Evaluating electronic textbooks : a methodology

EBONI (Electronic Books ON-screen Interface) [1] builds on the premise to emerge from the Visual Book [2] and WEB Book projects [3], that appearance is important in the design of electronic textbooks, and offers an evaluation model, or general methodology, from which ebook usability experiments in a range of areas can be extracted and remain comparable at a basic level. The methodology sets out options for selecting material, participants, tasks and techniques, which vary in cost and level of sophistication. Results from each study will feed into a set of best practice guidelines for producing electronic textbooks on the Web, reflecting the requirements of students and academics throughout the UK

Vers un modèle de Recherche d'Information Sociale pour l'accès aux ressources bibliographiques

National audienceCet article propose une nouvelle approche, basée sur les réseaux sociaux, pour l'accès aux ressources bibliographiques. Nous introduisons un modèle d'information sociale dont les auteurs sont les principales entités et les relations sont extraites à partir des liens de coauteur et de citation. En effet, ces relations sont pondérées à l'aide d'une mesure d'entropie qui tient compte des interactions au voisinage social du document et des annotations sociales produites par les utilisateurs. Dans ce modèle, la pertinence d'un document est calculée par combinaison de la pertinence thématique et de la pertinence dérivée de l'importance sociale des auteurs associés. Nous montrons la viabilité de notre modèle par une série d'expérimentations basées sur une collection d'articles scientifiques dont les annotation sociales sont collectées depuis le réseau social académique "CiteULike.org"

E-book readers in higher education

Ebook readers have received a mixed press, with some hailing them as the future of reading and others believing that they will never be popular. The study outlined here aims to understand the attitudes of, and issues of importance to, lecturers in UK academia, with a view to improving the design of ebook readers for education in the future. An evaluation of five portable devices is presented, in which lecturers were given the opportunity to read an ebook and provide feedback via a questionnaire. Results are compared with concerns arising from other experiments in the same field, and recommendations are made for successful ebook design

Browsing and searching e-encyclopaedias

Educational websites and electronic encyclopaedias employ many of the same design elements, such as hyperlinks, frames and search mechanisms. This paper asks to what extent recommendations from the world of web design can be applied to e-encyclopaedias, through an evaluation of users' browsing and searching behaviour in the free, web-based versions of Encyclopaedia Britannica, the Concise Columbia Encyclopaedia and Microsoft's Encarta. It is discovered that e-encyclopaedias have a unique set of design requirements, as users' expectations are inherited from the worlds of both web and print

Treatment of Georeferencing in Knowledge Organization Systems: North American Contributions to Integrated Georeferencing

Recent research projects in North America that have advanced the integration of formal mathematical georeferencing and informal placename georeferencing in knowledge organization systems are described and related to visualization applications

Un modèle de Recherche d'Information Sociale pour l'Accès aux Ressources Bibliographiques : Vers un réseau social pondéré

International audienceCet article propose une nouvelle approche, basée sur les réseaux sociaux, pour laccès aux ressources bibliographiques. Nous introduisons un modèle dinformation sociale dont les auteurs sont les principales entités et les relations sont extraites à partir des liens de coauteur et de citation. En effet, ces relations sont pondérées en tenant compte des interactions entre les auteurs et des annotations sociales produites par les utilisateurs. Dans ce modèle, la pertinence dun document est estimée par combinaison de la pertinence thématique et de la pertinence sociale, qui est à son tour dérivée de limportance sociale des auteurs associés. Nous évaluons la viabilité de notre modèle sur une collection darticles scientifiques dont les annotation sociales sont extraites depuis le réseau social académique CiteULike.org. Les résultats obtenus montrent la supériorité des performances de notre modèle par rapport à la recherche dinformation traditionnelle

A social model for Literature Access: Towards a weighted social network of authors

International audienceThis paper presents a novel retrieval approach for literature access based on social network analysis. In fact, we investigate a social model where authors represent the main entities and relationships are extracted from co-author and citation links. Moreover, we define a weighting model for social relationships which takes into account the authors positions in the social network and their mutual collaborations. Assigned weights express influence, knowledge transfer and shared interest between authors. Furthermore, we estimate document relevance by combing the document-query similarity and the document social importance derived from corresponding authors. To evaluate the effectiveness of our model, we conduct a series of experiments on a scientific document dataset that includes textual content and social data extracted from the academic social network CiteULike. Final results show that the proposed model improves the retrieval effectiveness and outperforms traditional and social information retrieval baselines

Contextualized Digital Library Evaluation: The Perseus Digital Library within Theological Research

As the development of digital libraries increases, the growth has been accompanied by a refinement of evaluation criteria and methods. Evaluators are increasingly aware that the context of digital library usage (the social, cultural, academic, and institutional environments of the users) is an essential consideration of effective assessment. This article evaluates the Perseus Digital Library through the needs and objectives of a specific learning community – those engaged in theological research. After a review of relevant literature, a rationale is given for ranking ten key facets of digital library evaluation by order of importance. These criteria are then applied to the Perseus Digital Library, contextualized through the particular prism of theological research

Metadata categorization for identifying search patterns in a digital library

Purpose: For digital libraries, it is useful to understand how users search in a collection. Investigating search patterns can help them to improve the user interface, collection management and search algorithms. However, search patterns may vary widely in different parts of a collection. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how to identify these search patterns within a well-curated historical newspaper collection using the existing metadata.Design/methodology/approach: The authors analyzed search logs combined with metadata