Book Review: Digital Rights Management: The Librarian\u27s Guide

Over the past decade, the dramatic proliferation of technologies in the expanding digital world has transformed the way we operate and interact with various forms of information. Enhanced access to digital information has empowered both individuals and libraries. People have gained access to such digital media as streaming audio and video, DVDs, e-books, e-journals, research subscription databases, websites, and other sources of digital information. This enhanced access has enabled libraries to deliver more effective and scalable services for their users in the digital environment. These digital movements and technological advances, including a drastic increase of Web-based tools, make sharing information easy and inexpensive

Robust Image Retrieval using Dominant Colour with Binarized Pattern Feature Extraction and Fast Correlation

The modern technology providing the sharing of information at very fast rate such as audio, video and images. The sharing of such data also increased as the social networking sites become popular among young generation. Now the online databases of images is so huge having millions of images, and the searching of images we need is crucial task. For such applications various image retrieval methodologies is proposed. In this paper we are proposing very efficient image retrieval technique based on dominant colour features extraction and pattern feature extraction. In the simulation results we have found that from around 6000 images proposed algorithm takes only 1.5 seconds to retrieve results. That is why this approach is significant in terms of retrieval speed

An Analysis of BitTorrent Cross-Swarm Peer Participation and Geolocational Distribution

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) file-sharing is becoming increasingly popular in recent years. In 2012, it was reported that P2P traffic consumed over 5,374 petabytes per month, which accounted for approximately 20.5% of consumer internet traffic. TV is the popular content type on The Pirate Bay (the world's largest BitTorrent indexing website). In this paper, an analysis of the swarms of the most popular pirated TV shows is conducted. The purpose of this data gathering exercise is to enumerate the peer distribution at different geolocational levels, to measure the temporal trend of the swarm and to discover the amount of cross-swarm peer participation. Snapshots containing peer related information involved in the unauthorised distribution of this content were collected at a high frequency resulting in a more accurate landscape of the total involvement. The volume of data collected throughout the monitoring of the network exceeded 2 terabytes. The presented analysis and the results presented can aid in network usage prediction, bandwidth provisioning and future network design.Comment: The First International Workshop on Hot Topics in Big Data and Networking (HotData I

A walk through the web’s video clips

Approximately 10^5 video clips are posted every day on the Web. The popularity of Web-based video databases poses a number of challenges to machine vision scientists: how do we organize, index and search such large wealth of data? Content-based video search and classification have been proposed in the literature and applied successfully to analyzing movies, TV broadcasts and lab-made videos. We explore the performance of some of these algorithms on a large data-set of approximately 3000 videos. We collected our data-set directly from the Web minimizing bias for content or quality, way so as to have a faithful representation of the statistics of this medium. We find that the algorithms that we have come to trust do not work well on video clips, because their quality is lower and their subject is more varied. We will make the data publicly available to encourage further research

Creating a Religious Properties Database for the City of New Bedford: an Analysis of Best Practices and Available Systems

This policy analysis was written to provide the city of New Bedford, the Waterfront Historic Area League, Inter-church Council of Greater New Bedford, and the congregations with possible database systems to consider in creating their historic religious properties database. It also provides the best methodology to use when choosing a database. Deciding on who will be involved in the choosing process, determining a budget, and listing the mandatory requirements the database should provide are all important to consider in the decision making process

Encore EDS Task Force Final Summary Report (6.4.14)

Final report of the Encore EDS Task Force recommending that, After careful consideration, trial and evaluation, the task force reached consensus that HELIN should move forward in switching from Serials Solutions to EBSCO\u27s A-Z with LinkSource product for 2014-2015. This will allow each HELIN library to decide for themselves whether to start using Encore Duet immediately, or to hold off until upcoming enhancements become available. In order to be ready for the beginning of the 2014 fall semester, the task force recommends that the transition to EBSCO A to Z with Linksource be made as soon as possible and that the HELIN Board and Central Office communicate a timeline for implementation of EBSCO A to Z with Linksource and Encore Duet to the HELIN Libraries

Collaborative yet independent: Information practices in the physical sciences

In many ways, the physical sciences are at the forefront of using digital tools and methods to work with information and data. However, the fields and disciplines that make up the physical sciences are by no means uniform, and physical scientists find, use, and disseminate information in a variety of ways. This report examines information practices in the physical sciences across seven cases, and demonstrates the richly varied ways in which physical scientists work, collaborate, and share information and data. This report details seven case studies in the physical sciences. For each case, qualitative interviews and focus groups were used to understand the domain. Quantitative data gathered from a survey of participants highlights different information strategies employed across the cases, and identifies important software used for research. Finally, conclusions from across the cases are drawn, and recommendations are made. This report is the third in a series commissioned by the Research Information Network (RIN), each looking at information practices in a specific domain (life sciences, humanities, and physical sciences). The aim is to understand how researchers within a range of disciplines find and use information, and in particular how that has changed with the introduction of new technologies

Assessing the Research Process Improves the Product: Results of a Faculty-­Librarian Collaboration

When an education professor and a reference librarian sought to improve the quality of undergraduate student research, their partnership led to a new focus on assessing the research process in addition to the product. In this study, we reflect on our collaborative experience introducing information literacy as the foundation for undergraduate teacher education research. We examine the outcomes of this collaboration, focusing on the assessment of the process. Using a mixed methods approach, we found that direct instruction supporting effective research strategies positively impacted student projects. Our data also suggest that undergraduate students benefit from not only sound research strategies, but also organization strategies