The Wiltshire Wills Feasibility Study

The Wiltshire and Swindon Record Office has nearly ninety thousand wills in its care. These records are neither adequately catalogued nor secured against loss by facsimile microfilm copies. With support from the Heritage Lottery Fund the Record Office has begun to produce suitable finding aids for the material. Beginning with this feasibility study the Record Office is developing a strategy to ensure the that facsimiles to protect the collection against risk of loss or damage and to improve public access are created.<p></p> This feasibility study explores the different methodologies that can be used to assist the preservation and conservation of the collection and improve public access to it. The study aims to produce a strategy that will enable the Record Office to create digital facsimiles of the Wills in its care for access purposes and to also create preservation quality microfilms. The strategy aims to seek the most cost effective and time efficient approach to the problem and identifies ways to optimise the processes by drawing on the experience of other similar projects. This report provides a set of guidelines and recommendations to ensure the best use of the resources available for to provide the most robust preservation strategy and to ensure that future access to the Wills as an information resource can be flexible, both local and remote, and sustainable

Recommendation, collaboration and social search

This chapter considers the social component of interactive information retrieval: what is the role of other people in searching and browsing? For simplicity we begin by considering situations without computers. After all, you can interactively retrieve information without a computer; you just have to interact with someone or something else. Such an analysis can then help us think about the new forms of collaborative interactions that extend our conceptions of information search, made possible by the growth of networked ubiquitous computing technology. Information searching and browsing have often been conceptualized as a solitary activity, however they always have a social component. We may talk about 'the' searcher or 'the' user of a database or information resource. Our focus may be on individual uses and our research may look at individual users. Our experiments may be designed to observe the behaviors of individual subjects. Our models and theories derived from our empirical analyses may focus substantially or exclusively on an individual's evolving goals, thoughts, beliefs, emotions and actions. Nevertheless there are always social aspects of information seeking and use present, both implicitly and explicitly. We start by summarizing some of the history of information access with an emphasis on social and collaborative interactions. Then we look at the nature of recommendations, social search and interfaces to support collaboration between information seekers. Following this we consider how the design of interactive information systems is influenced by their social elements

INSPIRAL: investigating portals for information resources and learning. Final project report

INSPIRAL's aims were to identify and analyse, from the perspective of the UK HE learner, the nontechnical, institutional and end-user issues with regard to linking VLEs and digital libraries, and to make recommendations for JISC strategic planning and investment. INSPIRAL's objectives -To identify key stakeholders with regard to the linkage of VLEs, MLEs and digital libraries -To identify key stakeholder forum points and dissemination routes -To identify the relevant issues, according to the stakeholders and to previous research, pertaining to the interaction (both possible and potential) between VLEs/MLEs and digital libraries -To critically analyse identified issues, based on stakeholder experience and practice; output of previous and current projects; and prior and current research -To report back to JISC and to the stakeholder communities, with results situated firmly within the context of JISC's strategic aims and objectives

The evolving scholarly record

This report presents a framework to help organize and drive discussions about the evolving scholarly record. The framework provides a high-level view of the categories of material the scholarly record potentially encompasses, as well as the key stakeholder roles associated with the creation, management, and use of the scholarly record. Key highlights: A confluence of trends is accelerating changes to the scholarly record\u27s content and stakeholder roles. Scholarly outcomes are contextualized by materials generated in the process and aftermath of scholarly inquiry. The research process generates materials covering methods employed, evidence used, and formative discussion. The research aftermath generates materials covering discussion, revision, and reuse of scholarly outcomes. The scholarly record is evolving to have greater emphasis on collecting and curating context of scholarly inquiry. The scholarly record’s stakeholder ecosystem encompasses four key roles: create, fix, collect, and use. The stakeholder ecosystem supports thinking about how roles are reconfigured as the scholarly record evolves. The ways and means of scholarly inquiry are experiencing fundamental change, with consequences for scholarly communication and ultimately, the scholarly record. The boundaries of the scholarly record are both expanding and blurring, driven by changes in research practices, as well as changing perceptions of the long-term value of certain forms of scholarly materials. Understanding the nature, scope, and evolutionary trends of the scholarly record is an important concern in many quarters—for libraries, for publishers, for funders, and of course for scholars themselves. Many issues are intrinsic to the scholarly record, such as preservation, citation, replicability, provenance, and data curation. The conceptualization of the scholarly record and its stakeholder ecosystem provided in the report can serve as a common point of reference in discussions within and across domains, and help cultivate the shared understanding and collaborative relationships needed to identify, collect, and make accessible the wide range of materials the scholarly record is evolving to include

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