74,677 research outputs found
Digital age: challenges for libraries
Information technology and globalization are the two most influential forces of the modern times. IT has given new meanings to the transmission, dissemination and storage of information; whereas globalisation is reducing the importance of geographical boundaries. Libraries as an important social institution have been affected by these changes. Information retrieval, information storage and information transmission are the core competencies of the libraries. Digital age characterized by efficient graphic user interface, digital imaging, efficient transfer and storage of texts, is presenting important challenges for the libraries. Information privacy, copyrights, and information security are some of the challenging issues faced by the libraries in digital age. This paper is an attempt to present as well as to discuss the implications of these issues so that strategies can be devised to address them effectively and efficiently
Resource selection and data fusion for multimedia international digital libraries: an overview of the MIND project
The inspiration for MIND grew out of the problems which users face when they have remote access to thousands of heterogeneous and distributed multimedia digital libraries. A user must know where to search, how to query different media, and how to combine information from diverse resources. As digital libraries continue to proliferate, in a variety of media and from a variety of sources, the problems of resource selection, query formulation and data fusion become major obstacles to effective search and retrieval. The key goal of MIND is to develop a common system for identifying, searching and combining results from multiple digital libraries. MIND, therefore, is investigating methods for resource description and selection (i.e., gathering and updating information about digital libraries to assist in selecting those which are most likely to contain the information sought), query processing (i.e. modifying the terms contained in a query and transforming the query into the local command language), data fusion (i.e., the merging of different data retrieved from different digital libraries) and information visualisation (in particular, the automatic generation of surrogates and presentation of fused retrieved data)
Editorial for the Bibliometric-enhanced Information Retrieval Workshop at ECIR 2014
This first "Bibliometric-enhanced Information Retrieval" (BIR 2014) workshop
aims to engage with the IR community about possible links to bibliometrics and
scholarly communication. Bibliometric techniques are not yet widely used to
enhance retrieval processes in digital libraries, although they offer
value-added effects for users. In this workshop we will explore how statistical
modelling of scholarship, such as Bradfordizing or network analysis of
co-authorship network, can improve retrieval services for specific communities,
as well as for large, cross-domain collections. This workshop aims to raise
awareness of the missing link between information retrieval (IR) and
bibliometrics / scientometrics and to create a common ground for the
incorporation of bibliometric-enhanced services into retrieval at the digital
library interface. Our interests include information retrieval, information
seeking, science modelling, network analysis, and digital libraries. The goal
is to apply insights from bibliometrics, scientometrics, and informetrics to
concrete practical problems of information retrieval and browsing.Comment: 4 pages, Bibliometric-enhanced Information Retrieval Workshop at ECIR
2014, Amsterdam, N
On Synergies Between Information Retrieval and Digital Libraries
In this paper we present the results of a longitudinal analysis of ACM SIGIR papers from 2003 to 2017. ACM SIGIR is the main venue where Information Retrieval (IR) research and innovative results are presented yearly; it is a highly competitive venue and only the best and most relevant works are accepted for publication. The analysis of ACM SIGIR papers gives us a unique opportunity to understand where the field is going and what are the most trending topics in information access and search.
In particular, we conduct this analysis with a focus on Digital Library (DL) topics to understand what is the relation between these two fields that we know to be closely linked. We see that DL provide document collections and challenging tasks to be addressed by the IR community and in turn exploit the latest advancements in IR to improve the offered services.
We also point to the role of public investments in the DL field as one of the core drivers of DL research which in turn may also have a positive effect on information accessing and searching in general
An Investigation on Text-Based Cross-Language Picture Retrieval Effectiveness through the Analysis of User Queries
Purpose: This paper describes a study of the queries generated from a user experiment for cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) from a historic image archive. Italian speaking users generated 618 queries for a set of known-item search tasks. The queries generated by user’s interaction with the system have been analysed and the results used to suggest recommendations for the future development of cross-language retrieval systems for digital image libraries.
Methodology: A controlled lab-based user study was carried out using a prototype Italian-English image retrieval system. Participants were asked to carry out searches for 16 images provided to them, a known-item search task. User’s interactions with the system were recorded and queries were analysed manually quantitatively and qualitatively.
Findings: Results highlight the diversity in requests for similar visual content and the weaknesses of Machine Translation for query translation. Through the manual translation of queries we show the benefits of using high-quality translation resources. The results show the individual characteristics of user’s whilst performing known-item searches and the overlap obtained between query terms and structured image captions, highlighting the use of user’s search terms for objects within the foreground of an image.
Limitations and Implications: This research looks in-depth into one case of interaction and one image repository. Despite this limitation, the discussed results are likely to be valid across other languages and image repository.
Value: The growing quantity of digital visual material in digital libraries offers the potential to apply techniques from CLIR to provide cross-language information access services. However, to develop effective systems requires studying user’s search behaviours, particularly in digital image libraries. The value of this paper is in the provision of empirical evidence to support recommendations for effective cross-language image retrieval system design.</p
Multilingual adaptive search for digital libraries
This paper describes a framework for Adaptive Multilingual Information Retrieval (AMIR) which allows multilingual resource discovery and delivery using on-the-fly machine translation of documents and queries. Result documents
are presented to the user in a contextualised manner. Challenges and affordances of both Adaptive and Multilingual IR, with a particular focus on Digital Libraries, are detailed. The framework components are motivated by a series of results from experiments on query logs and documents from The European Library. We conclude that factoring adaptivity and multilinguality aspects into the search process can enhance the user’s experience with online Digital Libraries
Natural language processing
Beginning with the basic issues of NLP, this chapter aims to chart the major research activities in this area since the last ARIST Chapter in 1996 (Haas, 1996), including: (i) natural language text processing systems - text summarization, information extraction, information retrieval, etc., including domain-specific applications; (ii) natural language interfaces; (iii) NLP in the context of www and digital libraries ; and (iv) evaluation of NLP systems
Query Expansion for Survey Question Retrieval in the Social Sciences
In recent years, the importance of research data and the need to archive and
to share it in the scientific community have increased enormously. This
introduces a whole new set of challenges for digital libraries. In the social
sciences typical research data sets consist of surveys and questionnaires. In
this paper we focus on the use case of social science survey question reuse and
on mechanisms to support users in the query formulation for data sets. We
describe and evaluate thesaurus- and co-occurrence-based approaches for query
expansion to improve retrieval quality in digital libraries and research data
archives. The challenge here is to translate the information need and the
underlying sociological phenomena into proper queries. As we can show retrieval
quality can be improved by adding related terms to the queries. In a direct
comparison automatically expanded queries using extracted co-occurring terms
can provide better results than queries manually reformulated by a domain
expert and better results than a keyword-based BM25 baseline.Comment: to appear in Proceedings of 19th International Conference on Theory
and Practice of Digital Libraries 2015 (TPDL 2015
The Pace of Digital Libraries: Academic libraries perspective
Digital libraries are playing a prominent role in information services in general and information retrieval in particular. Users are giving more preference to digital than print resources. The metamorphosis of libraries from traditional to digital, information services to access providers, Document custodians to Knowledge managers forced library professionals to evolve themselves as information providers. The topics like a user-centric digital library system, leverage of social media in digital library services and other aspects are discussed in detail
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