A semantic-based system for querying personal digital libraries

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-28640-0_4. Copyright @ Springer 2004.The decreasing cost and the increasing availability of new technologies is enabling people to create their own digital libraries. One of the main topic in personal digital libraries is allowing people to select interesting information among all the different digital formats available today (pdf, html, tiff, etc.). Moreover the increasing availability of these on-line libraries, as well as the advent of the so called Semantic Web [1], is raising the demand for converting paper documents into digital, possibly semantically annotated, documents. These motivations drove us to design a new system which could enable the user to interact and query documents independently from the digital formats in which they are represented. In order to achieve this independence from the format we consider all the digital documents contained in a digital library as images. Our system tries to automatically detect the layout of the digital documents and recognize the geometric regions of interest. All the extracted information is then encoded with respect to a reference ontology, so that the user can query his digital library by typing free text or browsing the ontology

Personal digital libraries: Keeping track of academic reading material

This paper discusses optionsfor tracking academic reading material and introduces a personal digital library solution. We combined and extended the open source projects Zotero and Greenstone such that material can be easily downloaded and ingested into the combined system. Our prototype system has been explored in a small user study

The Use of Academic Library Resources and Services by Undergraduate in Ibadan North Local Government of Nigeria

Libraries provide resources for knowledge acquisition, recreation, personal interests and inter-personal relationships for all categories of users. It enables the individual to obtain spiritual, inspirational, and recreational activities through reading, and therefore the opportunity of interacting with the society’s wealth and accumulated knowledge. This study examined the undergraduate students’ use of University library services and resources. It was affirmed the undergraduate utilized the University Libraries as learning centre. This was shown by the massive turn out to patronize the library services and resources weekly

Digital Curation and the Citizen Archivist

The increasing array and power of personal digital recordkeeping systems promises both to make it more difficult for established archives to acquire personal and family archives and less likely that individuals might wish to donate personal and family digital archives to archives, libraries, museums, and other institutions serving as documentary repositories. This paper provides a conceptual argument for how projects such as the Digital Curation one ought to consider developing spinoffs for archivists training private citizens how to preserve, manage, and use digital personal and family archives. Rethinking how we approach the public, which will increasingly face difficult challenges in caring for their digital archives, also brings with it substantial promise in informing them about the nature and importance of the archival mission. Can the Digital Curation project provide tools that canbe used for working with the public

Global Trends in Mobile Technology and Their Impact on Your Library

Contrary to the impression of many Americans, some less technologically developed countries are more actively using mobile technology than we are. As mobile technology is exploding in both our personal and professional lives, this is impacting our libraries and our users as they reach out to us with their mobile devices. This article will examine some of these trends and discuss ways that libraries can begin to institute mobile services even if they do not have a lot of funds or technical expertise. Results of a survey of how ACL libraries are using mobile services in their libraries are discussed

Organizing digital music for use: an examination of personal music collections

Current research on music information retrieval and music digital libraries focuses on providing access to huge, public music collections. In this paper we consider a different, but related, problem: supporting an individual in maintaining and using a personal music collection. We analyze organization and access techniques used to manage personal music collections (primarily CDs and MP3 files), and from these behaviors, to suggest user behaviors that should be supported in a personal music digital library (that is, a digital library of an individual's personal music collection)

Utilizing discovery tools for classrooms: how do librarian attitudes on discovery impact tools they teach?

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the utilization of discovery tools in classrooms with the aim of trying to assess the attitude toward them. Design/methodology/approach – The methodology adopted in this article is a literature review. Findings – Despite the author\u27s best efforts to look at the data from all angles, the author found no statistical significance in any of the data pulled from the survey. The author also tested to see if personal preference had any bearing on reference preference and found that there was no statistical significance between personal preference and reference preference. The author removed all responses that said “it depends” and the results showed that there still was no statistical significance between personal preference and reference preference. Originality/value – Libraries can rebrand their services by utilizing and advocating for discovery tools, but it will only happen if they are willing to make changes on their attitudes toward discovery tools