The Digital Puglia Project: An Active Digital Library of Remote Sensing Data

The growing need of software infrastructure able to create, maintain and ease the evolution of scientific data, promotes the development of digital libraries in order to provide the user with fast and reliable access to data. In a world that is rapidly changing, the standard view of a digital library as a data repository specialized to a community of users and provided with some search tools is no longer tenable. To be effective, a digital library should be an active digital library, meaning that users can process available data not just to retrieve a particular piece of information, but to infer new knowledge about the data at hand. Digital Puglia is a new project, conceived to emphasize not only retrieval of data to the client's workstation, but also customized processing of the data. Such processing tasks may include data mining, filtering and knowledge discovery in huge databases, compute-intensive image processing (such as principal component analysis, supervised classification, or pattern matching) and on demand computing sessions. We describe the issues, the requirements and the underlying technologies of the Digital Puglia Project, whose final goal is to build a high performance distributed and active digital library of remote sensing data

Computer-based library or computer-based learning?

Traditionally, libraries have played the role of repository of published information resources and, more recently, gateway to online subscription databases. The library online catalog and digital library interface serve an intermediary function to help users locate information resources available through the library. With competition from Web search engines and Web portals of various kinds available for free, the library has to step up to play a more active role as guide and coach to help users make use of information resources for learning or to accomplish particular tasks. It is no longer sufficient for computer-based library systems to provide just search and access functions. They must provide the functionality and environment to support learning and become computer-based learning systems. This paper examines the kind of learning support that can be incorporated in library online catalogs and digital libraries, including 1) enhanced support for information browsing and synthesis through linking by shared meta-data, references and concepts; 2) visualization of related information; 3) adoption of Library 2.0 and social technologies; 4) adoption of Library 3.0 technologies including intelligent processing and text mining

From Digital Library to Open Datasets

This article discusses the burgeoning “collections as data” movement within the fields of digital libraries and digital humanities. Faculty at the University of Utah’s Marriott Library are developing a collections as data strategy by leveraging existing Digital Library and Digital Matters programs. By selecting various digital collections, small- and large-scale approaches to developing open datasets are explored. Five case studies chronicling this strategy are reviewed, along with testing the datasets using various digital humanities methods, such as text mining, topic modeling, and GIS (geographic information system)

Design and Evaluation of Techniques to Utilize Implicit Rating Data in Complex Information Systems.

Research in personalization, including recommender systems, focuses on applications such as in online shopping malls and simple information systems. These systems consider user profile and item information obtained from data explicitly entered by users - where it is possible to classify items involved and to make personalization based on a direct mapping from user or user group to item or item group. However, in complex, dynamic, and professional information systems, such as Digital Libraries, additional capabilities are needed to achieve personalization to support their distinctive features: large numbers of digital objects, dynamic updates, sparse rating data, biased rating data on specific items, and challenges in getting explicit rating data from users. In this report, we present techniques for collecting, storing, processing, and utilizing implicit rating data of Digital Libraries for analysis and decision support. We present our pilot study to find virtual user groups using implicit rating data. We demonstrate the effectiveness of implicit rating data for characterizing users and finding virtual user communities, through statistical hypothesis testing. Further, we describe a visual data mining tool named VUDM (Visual User model Data Mining tool) that utilizes implicit rating data. We provide the results of formative evaluation of VUDM and discuss the problems raised and plans for further studies

Legal Deposit Web Archives and the Digital Humanities: a Universe of Lost Opportunity?

Legal deposit libraries have archived the web for over a decade. Several nations, supported by legal deposit regu-lations, have introduced comprehensive national domain web crawling, an essential part of the national library re-mit to collect, preserve and make accessible a nation’s intellectual and cultural heritage (Brazier, 2016). Scholars have traditionally been the chief beneficiaries of legal de-posit collections: in the case of web archives, the poten-tial for research extends to contemporary materials, and to Digital Humanities text and data mining approaches. To date, however, little work has evaluated whether legal deposit regulations support computational approaches to research using national web archive data (Brügger, 2012; Hockx-Yu, 2014; Black, 2016). This paper examines the impact of electronic legal deposit (ELD) in the United Kingdom, particularly how the 2013 regulations influence innovative scholarship using the Legal Deposit UK Web Archive. As the first major case study to analyse the implementation of ELD, it will ad-dress the following key research questions:• • Is legal deposit, a concept defined and refined for print materials, the most suitable vehicle for suppor-ting DH research using web archives? • How does the current framing of ELD affect digital in-novation in the UK library sector? • How does the current information ecology, including not for-profit archives, influence the relationship between DH researchers and legal deposit libraries

Digitized newspapers and digital research: What is the library‘s role?

