboard, users can recover lost of information during query, users can retrieve information from the ILS without the help of a librarian and users can retrieve documents from ILS when needed, majority of the respondents agreed that ILS allow users to access to the books and other materials in the library, allows for round the clock library services, helps to know a documents reservation status, bring the library closer to the users, help to know easily the total number of books held in a library, know a document return date or date of availability in the library, allows for easy borrowing of library materials, auto-renewal of borrowed book is easy and fast, helps to know the position of a particular title held by the library, helps to know the position of a particular materials on the shelf and Helps to ascertain if a book is present in the library or not and the majority of the respondents testify that bottle necks on the use of ILS are as follows, lack of awareness, poor Internet connectivity /low bandwidth, lack of information searching skills, lack of proper guidance from librarians, lack of funds to support automation project by library management, shortage of computer systems designated for library OPAC, lack of required ICT skills, complex OPAC interface design, erractic electricity power supply/high cost of running electricity generating sets and lack of user training on how to use the library software. The respondents were concerned about the service delivery in the library. It is expected that librarians should ensure that users get their information needs on time and in the right format and that the best integrated library software should be installed and used in library services. Keywords: Integrated library software, users\u27 perception, service delivery, Federal University Libraries, Niger Delta, Nigeria. Introduction Almost all libraries in this 21st Century have a collection of both print as well as electronic resources

On the Use of XML in Medical Imaging Web-Based Applications

The rapid growth of digital technology in medical fields over recent years has increased the need for applications able to manage patient medical records, imaging data, and chart information. Web-based applications are implemented with the purpose to link digital databases, storage and transmission protocols, management of large volumes of data and security concepts, allowing the possibility to read, analyze, and even diagnose remotely from the medical center where the information was acquired. The objective of this paper is to analyze the use of the Extensible Markup Language (XML) language in web-based applications that aid in diagnosis or treatment of patients, considering how this protocol allows indexing and exchanging the huge amount of information associated with each medical case. The purpose of this paper is to point out the main advantages and drawbacks of the XML technology in order to provide key ideas for future web-based applicationsPeer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

An Infrastructure for acquiring high quality semantic metadata

Because metadata that underlies semantic web applications is gathered from distributed and heterogeneous data sources, it is important to ensure its quality (i.e., reduce duplicates, spelling errors, ambiguities). However, current infrastructures that acquire and integrate semantic data have only marginally addressed the issue of metadata quality. In this paper we present our metadata acquisition infrastructure, ASDI, which pays special attention to ensuring that high quality metadata is derived. Central to the architecture of ASDI is a erification engine that relies on several semantic web tools to check the quality of the derived data. We tested our prototype in the context of building a semantic web portal for our lab, KMi. An experimental evaluation omparing the automatically extracted data against manual annotations indicates that the verification engine enhances the quality of the extracted semantic metadata

BlogForever D2.6: Data Extraction Methodology

This report outlines an inquiry into the area of web data extraction, conducted within the context of blog preservation. The report reviews theoretical advances and practical developments for implementing data extraction. The inquiry is extended through an experiment that demonstrates the effectiveness and feasibility of implementing some of the suggested approaches. More specifically, the report discusses an approach based on unsupervised machine learning that employs the RSS feeds and HTML representations of blogs. It outlines the possibilities of extracting semantics available in blogs and demonstrates the benefits of exploiting available standards such as microformats and microdata. The report proceeds to propose a methodology for extracting and processing blog data to further inform the design and development of the BlogForever platform