How effectively can computers be used skilled tasks of professional librarianship?

Libraries are expensive and research libraries are particularly expensive. Even in the United States, few people can afford good access to primary scientific, medical, legal and scholarly information. Members of major universities have excellent library services. So do people who work in teaching hospitals, or for drug companies or rich law firms. Others have access to information only through the tedious, inefficient system of interlibrary lending. In less affluent countries the situation is worse; even the best universities cannot afford good libraries. Must access to scientific and professional information always be expensive, or is it possible that digital libraries might change this sad situation? The costs of a conventional research library fall into three main categories: facilities (which include buildings), library materials and staff. In digital libraries, the facilities costs are small, since digital libraries avoid the need for expensive buildings. Digital libraries require computers and networks, but these are relatively inexpensive, and the costs to users are shared with other services, such as electronic mail and word processing..

DIDET: Digital libraries for distributed, innovative design education and teamwork. Final project report

The central goal of the DIDET Project was to enhance student learning opportunities by enabling them to partake in global, team based design engineering projects, in which they directly experience different cultural contexts and access a variety of digital information sources via a range of appropriate technology. To achieve this overall project goal, the project delivered on the following objectives: 1. Teach engineering information retrieval, manipulation, and archiving skills to students studying on engineering degree programs. 2. Measure the use of those skills in design projects in all years of an undergraduate degree program. 3. Measure the learning performance in engineering design courses affected by the provision of access to information that would have been otherwise difficult to access. 4. Measure student learning performance in different cultural contexts that influence the use of alternative sources of information and varying forms of Information and Communications Technology. 5. Develop and provide workshops for staff development. 6. Use the measurement results to annually redesign course content and the digital libraries technology. The overall DIDET Project approach was to develop, implement, use and evaluate a testbed to improve the teaching and learning of students partaking in global team based design projects. The use of digital libraries and virtual design studios was used to fundamentally change the way design engineering is taught at the collaborating institutions. This was done by implementing a digital library at the partner institutions to improve learning in the field of Design Engineering and by developing a Global Team Design Project run as part of assessed classes at Strathclyde, Stanford and Olin. Evaluation was carried out on an ongoing basis and fed back into project development, both on the class teaching model and the LauLima system developed at Strathclyde to support teaching and learning. Major findings include the requirement to overcome technological, pedagogical and cultural issues for successful elearning implementations. A need for strong leadership has been identified, particularly to exploit the benefits of cross-discipline team working. One major project output still being developed is a DIDET Project Framework for Distributed Innovative Design, Education and Teamwork to encapsulate all project findings and outputs. The project achieved its goal of embedding major change to the teaching of Design Engineering and Strathclyde's new Global Design class has been both successful and popular with students

Personalisation and recommender systems in digital libraries

Widespread use of the Internet has resulted in digital libraries that are increasingly used by diverse communities of users for diverse purposes and in which sharing and collaboration have become important social elements. As such libraries become commonplace, as their contents and services become more varied, and as their patrons become more experienced with computer technology, users will expect more sophisticated services from these libraries. A simple search function, normally an integral part of any digital library, increasingly leads to user frustration as user needs become more complex and as the volume of managed information increases. Proactive digital libraries, where the library evolves from being passive and untailored, are seen as offering great potential for addressing and overcoming these issues and include techniques such as personalisation and recommender systems. In this paper, following on from the DELOS/NSF Working Group on Personalisation and Recommender Systems for Digital Libraries, which met and reported during 2003, we present some background material on the scope of personalisation and recommender systems in digital libraries. We then outline the working group’s vision for the evolution of digital libraries and the role that personalisation and recommender systems will play, and we present a series of research challenges and specific recommendations and research priorities for the field

A Proposal for Action Plan for Digitization of University Libraries

Electronic publishing and information accessing have become easy and convenient mainly because of Internet and the World Wide Web technologies. Most digital libraries were developed in the past by taking up projects based on specific disciplines and then developed into full-fledged digital libraries. The inter-networking communication links, low cost storage solutions, powerful desktops, workstations, servers and multimedia hardware and software technologies are now available for initiating the Digital Library projects in India. Digital Library is also known as Electronic Library or Virtual Library with very little difference

User-interface issues for browsing digital video

In this paper we examine a suite of systems for content-based indexing and browsing of digital video and we identify a superset of features and functions which are provided by these systems. From our classification of these we have identified that common to all is the fact of being predominantly technology-based, with little attention paid to actual user requirements. As part of our work we are developing an application for content-based browsing of digital video which will incorporate the most desirable but achievable of the functions of other systems. This will be achieved via a series of continuously refined demonstrator systems from Spring 1999 onwards which will be subjected to analysis of performance in terms of user

Inexpensive fusion methods for enhancing feature detection

Recent successful approaches to high-level feature detection in image and video data have treated the problem as a pattern classification task. These typically leverage the techniques learned from statistical machine learning, coupled with ensemble architectures that create multiple feature detection models. Once created, co-occurrence between learned features can be captured to further boost performance. At multiple stages throughout these frameworks, various pieces of evidence can be fused together in order to boost performance. These approaches whilst very successful are computationally expensive, and depending on the task, require the use of significant computational resources. In this paper we propose two fusion methods that aim to combine the output of an initial basic statistical machine learning approach with a lower-quality information source, in order to gain diversity in the classified results whilst requiring only modest computing resources. Our approaches, validated experimentally on TRECVid data, are designed to be complementary to existing frameworks and can be regarded as possible replacements for the more computationally expensive combination strategies used elsewhere

The VisOR System: Testing the Utility of User Interface Components for Feature-based Searching in Video Retrieval Software

This study uses a test video retrieval system, VisOR, to assess the value of user interface components that provide feature-based searching on automatically-extracted visual and auditory features. In particular, the study attempts to find a) whether sliders that allow users to adjust the relative weights of individual features improve performance on search tasks, b) which features prove the most useful in conducting normal search tasks, c) whether feature-based searching is difficult for the typical used, and d) whether color and brightness-based searching enables users to find exact-match shots especially quickly. Seventeen subjects completed 14 search tasks each. For a), it was discovered that the weight sliders had no significant effect on performance. For b), it was found the keywords, Indoors/Outdoors, and Cityscape/Landscape proved most useful. For c), user questionnaires indicated no special difficulty or frustration. For d), it was found that users who regularly use color and brightness components for searching consistently found exact-match shots more quickly than others