119,948 research outputs found

    Conceptual Discovery of Educational Resources through Learning Objectives

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    Περιέχει το πλήρες κείμενοThis poster reports on current work with the NSF-funded Achievement Standards Network (ASN) to support discovery of educational resources in digital libraries using conceptual graphs of officially promulgated achievement standards statements. Conceptual graphs or knowledge maps of achievement standards reveal the macrostructure of the learning domain modeled by those standards and support higher-level understanding by teachers and students. The work builds on the conceptual framework of the AAAS knowledge maps by providing the means to flexibly define and deploy new relationship schemas to fit the disparate modeling needs of the nearly 740 learning standards documents in the ASN repository. Using an RDF-based, node-link representation of learning goals and the relationships among them, the ASN Knowledge Map Service will provide the framework to correlate educational resources to nodes in conceptual models in order to augment more conventional mechanisms of discovery and retrieval in digital libraries

    The Digital Puglia Project: An Active Digital Library of Remote Sensing Data

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    The growing need of software infrastructure able to create, maintain and ease the evolution of scientific data, promotes the development of digital libraries in order to provide the user with fast and reliable access to data. In a world that is rapidly changing, the standard view of a digital library as a data repository specialized to a community of users and provided with some search tools is no longer tenable. To be effective, a digital library should be an active digital library, meaning that users can process available data not just to retrieve a particular piece of information, but to infer new knowledge about the data at hand. Digital Puglia is a new project, conceived to emphasize not only retrieval of data to the client's workstation, but also customized processing of the data. Such processing tasks may include data mining, filtering and knowledge discovery in huge databases, compute-intensive image processing (such as principal component analysis, supervised classification, or pattern matching) and on demand computing sessions. We describe the issues, the requirements and the underlying technologies of the Digital Puglia Project, whose final goal is to build a high performance distributed and active digital library of remote sensing data

    Maine Library History

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    From the earliest small private and university libraries of the 1700s to today’s high-speed Internet-connected institutions, the history of Maine’s libraries mirrors the development of the state and provides a sense of the concerns people had for access to information and education. Melora Norman describes the development of various kinds of libraries in Maine and the opportunities and challenges they have faced over time. She notes that the 20th century was a time of increasing professionalization and standardization in Maine’s libraries. During the late 1990s through the present, libraries have been changing dramatically as they shift from a focus on print, reference, and preservation to digital knowledge, discovery, and instruction

    Opportunities for public libraries and Wikipedia

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    Wikipedia is a powerful tool for public libraries,especially in parts of the world where access to other resources is cost-prohibitive: it supplements library resources with timely, useful information; acts as a tool for librarians answering reference questions; provides a pathway to primary and secondary sources and citations; helps library clients perform research; and provides a vital platform for ecording local knowledge, in local languages, not typically supported by the larger research and publishing industry. Experiments within existing communities suggest that by engaging in Wikipedia, public libraries can expose both their staff and patrons to more complex and sophisticated strategies for dealing with the changing digital landscape. Public libraries and their supporting networks would greatly benefit from a strategy for engaging with Wikipedia. Wikipedia strategies could also serve other library needs, encouraging engagement with a key 21st-century resource for education and learning, providing a model for developing and teaching complex digital literacy skills, and creating a venue for sharing local cultural heritage with a wider audience. These opportunities are even more present in the context of the developing world, where libraries have become de facto access points for digital information yet may not have capacity or resources to invest in digital tools. Equally, Wikipedia has the potential to point clients to libraries, where resources in their areas of interest can be found. Wikipedia-library engagement connects Wikipedia with the important role libraries play in bridging inequalities in access to information, while also being a source for local and regional knowledge and resource discovery

