Follow the users: assessing UK nonprint legal deposit within the academic discovery environment

This chapter explores the role that non-print legal deposit collections can play in library discovery and calls on libraries to help users to understand how these unique resources can contribute to their research

Metadata enrichment for digital heritage: users as co-creators

This paper espouses the concept of metadata enrichment through an expert and user-focused approach to metadata creation and management. To this end, it is argued the Web 2.0 paradigm enables users to be proactive metadata creators. As Shirky (2008, p.47) argues Web 2.0’s social tools enable “action by loosely structured groups, operating without managerial direction and outside the profit motive”. Lagoze (2010, p. 37) advises, “the participatory nature of Web 2.0 should not be dismissed as just a popular phenomenon [or fad]”. Carletti (2016) proposes a participatory digital cultural heritage approach where Web 2.0 approaches such as crowdsourcing can be sued to enrich digital cultural objects. It is argued that “heritage crowdsourcing, community-centred projects or other forms of public participation”. On the other hand, the new collaborative approaches of Web 2.0 neither negate nor replace contemporary standards-based metadata approaches. Hence, this paper proposes a mixed metadata approach where user created metadata augments expert-created metadata and vice versa. The metadata creation process no longer remains to be the sole prerogative of the metadata expert. The Web 2.0 collaborative environment would now allow users to participate in both adding and re-using metadata. The case of expert-created (standards-based, top-down) and user-generated metadata (socially-constructed, bottom-up) approach to metadata are complementary rather than mutually-exclusive. The two approaches are often mistakenly considered as dichotomies, albeit incorrectly (Gruber, 2007; Wright, 2007) . This paper espouses the importance of enriching digital information objects with descriptions pertaining the about-ness of information objects. Such richness and diversity of description, it is argued, could chiefly be achieved by involving users in the metadata creation process. This paper presents the importance of the paradigm of metadata enriching and metadata filtering for the cultural heritage domain. Metadata enriching states that a priori metadata that is instantiated and granularly structured by metadata experts is continually enriched through socially-constructed (post-hoc) metadata, whereby users are pro-actively engaged in co-creating metadata. The principle also states that metadata that is enriched is also contextually and semantically linked and openly accessible. In addition, metadata filtering states that metadata resulting from implementing the principle of enriching should be displayed for users in line with their needs and convenience. In both enriching and filtering, users should be considered as prosumers, resulting in what is called collective metadata intelligence

Using RDF to Describe and Link Social Science Data to Related Resources on the Web

Kramer S, Leahey A, Southall H, Vompras J, Wackerow J. Using RDF to Describe and Link Social Science Data to Related Resources on the Web. DDI Working Paper Series. Dagstuhl, Germany: DDI Alliance; 2012.This document focuses on how best to relate Resource Description Framework (RDF)-described datasets to other related resources and objects (publications, geographies, organizations, people, etc.) in the Semantic Web. This includes a description of what would be needed to make these types of relationships most useful, including which RDF vocabularies should be used, potential link predicates, and possible data sources. RDF provides a good model for describing social science data because it supports formal semantics that provide a dependable basis for reasoning about the meaning of an RDF expression. In particular, it supports defined notions of entailment which provide a basis for defining reliable rules of inference in RDF data. Our findings are discussed in the context of social science data and more specifically, how to leverage existing metadata models to use alongside linked data. We provide a case for leveraging the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) to enable semantic linking of social science data to other data and related resources on the Web. This document is organized into five use cases, which we consider in turn. Use cases include: linking related publications to data, linking data about people and organizations to research data, linking geography, linking to related studies, and linking data to licenses. We briefly discuss emerging or known issues surrounding the potential use of linked data within each of the defined use cases. Following these, we list more topics that could develop into additional use cases. Appendix A lists elements from the DDI-Codebook and DDI-Lifecycle specifications that are relevant to each use case

Heading for new Shores: Crowdsourcing for Entrepreneurial Opportunity Creation

In this conceptual paper, we propose crowdsourcing for opportunity creation as a new field of further research in both in the information systems and entrepreneurship domain. Building on previous research on entrepreneurial opportunity creation, we elaborate on the benefits of em-ploying a crowdsourcing approach in order to reduce uncertainty and iteratively develop an op-portunity into a new venture. Based on this assessment we develop a research agenda that high-lights the need to adapt previous crowdsourcing mechanisms for the special context of entrepre-neurial opportunity creation. In doings so, we expand research of crowdsourcing to the field of entrepreneurship by extending the principles of crowdsourcing for innovation for entrepreneuri-al opportunity creation. Further, by highlighting the requirements of crowdsourcing for oppor-tunity creation, we point towards potential future research issues. Such research should examine novel participation architectures that enable the iterative co-creation of an opportunity through different maturity stages, thereby overcoming the limitations of previous crowdsourcing efforts that rather focus on the generation of novel ideas than its evolution. Finally, we propose crowdsourcing as a practical way for entrepreneurs to validate their assumptions about their op-portunity, thereby achieving fast and early product-market fit

Sharing food, gathering information: the context and visibility of community information work in a crisis event

This paper describes ICT use after a disaster, connecting the stories of various community responders and tracing their activities across sociotechnical networks. Drawing on contextual interviews and the digital record, we reveal how information work, food work, and emotional labor intersected. At the most superficial level, we find that many community responders continue to rely upon face-to-face communication and “real simple” technologies to coordinate their activities. This research also speaks to the visibility of community response work—offering a method for surfacing less visible work given the social complexities of a disaster. This approach provides a complementary perspective to research that relies solely on digital traces

