Students’ perceptions toward the usability and usefulness of the digital libraries: A Case Study of Women University in District Peshawar.

This paper investigated the perceptions of undergraduate students regarding usability and usefulness of Digital Libraries. A case study was conducted to explore the use of Digital Library (DL) resources in ten undergraduate classes at Shaheed Benazir Butto Women University Peshawar and identified students\u27 perceptions regarding educational digital libraries. Data was collected through survey method using qualitative tools such as observation and interviews. The study examined that university provides internet facility to all students and they have ample access for using Digital libraries but majority of the students are not aware of the use of DLs. Only research students are using digital libraries and most of them use it for research purpose while other using open Web sources for visual and multimedia purpose. Furthermore students did not recognize academic libraries as a useful source for digital images and used various search browsers while searching for visual resources. Students stated that the digital library websites are difficult to navigate and insufficient in providing signs about the richness of resources that it offers. Students’ experiences regarding the use of library website badly affected their perceptions about digital services

Context-based metrics for evaluating changes to web pages

The web provides a lot of fluid information but this information changes, moves, and even disappears over time. Bookmark lists, portals, and paths are collections where the building blocks are web pages, which are susceptible to these changes. A lot of research, both in industry and in academia, focuses on organizing this vast amount of data. In this thesis, I present context-based algorithms for measuring changes to a document. The methods proposed use other documents in a collection as the context for evaluating changes in the web pages. These metrics will be used in maintaining paths as the individual pages in paths change. This approach will enhance the evaluations of change made by the currently existing Path Manager, in the Walden's Paths project that is being developed in the Center for the Study of Digital Libraries at Texas A&M University

Identifying the Bounds of an Internet Resource

Systems for retrieving or archiving Internet resources often assume a URL acts as a delimiter for the resource. But there are many situations where Internet resources do not have a one-to-one mapping with URLs. For URLs that point to the first page of a document that has been broken up over multiple pages, users are likely to consider the whole article as the resource, even though it is spread across multiple URLs. Comments, tags, ratings, and advertising might or might not be perceived as part of the resource whether they are retrieved as part of the primary URL or accessed via a link. Understanding what people perceive as part of a resource is necessary prior to developing algorithms to detect and make use of resource boundaries. A pilot study examined how content similarity, URL similarity, and the combination of the two matched human expectations. This pilot study showed that more nuanced techniques were needed that took into account the particular content and context of the resource and related content. Based on the lessons from the pilot study, a study was performed focused on two research questions: (1) how particular relationships between the content of pages effect expectations and (2) how encountered implementations of saving and perceptions of content value relate to the notion of internet resource bounds. Results showed that human expectations are affected by expected relationships, such as two web pages showing parts of the same news article. They are also affected when two content elements are part of the same set of content, as is the case when two photos are presented as members of the same collection or presentation. Expectations were also affected by the role of the content – advertisements presented alongside articles or photos were less likely to be considered as part of a resource. The exploration of web resource boundaries found that people’s assessments of resource bounds rely on understanding relationships between content fragments on the same web page and between content fragments on different web pages. These results were in the context of personal archiving scenarios. Would institutional archives have different expectations? A follow-on study gathered perceptions in the context of institutional archiving questions to explore whether such perceptions change based on whether the archive is for personal use or is institutional in nature. Results show that there are similar expectations for preserving continuations of the main content in personal and institutional archiving scenarios. Institutional archives are more likely to be expected to preserve the context of the main content, such as additional linked content, advertisements, and author information. This implies alternative resource bounds based on the type of content, relationships between content elements, and the type of archive in consideration. Based on the predictive features that gathered, an automatic classification for determining if two pieces of content should be considered as part of the same resource was designed. This classifier is an example of taking into account the features identified as important in the studies of human perceptions when developing techniques that bound materials captured during the archiving of online resources

Internet Content Delivery Acceleration Methods for Hybrid Network Topologies

Internet demand has been characterized by an exponential growth. Broadband Internet via satellite provides high-speed direct-to-home (DTH) Internet access. However, such systems suffer from high delay which causes degradation in the performance of protocols such as HTTP and TCP, which were developed to be used on terrestrial networks, in terms of throughput and the latency perceived by the end-user of the system. In this thesis we investigate different versions and developments of the HTTP protocol and different algorithms and schemes in order to reduce the user's perceived latency and make browsing DTH delivered Internet a less cumbersome experience. The first of the two suggested schemes uses concurrent connections and the second scheme is a caching scheme. We show that there is a marked reduction in the perceived delay using these methods. Lastly, this thesis describes other non-mature mechanisms and their possible implementation to overcome the above-mentioned problem

