A modular methodology for converting large, complex books into usable, accessible and standards-compliant ebooks

This report describes the methodology used for ebook creation for the Glasgow Digital Library (GDL), and provides detailed instructions on how the same methodology could be used elsewhere. The document includes a description and explanation of the processes for ebook creation followed by a tutorial

Creation of a Style Independent Intelligent Autonomous Citation Indexer to Support Academic Research

This paper describes the current state of RUgle, a system for classifying and indexing papers made available on the World Wide Web, in a domain-independent and universal manner. By building RUgle with the most relaxed restrictions possible on the formatting of the documents it can process, we hope to create a system that can combine the best features of currently available closed library searches that are designed to facilitate academic research with the inclusive nature of general purpose search engines that continually crawl the web and add documents to their indexed database

Finite element model updating of a RC building considering seismic response trends

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The authors would like to thank their supporters. GeoNet staff, particularly Dr Jim Cousins, Dr S.R. Uma and Dr Ken Gledhill, helped with access to seismic data and building information. Faheem Butt’s PhD study was funded by Higher Education Commission (HEC) Pakistan. Piotr Omenzetter’s work within The LRF Centre for Safety and Reliability Engineering at the University of Aberdeen is supported by The Lloyd's Register Foundation (The LRF). The LRF supports the advancement of engineering-related education, and funds research and development that enhances safety of life at sea, on land and in the air.Peer reviewedPostprin

How Well Do Ontario Library Web Sites Meet New Accessibility Requirements?

New changes to Ontario law will require library web sites to comply with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, version 2.0 (WCAG 2.0). This study evaluates 64 Ontario university, college, and public library web sites to see how well they comply with WCAG 2.0 guidelines at present. An average of 14.75 accessibility problems were found per web page. The most common problems included invalid html, poor color contrast, incorrect form controls and labels, missing alt text, bad link text, improper use of headings, using html to format pages, using absolute units of measure, and issues with tables and embedded objects

Research Articles in Simplified HTML: a Web-first format for HTML-based scholarly articles

Purpose. This paper introduces the Research Articles in Simplified HTML (or RASH), which is a Web-first format for writing HTML-based scholarly papers; it is accompanied by the RASH Framework, a set of tools for interacting with RASH-based articles. The paper also presents an evaluation that involved authors and reviewers of RASH articles submitted to the SAVE-SD 2015 and SAVE-SD 2016 workshops. Design. RASH has been developed aiming to: be easy to learn and use; share scholarly documents (and embedded semantic annotations) through the Web; support its adoption within the existing publishing workflow. Findings. The evaluation study confirmed that RASH is ready to be adopted in workshops, conferences, and journals and can be quickly learnt by researchers who are familiar with HTML. Research Limitations. The evaluation study also highlighted some issues in the adoption of RASH, and in general of HTML formats, especially by less technically savvy users. Moreover, additional tools are needed, e.g., for enabling additional conversions from/to existing formats such as OpenXML. Practical Implications. RASH (and its Framework) is another step towards enabling the definition of formal representations of the meaning of the content of an article, facilitating its automatic discovery, enabling its linking to semantically related articles, providing access to data within the article in actionable form, and allowing integration of data between papers. Social Implications. RASH addresses the intrinsic needs related to the various users of a scholarly article: researchers (focussing on its content), readers (experiencing new ways for browsing it), citizen scientists (reusing available data formally defined within it through semantic annotations), publishers (using the advantages of new technologies as envisioned by the Semantic Publishing movement). Value. RASH helps authors to focus on the organisation of their texts, supports them in the task of semantically enriching the content of articles, and leaves all the issues about validation, visualisation, conversion, and semantic data extraction to the various tools developed within its Framework