Mass-digitised newspapers offer researchers, academic and non-academic, a readily-accessible and invaluable resource for all sorts of historical enquiries. Research of print-medium newspapers, even as reproduced as microfiche or similar formats, traditionally entails the relatively close reading of individual articles, in order to extrapolate the information pertinent to the research question pursued. The re-medialisation of historical print newspapers into digital format, however, opens up new analytical avenues that allow the methodologically-savvy researcher to extrapolate information across a large number of texts with the help of approaches developed for text mining and information retrieval. The question for which this paper will present possible answers is: how can libraries that hold digitised newspaper collections support these distant reading-approaches? In answering that question, the paper will focus on three interlinked areas with potential roles for libraries and present best practice examples. These areas are (1) technical infrastructure, (2) methodological knowhow and (3) analytical tools: 1. Most research libraries have accepted their key role in providing a digital research infrastructure and are increasingly engaged in actively developing the constituent parts of said infrastructure. Researchers applying distant reading approaches, which ideally need open access to the entire data set in order to apply its approaches rather than curated interfaces, are still not part of the main vision. 2. Few historians are trained in text mining, information retrieval and related approaches. It will be argued that libraries have not only a responsibility to give access to research-relevant digital data but also to provide competent consultation and teaching in analytical methods suitable to and made possible by the digital medium. 3. The final area encompasses the provision of tools that implement standard methods on the newspaper corpora. This area might be one where libraries focus on the re-use of already existing tools rather than own developments

Beyond Finding and Managing: Extending Research Data Services at Liberal Arts Institutions

As more and more researchers seek utilize new methodologies, such as computer-assisted qualitative data analysis, data visualization, and text mining, academic libraries have begun to expand their support for these data services as well. In this working group, librarians who support data services, digital humanities, and digital pedagogy came together to discuss these growth areas in data services, how they are being supported at their institutions, opportunities for collaborative support across the Oberlin Group, and how liberal arts institutions can bring a unique perspective to these methods

Digitized newspapers and digital research: What is the library‘s role?

Mass-digitised newspapers offer researchers, academic and non-academic, a readily-accessible and invaluable resource for all sorts of historical enquiries. Research of print-medium newspapers, even as reproduced as microfiche or similar formats, traditionally entails the relatively close reading of individual articles, in order to extrapolate the information pertinent to the research question pursued. The re-medialisation of historical print newspapers into digital format, however, opens up new analytical avenues that allow the methodologically-savvy researcher to extrapolate information across a large number of texts with the help of approaches developed for text mining and information retrieval. The question for which this paper will present possible answers is: how can libraries that hold digitised newspaper collections support these distant reading-approaches? In answering that question, the paper will focus on three interlinked areas with potential roles for libraries and present best practice examples. These areas are (1) technical infrastructure, (2) methodological knowhow and (3) analytical tools: 1. Most research libraries have accepted their key role in providing a digital research infrastructure and are increasingly engaged in actively developing the constituent parts of said infrastructure. Researchers applying distant reading approaches, which ideally need open access to the entire data set in order to apply its approaches rather than curated interfaces, are still not part of the main vision. 2. Few historians are trained in text mining, information retrieval and related approaches. It will be argued that libraries have not only a responsibility to give access to research-relevant digital data but also to provide competent consultation and teaching in analytical methods suitable to and made possible by the digital medium. 3. The final area encompasses the provision of tools that implement standard methods on the newspaper corpora. This area might be one where libraries focus on the re-use of already existing tools rather than own developments