Novo paradigma de navegação Web : separadores hierárquicos com integração de favoritos e histórico

Tese de mestrado integrado. Engenharia Informática e Computação. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 201

Identifying the Bounds of an Internet Resource

Systems for retrieving or archiving Internet resources often assume a URL acts as a delimiter for the resource. But there are many situations where Internet resources do not have a one-to-one mapping with URLs. For URLs that point to the first page of a document that has been broken up over multiple pages, users are likely to consider the whole article as the resource, even though it is spread across multiple URLs. Comments, tags, ratings, and advertising might or might not be perceived as part of the resource whether they are retrieved as part of the primary URL or accessed via a link. Understanding what people perceive as part of a resource is necessary prior to developing algorithms to detect and make use of resource boundaries. A pilot study examined how content similarity, URL similarity, and the combination of the two matched human expectations. This pilot study showed that more nuanced techniques were needed that took into account the particular content and context of the resource and related content. Based on the lessons from the pilot study, a study was performed focused on two research questions: (1) how particular relationships between the content of pages effect expectations and (2) how encountered implementations of saving and perceptions of content value relate to the notion of internet resource bounds. Results showed that human expectations are affected by expected relationships, such as two web pages showing parts of the same news article. They are also affected when two content elements are part of the same set of content, as is the case when two photos are presented as members of the same collection or presentation. Expectations were also affected by the role of the content – advertisements presented alongside articles or photos were less likely to be considered as part of a resource. The exploration of web resource boundaries found that people’s assessments of resource bounds rely on understanding relationships between content fragments on the same web page and between content fragments on different web pages. These results were in the context of personal archiving scenarios. Would institutional archives have different expectations? A follow-on study gathered perceptions in the context of institutional archiving questions to explore whether such perceptions change based on whether the archive is for personal use or is institutional in nature. Results show that there are similar expectations for preserving continuations of the main content in personal and institutional archiving scenarios. Institutional archives are more likely to be expected to preserve the context of the main content, such as additional linked content, advertisements, and author information. This implies alternative resource bounds based on the type of content, relationships between content elements, and the type of archive in consideration. Based on the predictive features that gathered, an automatic classification for determining if two pieces of content should be considered as part of the same resource was designed. This classifier is an example of taking into account the features identified as important in the studies of human perceptions when developing techniques that bound materials captured during the archiving of online resources

Identifying the Effects of Unexpected Change in a Distributed Collection of Web Documents

It is not unusual for digital collections to degrade and suffer from problems associated with unexpected change. In previous analyses, I have found that categorizing the degree of change affecting a digital collection over time is a difficult task. More specifically, I found that categorizing this degree of change is not a binary problem where documents are either unchanged or they have changed so dramatically that they do not fit within the scope of the collection. It is, in part, a characterization of the intent of the change. In this dissertation, I present a study that compares change detection methods based on machine learning algorithms against the assessment made by human subjects in a user study. Consequently, this dissertation focuses on two research questions. First, how can we categorize the various degrees of change that documents can endure? This point becomes increasingly interesting if we take into account that the resources found in a digital library are often curated and maintained by experts with affiliations to professionally managed institutions. And second, how do the automatic detection methods fare against the human assessment of change in the ACM conference list? The results of this dissertation are threefold. First, I provide a categorization framework that highlights the different instances of change that I found in an analysis of the Association for Computing Machinery conference list. Second, I focus on a set of procedures to classify the documents according to the characteristics of change that they exhibit. Finally, I evaluate the classification procedures against the assessment of human subjects. Taking into account the results of the user evaluation and the inability of the test subjects to recognize some instances of change, the main conclusion that I derive from my dissertation is that managing the effects of unexpected change is a more serious problem than had previously been anticipated, thus requiring the immediate attention of collection managers and curators

Perception of content, structure, and presentation changes in Web-based hypertext

