Automated user modeling for personalized digital libraries

Digital libraries (DL) have become one of the most typical ways of accessing any kind of digitalized information. Due to this key role, users welcome any improvements on the services they receive from digital libraries. One trend used to improve digital services is through personalization. Up to now, the most common approach for personalization in digital libraries has been user-driven. Nevertheless, the design of efficient personalized services has to be done, at least in part, in an automatic way. In this context, machine learning techniques automate the process of constructing user models. This paper proposes a new approach to construct digital libraries that satisfy user’s necessity for information: Adaptive Digital Libraries, libraries that automatically learn user preferences and goals and personalize their interaction using this information

USER AWARENESS IN CYCLADES: A COLLABORATIVE AND PERSONALIZED ENVIRONMENT FOR OPEN DIGITAL ARCHIVES

ABSTRACT Every day a huge amount of newly created information is electronically published in Digital Libraries. Complementary to the usual vision, we envisage a Digital Library not only as an information source where users may submit queries to satisfy their daily information need, but also as a collaborative working and meeting space of people sharing common interests. CYCLADES is a system, which combines several technologies from the Information Retrieval and Digital Library area, providing a highly personalized environment where not only users may organize (and search into) the information space according to an individual flavor, but, and more importantly, also provides support for advanced collaborative work. In particular, users may build communities, may become aware of each other, exchange information and knowledge with other users, and may get recommendations from the system based on preference patterns of users. We will present some experimental results showing the effectiveness of CYCLADES in relating users with similar interests to each other. This is important as it may help users to get aware of other users sharing similar interest and to enter maybe into long-term relationships

Evaluation of a personalized digital library based on cognitive styles: Adaptivity vs. adaptability

Personalization can be addressed by adaptability and adaptivity, which have different advantages and disadvantages. This study investigates how digital library users react to these two techniques. More specifically, we develop a personalized digital library to suit the needs of different cognitive styles based on the findings of our previous work (Frias-Martinez, et al., in press). The personalized digital library includes two versions: adaptive version and adaptable version. The results showed that users not only performed better in the adaptive version, but also they perceived more positively to the adaptive version. In addition, cognitive styles have great effects on users’ responses to adaptability and adaptivity. These results provide guidance for designers to select suitable techniques to develop personalized digital libraries

A Survey of Digital Library Aggregation Services

This report provides an overview of a diverse set of more than thirty digital library aggregation services, organizes them into functional clusters, and then evaluates them more fully from the perspective of an informed user. Most of the services under review rely wholly or partially on the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), although some of them predate its inception and a few use predominantly Z39.50 protocols. In the opening section of this report, each service is annotated with its organizational affiliation, subject coverage, function, audience, status, and size. Critical issues surrounding each of these elements are presented in order to provide the reader with an appreciation of the nuances inherent in seemingly straightforward factual information, such as audience or size. Each service is then grouped into one of five functional clusters: • open access e-print archives and servers; • cross-archive search services and aggregators; • from digital collections to digital library environments; • from peer-reviewed referratories to portal services; • specialized search engines

Managing geography learning objects using personalized project spaces in G-Portal

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Supporting field study with personalized project spaces in a geographical digital library

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Virtual digital libraries

Digital libraries represent the meeting places for knowledge providers and knowledge consumers supporting and enhancing the process through which knowledge is created, used, and discovered. The demand for digital libraries is worldwide strong. These complex systems can offer a richer set of functionality than that initially expected and are able to transform the way in which joint research is conducted, thus responding to the requirements of a great number of research communities. In fact, nowadays research is a collaborative and multidisciplinary effort conducted by virtual research organisations whose components are spread worldwide. Despite this large and innovative demand the current digital library development models remain unchanged and so they are not able to match the emerging requirements. In this dissertation we propose a novel approach based on virtual digital libraries, i. e. digital libraries built by dynamically aggregating and appropriately presenting the pool of shared resources needed to fulfil the requirements of digital library communities. To support such an approach we introduced (i ) a reference model for understanding significant relationships among the components of digital libraries and for developing consistent services that support them and (ii ) a set of approaches and services able to provide virtual views over the heterogeneous information space resulting from reusing shared information sources. In particular, three approaches to information space virtualization are presented that provide profitable usage of the shared resources: information objects virtualization, collections virtualization, and distributed semantic search

Contexts and Contributions: Building the Distributed Library

This report updates and expands on A Survey of Digital Library Aggregation Services, originally commissioned by the DLF as an internal report in summer 2003, and released to the public later that year. It highlights major developments affecting the ecosystem of scholarly communications and digital libraries since the last survey and provides an analysis of OAI implementation demographics, based on a comparative review of repository registries and cross-archive search services. Secondly, it reviews the state-of-practice for a cohort of digital library aggregation services, grouping them in the context of the problem space to which they most closely adhere. Based in part on responses collected in fall 2005 from an online survey distributed to the original core services, the report investigates the purpose, function and challenges of next-generation aggregation services. On a case-by-case basis, the advances in each service are of interest in isolation from each other, but the report also attempts to situate these services in a larger context and to understand how they fit into a multi-dimensional and interdependent ecosystem supporting the worldwide community of scholars. Finally, the report summarizes the contributions of these services thus far and identifies obstacles requiring further attention to realize the goal of an open, distributed digital library system

Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Social Information Retrieval for Technology-Enhanced Learning

Learning and teaching resource are available on the Web - both in terms of digital learning content and people resources (e.g. other learners, experts, tutors). They can be used to facilitate teaching and learning tasks. The remaining challenge is to develop, deploy and evaluate Social information retrieval (SIR) methods, techniques and systems that provide learners and teachers with guidance in potentially overwhelming variety of choices. The aim of the SIRTEL’09 workshop is to look onward beyond recent achievements to discuss specific topics, emerging research issues, new trends and endeavors in SIR for TEL. The workshop will bring together researchers and practitioners to present, and more importantly, to discuss the current status of research in SIR and TEL and its implications for science and teaching