Making digital history: The impact of digitality on public participation and scholarly practices in historical research

This thesis investigates tow key questions: firstly, how do two broad groups - academic, family and local historians, and the public - evaluate, use, and contribute to digital history resources? And consequently, what impact have digital technologies had on public participation and scholarly practices in historical research? Analysing the impact of design on participant experiences and the reception of digital historiography by demonstrating the value of methods drawn from human-computer interaction, including heuristic evaluation, trace ethnography and semi-structured interviews. This thesis also investigates the relationship between heritage crowdsourcing projects (which ask the public to help with meaningful, inherently rewarding tasks that contribute to a shared, significant goal or research interest related to cultural heritage collections or knowledge) and the development of historical skills and interests. It situates crowdsourcing and citizen history within the broader field of participatory digital history and then focuses on the impact of digitality on the research practices of faculty and community historians. Chapter 1 provides an overview of over 400 digital history projects aimed at engaging the public or collecting, creating or enhancing records about historical materials for scholarly and general audiences. Chapter 2 discusses design factors that may influence the success of crowdsourcing projects. Following this, Chapter 3 explores the ways in which some crowdsourcing projects encourage deeper engagement with history or science, and the role of communities of practice in citizen history. Chapter 4 shifts our focus from public participation to scholarly practices in historical research, presenting the results of interviews conducted with 29 faculty and community historians. Finally, the Conclusion draws together the threads that link public participation and scholarly practices, teasing out the ways in which the practices of discovering, gathering, creating and sharing historical materials and knowledge have been affected by digital methods, tools and resources

Future of the library and information science profession

In this project, ALIA set out to investigate the big questions. Heading towards 2025: How will libraries remain relevant for users? What changes will institutions and individuals in the sector experience? Will ‘library and information professional’ continue to be a necessary and desirable occupation? We were looking for bold thinking and we received challenging, insightful, inspiring responses to our request for feedback, through submissions from individuals and groups; participants at our Future of the LIS Profession discussions around Australia; senior library leaders, who gathered at our Summit; and the heads of other associations in the sector, who attended our sector roundtable. All these events were held between May and October 2013. Conversations initially focused on the current issues facing library and information professionals, before projecting forward into how we saw the landscape developing by 2025. As a result, we have been able to identify indicators, which will enable us to map our journey, and actions that will support positive outcomes. We concluded that the future is not fixed and we are in a position to write it ourselves rather than having it written for us. We need to be the architects of our own destiny, anticipating change and adapting our library and information services to be part of the flow We received challenging, insightful, inspiring responses to our request for feedback at events held all around Australia. As a result, we have been able to identify themes and develop actions that will support positive outcomes. The findings from the project have been produced as seven reports: Future of the Library and Information Science Profession Report | Action List Future of the LIS Profession: Professionals Report Future of the LIS Profession: Collecting Institutions Report | Summary Future of the LIS Profession: Public Libraries Report | Summary Future of the LIS Profession: Special Libraries Report | Summary Future of the LIS Profession: School Libraries Report | Summary Future of the LIS Profession: Tertiary Libraries Report | Summary: University | Summary: VE

Big Data Breaking Barriers – First step on a long trail

Most data sets and streams have a geospatial component. Some people even claim that about 80% of all data is related to location. In the era of Big Data this number might even be underestimated, as data sets interrelate and initially non-spatial data becomes indirectly geo-referenced. The optimal treatment of Big Data thus requires advanced methods and technologies for handling the geospatial aspects in data storage, processing, pattern recognition, prediction, visualisation and exploration. On the one hand, our work exploits earth and environmental sciences for existing interoperability standards, and the foundational data structures, algorithms and software that are required to meet these geospatial information handling tasks. On the other hand, we are concerned with the arising needs to combine human analysis capacities (intelligence augmentation) with machine power (artificial intelligence). This paper provides an overview of the emerging landscape and outlines our (Digital Earth) vision for addressing the upcoming issues. We particularly request the projection and re-use of the existing environmental, earth observation and remote sensing expertise in other sectors, i.e. to break the barriers of all of these silos by investigating integrated applications.JRC.H.6-Digital Earth and Reference Dat

From Signal to Social : Steps Towards Pervasive Social Context

The widespread adoption of smartphones with advanced sensing, computing and data transfer capabilities has made scientific studies of human social behavior possible at a previously unprecedented scale. It has also allowed context-awareness to become a natural feature in many applications using features such as activity recognition and location information. However, one of the most important aspects of context remains largely untapped at scale, i.e. social interactions and social context. Social interaction sensing has been explored using smartphones and specialized hardware for research purposes within computational social science and ubiquitous computing, but several obstacles remain to make it usable in practice by applications at industrial scale. In this thesis, I explore methods of physical proximity sensing and extraction of social context information from user-generated data for the purpose of context-aware applications. Furthermore, I explore the application space made possible through these methods, especially in the class of use cases that are characterized by embodied social agency, through field studies and a case study.A major concern when collecting context information is the impact on user privacy. I have performed a user study in which I have surveyed the user attitudes towards the privacy implications of proximity sensing. Finally, I present results from quantitatively estimating the sensitivity of a simple type of context information, i.e. application usage, in terms of risk of user re-identification