Mr. DLib: Recommendations-as-a-Service (RaaS) for Academia

Only few digital libraries and reference managers offer recommender systems, although such systems could assist users facing information overload. In this paper, we introduce Mr. DLib's recommendations-as-a-service, which allows third parties to easily integrate a recommender system into their products. We explain the recommender approaches implemented in Mr. DLib (content-based filtering among others), and present details on 57 million recommendations, which Mr. DLib delivered to its partner GESIS Sowiport. Finally, we outline our plans for future development, including integration into JabRef, establishing a living lab, and providing personalized recommendations.Comment: Accepted for publication at the JCDL conference 201

Diving in at the deep end : the value of alternative in-situ approaches for systematic library search

OPAC interfaces, still the dominant access point to library catalogs, support systematic search but are problematic for open-ended exploration and generally unpopular with visitors. As a result, libraries start subscribing to simplified search paradigms as exemplified by web-search systems. This is a problem considering that systematic search is a crucial skill in the light of today’s abundance of digital information. Inspired by novel approaches to facilitating search, we designed CollectionDiver, an installation for supporting systematic search in public libraries. The CollectionDiver combines tangible and large display direct-touch interaction with a visual representation of search criteria and filters. We conducted an in-situ qualitative study to compare participants’ search approaches on the CollectionDiver with those on the OPAC interface. Our findings show that while both systems support a similar search process, the CollectionDiver (1) makes systematic search more accessible, (2) motivates proactive search approaches by (3) adding transparency to the search process, and (4) facilitates shared search experiences. We discuss the CollectionDiver’s design concepts to stimulate new ideas toward supporting engaging approaches to systematic search in the library context and beyond.Postprin

Characteristics of Social Media Stories

An emerging trend in social media is for users to create and publish stories , or curated lists of web resources with the purpose of creating a particular narrative of interest to the user. While some stories on the web are automatically generated, such as Facebook’s Year in Review , one of the most popular storytelling services is Storify , which provides users with curation tools to select, arrange, and annotate stories with content from social media and the web at large. We would like to use tools like Storify to present automatically created summaries of archival collections. To support automatic story creation, we need to better understand as a baseline the structural characteristics of popular (i.e., receiving the most views) human-generated stories. We investigated 14,568 stories from Storify, comprising 1,251,160 individual resources, and found that popular stories (i.e., top 25 % of views normalized by time available on the web) have the following characteristics: 2/28/1950 elements (min/median/max), a median of 12 multimedia resources (e.g., images, video), 38 % receive continuing edits, and 11 % of the elements are missing from the live web

An Extensible Framework for Creating Personal Archives of Web Resources Requiring Authentication

The key factors for the success of the World Wide Web are its large size and the lack of a centralized control over its contents. In recent years, many advances have been made in preserving web content but much of this content (namely, social media content) was not archived, or still to this day is not being archived,for various reasons. Tools built to accomplish this frequently break because of the dynamic structure of social media websites. Because many social media websites exhibit a commonality in hierarchy of the content, it would be worthwhile to setup a means to reference this hierarchy for tools to leverage and become adaptive as the target websites evolve. As relying on the service to provide this means is problematic in the context of archiving, we can surmise that the only way to assure that all of these shortcomings are not experienced is to rely on the original context in which the user views the content, i.e. the webbrowser. In this thesis I will describe an abstract specification and concrete implementations of the specification that allow tools to leverage the context of theweb browser to capture content into personal web archives. These tools will then be able to accomplish personal web archiving in a way that makes them more robust. As evaluation, I will make a change in the hierarchy of a synthetic social media website and its respective specification. Then, I will show that anadapted tool, using the specification, continues to function and is able to archive the social media website