Judging a book by its cover: interface elements that affect reader selection of ebooks

Digital library research has demonstrated the impact of content presentation on both search and reading behaviours. In this paper, we scrutinise the influence of ebook presentation on user behaviour, focussing on document thumbnails and the first page view. We demonstrate that flaws in presentation increase the volume of short time-span reading, and reduce the likelihood of long-span reading when compared to other documents. This reflects other patterns of information seeking behaviour that demonstrate increased short-term reading when information content is uncertain, and suggests an ineffective use of reader time on less useful content

Detecting Family Resemblance: Automated Genre Classification.

This paper presents results in automated genre classification of digital documents in PDF format. It describes genre classification as an important ingredient in contextualising scientific data and in retrieving targetted material for improving research. The current paper compares the role of visual layout, stylistic features and language model features in clustering documents and presents results in retrieving five selected genres (Scientific Article, Thesis, Periodicals, Business Report, and Form) from a pool of materials populated with documents of the nineteen most popular genres found in our experimental data set.

Extending the 5S Framework of Digital Libraries to support Complex Objects, Superimposed Information, and Content-Based Image Retrieval Services

Advanced services in digital libraries (DLs) have been developed and widely used to address the required capabilities of an assortment of systems as DLs expand into diverse application domains. These systems may require support for images (e.g., Content-Based Image Retrieval), Complex (information) Objects, and use of content at fine grain (e.g., Superimposed Information). Due to the lack of consensus on precise theoretical definitions for those services, implementation efforts often involve ad hoc development, leading to duplication and interoperability problems. This article presents a methodology to address those problems by extending a precisely specified minimal digital library (in the 5S framework) with formal definitions of aforementioned services. The theoretical extensions of digital library functionality presented here are reinforced with practical case studies as well as scenarios for the individual and integrative use of services to balance theory and practice. This methodology has implications that other advanced services can be continuously integrated into our current extended framework whenever they are identified. The theoretical definitions and case study we present may impact future development efforts and a wide range of digital library researchers, designers, and developers

Feature Type Analysis in Automated Genre Classification

In this paper, we compare classifiers based on language model, image, and stylistic features for automated genre classification. The majority of previous studies in genre classification have created models based on an amalgamated representation of a document using a multitude of features. In these models, the inseparable roles of different features make it difficult to determine a means of improving the classifier when it exhibits poor performance in detecting selected genres. By independently modeling and comparing classifiers based on features belonging to three types, describing visual, stylistic, and topical properties, we demonstrate that different genres have distinctive feature strengths.