The Web provides access to a wide variety of information but much of this information is fluid; it changes, moves, and occasionally disappears. Bookmarks, paths over Web pages, and catalogs like Yahoo! are examples of page collections that can become out-of-date as changes are made to their components. Maintaining these collections requires that they be updated continuously. Tools to help in this maintenance require an understanding of what changes are important, such as when pages no longer exist, and what changes are not, such as when a visit counter changes. We performed a study to look at the effect of the type and quantity of change on people's perception of its importance. Subjects were presented pairs of Web pages with changes to either content (e.g., text), structure (e.g., links), or presentation (e.g., colors, layout). While changes in content were the most closely connected to subjects perceptions of the overall change to a page, subjects indicated a strong desire to be notified of structural changes. Subjects only considered the simultaneous change of many presentation characteristics as important

Como contar histórias ?: o hipertexto jornalístico na reportagem hipermídia

Compreender como as histórias são contadas nas reportagens hipermídia, a partir da Teoria do Hipertexto, a fim de elaborar elementos que apontem para as especificidades deste gênero no espaço de escrita digital é o objetivo principal desta tese. Para tanto refletimos sobre as características do hipertexto e sugerimos adequações ao campo do jornalismo. Definimos também o termo hipermídia como uma forma de mídia, resultante da remediação de todas as formas de mídia, de linguagem e de modos expressivos midiáticos que a antecederam. Sobre o gênero reportagem, discutimos a reportagem hipermídia e identificamos os recursos que potencializam a contextualização das histórias. A partir dessas discussões teóricas elaboramos nossa matriz metodológica que alia as especificidades do hipertexto jornalístico (a tipologia dos links, a multivocalidade e a estrutura de navegação) e as questões pertinentes às reportagens hipermídia, as quais denominamos de eixos estruturantes (camadas informativas, modalidades comunicativas e variantes contextuais). A análise foi realizada em três reportagens hipermídia: Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek – The New York Times (Estados Unidos), Filhos da Guerra: Quem é o filho que António deixou na guerra – Público (Portugal) e Crise da água: Líquido e Incerto – Folha de S. Paulo (Brasil). Os resultados nos apontam para padrões de recorrência nas reportagens hipermídia que indicam um perfil próprio desse gênero no espaço de escrita digital. Destacamos alguns traços desse perfil: a reportagem hipermídia utiliza links narrativos para complementar, particularizar, ilustrar e detalhar as informações; emprega múltiplas vozes; a participação do leitor é restrita; a estrutura de navegação é diversificada; a estrutura da reportagem conta com duas camadas informativas; as modalidades comunicativas estão integradas entre si; o texto é a peça-chave que conduz a história; a contextualização das histórias ocorre por meio da humanização dos relatos, de bases de dados, de recursos imersivos e das histórias em formato longo.The main goal of this thesis is to understand how stories are being told in hypermedia reporting, considering Hypertext as theoretical framework, in order to elaborate features that indicates the specificities of this genre in digital writing space. For this purpose, we consider hypertext characteristics in order to suggest adjustments to journalism field. We also define hypermedia as a new media format, resulting from the remediation of all types of media, language and expressive mediatic modes that preceeded it. When it comes to reporting as a genre, we discuss the hypermedia reporting and identify the resources that strengthen stories contextualization. From these theoretical discussions, we elaborate our methodological framework that combines the specificities of journalistic hypertext (the typology of links, the multivocality and the navigation structure) and the pertinent issues to hypermedia reports, which we denominate the structuring axes (informative layers, communicative modalities and contextual variants). We select as an analysis sample three hypermedia reports: Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek – The New York Times (United States), Filhos da Guerra: Quem é o filho que António deixou na guerra – Público (Portugal) and Crise da água: Líquido e Incerto – Folha de S. Paulo (Brazil). The study findings lead us to identify a standard in hypermedia reports which compose a profile of its own kind in the digital writing field. We highlighted some features of this profile: the hypermedia report uses narrative links as complement, to particularize, to illustrate and to detail the information; it employs multiple voices; it uses restrict reader participation; it uses a diverse navigation structure; it's structure has two informative layers. We also find that the communicative modalities are integrated with each other; the text is the key element that conducts the story; the story contextualization occurs using resources such as personification, databases, immersive language and long-form stories