Breaking the browsing barrier for historic search of newspaper texts

Traditionally, to find information in a newspaper collection it has been necessary to painstakingly browse through the individual issues hoping that relevant words will catch your eye. Researchers of New Zealand’s encounter history received a boost when, in 1996, the Alexander Turnbull Library produced a collection on microfiche totaling almost 18,000 pages and covering a printing period from 1842 to 1933. While having all the newspapers in a single collection was a large step forward, browsing or searching for information in this microfiche collection was still time consuming. By incorporating the collection into a digital library with an Internet interface, and by enabling full-text search, we have broken this browsing barrier. Making the information available this way is even more significant as the majority of the collection is written in the Māori language; we have created a Māori language resource that is sorely needed by education and research institutes, and one that provides quick and accurate access to the previously obscure source. The process involved in developing this unique digital library collection, the advantages of traditional newspaper stored in this medium, and the possibilities that we intend to investigate in the future, will be discussed in this paper

Breaking the Browsing Barrier for Historic Searching of Newspaper Texts

Traditionally, to find information in a newspaper collection it has been necessary to painstakingly browse through the individual issues hoping that relevant words will catch your eye. Researchers of New Zealand's encounter history received a boost when in 1996 the Alexander Turnbull library produced a collection on microfiche totalling almost 18,000 pages and covering a printing period from 1842 to 1933. While having all the newspapers in a single collection was a large step forward, browsing or searching for information in this microfiche collection was still time consuming. By incorporating the collection into a digital library with an Internet interface, and by enabling full-text search, we have broken this browsing barrier. Making the information available this way is even more significant as the majority of the collection is written in the Maori language; we have created a Maori language resource that is sorely needed by education institutes, and one that provides quick and accurate access to the previously obscure source. The process involved in developing this unique digital library collection, the advantages of traditional newspaper stored in this medium, and the possibilities that we intend to investigate in the future, will be discussed in this paper.Hosted by the Scholarly Text and Imaging Service (SETIS), the University of Sydney Library, and the Research Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences (RIHSS), the University of Sydney

Breaking the Browsing Barrier for Historic Searching of Newspaper Texts

Traditionally, to find information in a newspaper collection it has been necessary to painstakingly browse through the individual issues hoping that relevant words will catch your eye. Researchers of New Zealand's encounter history received a boost when in 1996 the Alexander Turnbull library produced a collection on microfiche totalling almost 18,000 pages and covering a printing period from 1842 to 1933. While having all the newspapers in a single collection was a large step forward, browsing or searching for information in this microfiche collection was still time consuming. By incorporating the collection into a digital library with an Internet interface, and by enabling full-text search, we have broken this browsing barrier. Making the information available this way is even more significant as the majority of the collection is written in the Maori language; we have created a Maori language resource that is sorely needed by education institutes, and one that provides quick and accurate access to the previously obscure source. The process involved in developing this unique digital library collection, the advantages of traditional newspaper stored in this medium, and the possibilities that we intend to investigate in the future, will be discussed in this paper.Hosted by the Scholarly Text and Imaging Service (SETIS), the University of Sydney Library, and the Research Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences (RIHSS), the University of Sydney

Digital library software architectures : TeachEngineering case study

Digital libraries are digitally accessible, organized collections of knowledge. Although under this broad definition any digitally accessible data set might be considered a digital library, the term is generally reserved for collections whose structures are carefully documented and made available in the form of so-called metadata. There is no specific approach to build a digital library as builders typically use their own architectures which serves only their purpose and satisfies their target audience. These approaches are sometimes hard to understand. In this project, Fm presenting a Best Practices for Digital Library Software Architectures after a careful study of existing architectures and comparing these architectures with the TeachEngineering Digital Library Architecture

FreeLib: A Self-Sustainable Peer-to-Peer Digital Library Framework for Evolving Communities

The need for efficient solutions to the problem of disseminating and sharing of data is growing. Digital libraries provide an efficient solution for disseminating and sharing large volumes of data to diverse sets of users. They enable the use of structured and well defined metadata to provide quality search services. Most of the digital libraries built so far follow a centralized model. The centralized model is an efficient model; however, it has some inherent problems. It is not suitable when content contribution is highly distributed over a very large number of participants. It also requires an organizational support to provide resources (hardware, software, and network bandwidth) and to manage processes for collecting, ingesting, curating, and maintaining the content. In this research, we develop an alternative digital library framework based on peer-to-peer. The framework utilizes resources contributed by participating nodes to achieve self-sustainability. A second key contribution of this research is a significant enhancement of search performance by utilizing the novel concept of community evolution. As demonstrated in this thesis, bringing users sharing similar interest together in a community significantly enhances the search performance. Evolving users into communities is based on a simple analysis of user access patterns in a completely distributed manner. This community evolution process is completely transparent to the user. In our framework, community membership of each node is continuously evolving. This allows users to move between communities as their interest shifts between topics, thus enhancing search performance for users all the time even when their interest changes. It also gives our framework great flexibility as it allows communities to dissolve and new communities to form and evolve over time to reflect the latest user interests. In addition to self-sustainability and performance enhancements, our framework has the potential of building extremely large collections although every node is only maintaining a small collection of digital objects

Integrating information seeking and information structuring: spatial hypertext as an interface to the digital library.

Information seeking is the task of finding documents that satisfy the information needs of a person or organisation. Digital Libraries are one means of providing documents to meet the information needs of their users - i.e. as a resource to support information seeking. Therefore, research into the activity of information seeking is key to the development and understanding of digital libraries. Information structuring is the activity of organising documents found in the process of information seeking. Information structuring can be seen as either part of information seeking, or as a sepárate, complementary activity. It is a task performed by the seeker themselves and targeted by them to support their understanding and the management of later seeking activity. Though information structuring is an important task, it receives sparse support in current digital library Systems. Spatial hypertexts are computer software Systems that have been specifically been developed to support information structuring. However, they seldom are connected to Systems that support information seeking. Thus to day, the two inter-related activities of information seeking and information structuring have been supported by disjoint computer Systems. However, a variety of research strongly indicates that in physical environments, information seeking and information structuring are closely inter-related activities. Given this connection, this thesis explores whether a similar relationship can be found in electronic information seeking environments. However, given the absence of a software system that supports both activities well, there is an immédiate practical problem. In this thesis, I introduce an integrated information seeking and structuring System, called Garnet, that provides a spatial hypertext interface that also supports information seeking in a digital library. The opportunity of supporting information seeking by the artefacts of information structuring is explored in the Garnet system, drawing on the benefits previously found in supporting one information seeking activity with the artefacts of another. Garnet and its use are studied in a qualitative user study that results in the comparison of user behaviour in a combined electronic environment with previous studies in physical environments. The response of participants to using Garnet is reported, particularly regarding their perceptions of the combined system and the quality of the interaction. Finally, the potential value of the artefacts of information structuring to support information seeking is also evaluated

Mecanismos para la cristalización del conocimiento, una propuesta mediante un sistema de trabajo colaborativo

Tesis doctoral inédita leída en la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid,. Escuela Politécnica Superior, Departamento de Ingeniería Informática. Fecha de lectura: 17-09-200