    Katsir: A Framework for Harvesting Digital Libraries on the Web

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    The information era has brought with it the wellknown problem of \u27Information Explosion\u27. There are many and varied search engines on the Internet but it is still hard to locate and concentrate only on materials relevant to a specific task. Digital libraries, on the other hand, provide better services for focused discovery of relevant Web resources. However, digital libraries have been much less researched and implemented than search engines. The \u27Katsir/Harvest\u27 project laid the ground for our understanding that a new paradigm should to be developed - the Harvested Digital Library (HDL). The contribution of this article is in presenting a new framework and harvesting model for constructing HDLs. The open harvesting architecture proposed here uses advanced information retrieval tools and provides a set of integrated DL services to its users. This model and architecture are discussed throughout the article, including description of the implemented Katsir system and discussion of future research directions. The future DLs will be knowledge rich in the sense that each DL contains relevant meta-information on its domain and employs advanced knowledge management techniques

    How user-friendly are user interfaces of open access digital repositories?

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    Digital information resources available on the Internet have become conditio sine qua non of modern research and teaching. In the last decade and a half the Internet and especially the Web had introduced many types of online information resources that emerged and vanished. Only those that were closely associated with important institutions in society (such as libraries and universities) and proved usable survived. Until recently, libraries have been places where university staff seeks quality information for research and teaching, and students for learning. With the proliferation of the Web, students have replaced libraries with search engines and are now using them as primary tools for discovery of information necessary for completion of their written exams, term papers, presentations etc. In their effort to provide researchers, teachers and students with quality content, universities and libraries started development of digital repositories, digital archives of the intellectual product created by the faculty, research staff, and students of an institution. Digital repositories contain research data, journal articles, preprints, technical reports, books, theses and dissertations and other material used in research and educational process. The diverse content of digital repositories represents rich resources for research and teaching, In addition to the diversity and quality of the content, another issue – user interfaces – attracted attention of computer specialists because user interfaces are means of successful use of digital repositories. The research of top 20 open access digital repositories showed that the biggest repositories share common characteristics which help their users in their daily access to the content of repositories. Despite helpful similarities, some of these digital repositories should improve their design to become more attractive and attract younger generations of users seeking knowledge elsewhere on the Internet

    Μοντέλο λειτουργίας των Ακαδημαϊκών Βιβλιοθηκών ως φορέων εξ αποστάσεως εκπαίδευσης : εικονικά περιβαλλοντα στην υπηρεσία των χρηστών-εκπαιδευομένων

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    The transformation of collections of traditional academic library in digital or simulated placed the librarian front new occasions and challenges. The internet and specifically the world web lent in the librarian a new role in the management of information with better and more suitable ways. Because his dynamic characteristics as the division, the heterogeneity, the collaboration and architecture, the web brought revolutionary changes in the information access opening new prospects as the academic pictorial libraries that they help in the more effective recuperation and diffusion of knowledge. How would be supposed the academic libraries to see their future in the discovery of information and knowledge services? In the place of existing limited frame that forces the users to visit various scattered sources, the libraries will provide a simulated service of alter-activity with incomparable content and broadness in each type and form of familiar academic content. The academic libraries in this collaborative frame contribute decisive in the creation of open network of distance learning that will offer a alternative solution in the running lists of search engines. This statement presents a model that it helps in the benefit of distance learning in real time in removed users via the facilitations of simulated environment

    Resource discovery in heterogeneous digital content environments

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    The concept of 'resource discovery' is central to our understanding of how users explore, navigate, locate and retrieve information resources. This submission for a PhD by Published Works examines a series of 11 related works which explore topics pertaining to resource discovery, each demonstrating heterogeneity in their digital discovery context. The assembled works are prefaced by nine chapters which seek to review and critically analyse the contribution of each work, as well as provide contextualization within the wider body of research literature. A series of conceptual sub-themes is used to organize and structure the works and the accompanying critical commentary. The thesis first begins by examining issues in distributed discovery contexts by studying collection level metadata (CLM), its application in 'information landscaping' techniques, and its relationship to the efficacy of federated item-level search tools. This research narrative continues but expands in the later works and commentary to consider the application of Knowledge Organization Systems (KOS), particularly within Semantic Web and machine interface contexts, with investigations of semantically aware terminology services in distributed discovery. The necessary modelling of data structures to support resource discovery - and its associated functionalities within digital libraries and repositories - is then considered within the novel context of technology-supported curriculum design repositories, where questions of human-computer interaction (HCI) are also examined. The final works studied as part of the thesis are those which investigate and evaluate the efficacy of open repositories in exposing knowledge commons to resource discovery via web search agents. Through the analysis of the collected works it is possible to identify a unifying theory of resource discovery, with the proposed concept of (meta)data alignment described and presented with a visual model. This analysis assists in the identification of a number of research topics worthy of further research; but it also highlights an incremental transition by the present author, from using research to inform the development of technologies designed to support or facilitate resource discovery, particularly at a 'meta' level, to the application of specific technologies to address resource discovery issues in a local context. Despite this variation the research narrative has remained focussed on topics surrounding resource discovery in heterogeneous digital content environments and is noted as having generated a coherent body of work. Separate chapters are used to consider the methodological approaches adopted in each work and the contribution made to research knowledge and professional practice.The concept of 'resource discovery' is central to our understanding of how users explore, navigate, locate and retrieve information resources. This submission for a PhD by Published Works examines a series of 11 related works which explore topics pertaining to resource discovery, each demonstrating heterogeneity in their digital discovery context. The assembled works are prefaced by nine chapters which seek to review and critically analyse the contribution of each work, as well as provide contextualization within the wider body of research literature. A series of conceptual sub-themes is used to organize and structure the works and the accompanying critical commentary. The thesis first begins by examining issues in distributed discovery contexts by studying collection level metadata (CLM), its application in 'information landscaping' techniques, and its relationship to the efficacy of federated item-level search tools. This research narrative continues but expands in the later works and commentary to consider the application of Knowledge Organization Systems (KOS), particularly within Semantic Web and machine interface contexts, with investigations of semantically aware terminology services in distributed discovery. The necessary modelling of data structures to support resource discovery - and its associated functionalities within digital libraries and repositories - is then considered within the novel context of technology-supported curriculum design repositories, where questions of human-computer interaction (HCI) are also examined. The final works studied as part of the thesis are those which investigate and evaluate the efficacy of open repositories in exposing knowledge commons to resource discovery via web search agents. Through the analysis of the collected works it is possible to identify a unifying theory of resource discovery, with the proposed concept of (meta)data alignment described and presented with a visual model. This analysis assists in the identification of a number of research topics worthy of further research; but it also highlights an incremental transition by the present author, from using research to inform the development of technologies designed to support or facilitate resource discovery, particularly at a 'meta' level, to the application of specific technologies to address resource discovery issues in a local context. Despite this variation the research narrative has remained focussed on topics surrounding resource discovery in heterogeneous digital content environments and is noted as having generated a coherent body of work. Separate chapters are used to consider the methodological approaches adopted in each work and the contribution made to research knowledge and professional practice

    The impact of digitization and digital resource design on the scholarly workflow in art history

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    The technological progress of the past decades has had a transformative effect on both cultural institutions and academic research. It is generally accepted that mass digitization projects led by museums, libraries and archives have allowed institutions to reach new audiences and increase the impact of their collections, while the emergence of digital libraries and other types of digital resources has opened up new opportunities for scholars in terms of accessing diverse types of information. Yet, our knowledge of the impact of these resources on the scholarly workflow beyond the stage of discovery remains limited; this paper argues for the importance of understanding user behavior and needs for building digital resources that have a positive effect on the whole scholarly workflow. By employing an ethnographic approach to the study of art historians’ habits we get a detailed view of the effect that digitization and digital resource design can have on scholars’ work, from the seeking of the information to the construction of the research argument. The complex information behavior of art historians and the challenges they often face when interacting with digital resources make them a great example to demonstrate the impact that these can have on the research process
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