Generating collaborative systems for digital libraries: A model-driven approach

This is an open access article shared under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/). Copyright @ 2010 The Authors.The design and development of a digital library involves different stakeholders, such as: information architects, librarians, and domain experts, who need to agree on a common language to describe, discuss, and negotiate the services the library has to offer. To this end, high-level, language-neutral models have to be devised. Metamodeling techniques favor the definition of domainspecific visual languages through which stakeholders can share their views and directly manipulate representations of the domain entities. This paper describes CRADLE (Cooperative-Relational Approach to Digital Library Environments), a metamodel-based framework and visual language for the definition of notions and services related to the development of digital libraries. A collection of tools allows the automatic generation of several services, defined with the CRADLE visual language, and of the graphical user interfaces providing access to them for the final user. The effectiveness of the approach is illustrated by presenting digital libraries generated with CRADLE, while the CRADLE environment has been evaluated by using the cognitive dimensions framework

Content-Based Video Retrieval in Historical Collections of the German Broadcasting Archive

The German Broadcasting Archive (DRA) maintains the cultural heritage of radio and television broadcasts of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR). The uniqueness and importance of the video material stimulates a large scientific interest in the video content. In this paper, we present an automatic video analysis and retrieval system for searching in historical collections of GDR television recordings. It consists of video analysis algorithms for shot boundary detection, concept classification, person recognition, text recognition and similarity search. The performance of the system is evaluated from a technical and an archival perspective on 2,500 hours of GDR television recordings.Comment: TPDL 2016, Hannover, Germany. Final version is available at Springer via DO

An examination of automatic video retrieval technology on access to the contents of an historical video archive

Purpose – This paper aims to provide an initial understanding of the constraints that historical video collections pose to video retrieval technology and the potential that online access offers to both archive and users. Design/methodology/approach – A small and unique collection of videos on customs and folklore was used as a case study. Multiple methods were employed to investigate the effectiveness of technology and the modality of user access. Automatic keyframe extraction was tested on the visual content while the audio stream was used for automatic classification of speech and music clips. The user access (search vs browse) was assessed in a controlled user evaluation. A focus group and a survey provided insight on the actual use of the analogue archive. The results of these multiple studies were then compared and integrated (triangulation). Findings – The amateur material challenged automatic techniques for video and audio indexing, thus suggesting that the technology must be tested against the material before deciding on a digitisation strategy. Two user interaction modalities, browsing vs searching, were tested in a user evaluation. Results show users preferred searching, but browsing becomes essential when the search engine fails in matching query and indexed words. Browsing was also valued for serendipitous discovery; however the organisation of the archive was judged cryptic and therefore of limited use. This indicates that the categorisation of an online archive should be thought of in terms of users who might not understand the current classification. The focus group and the survey showed clearly the advantage of online access even when the quality of the video surrogate is poor. The evidence gathered suggests that the creation of a digital version of a video archive requires a rethinking of the collection in terms of the new medium: a new archive should be specially designed to exploit the potential that the digital medium offers. Similarly, users' needs have to be considered before designing the digital library interface, as needs are likely to be different from those imagined. Originality/value – This paper is the first attempt to understand the advantages offered and limitations held by video retrieval technology for small video archives like those often found in special collections

Digital Image Access & Retrieval

The 33th Annual Clinic on Library Applications of Data Processing, held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in March of 1996, addressed the theme of "Digital Image Access & Retrieval." The papers from this conference cover a wide range of topics concerning digital imaging technology for visual resource collections. Papers covered three general areas: (1) systems, planning, and implementation; (2) automatic and semi-automatic indexing; and (3) preservation with the bulk of the conference focusing on indexing and retrieval.published or submitted for publicatio

Orally active antischistosomal early leads identified from the open access malaria box.

BACKGROUND: Worldwide hundreds of millions of schistosomiasis patients rely on treatment with a single drug, praziquantel. Therapeutic limitations and the threat of praziquantel resistance underline the need to discover and develop next generation drugs. METHODOLOGY: We studied the antischistosomal properties of the Medicines for Malaria Venture (MMV) malaria box containing 200 diverse drug-like and 200 probe-like compounds with confirmed in vitro activity against Plasmodium falciparum. Compounds were tested against schistosomula and adult Schistosoma mansoni in vitro. Based on in vitro performance, available pharmacokinetic profiles and toxicity data, selected compounds were investigated in vivo. PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Promising antischistosomal activity (IC50: 1.4-9.5 µM) was observed for 34 compounds against schistosomula. Three compounds presented IC50 values between 0.8 and 1.3 µM against adult S. mansoni. Two promising early leads were identified, namely a N,N'-diarylurea and a 2,3-dianilinoquinoxaline. Treatment of S. mansoni infected mice with a single oral 400 mg/kg dose of these drugs resulted in significant worm burden reductions of 52.5% and 40.8%, respectively. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: The two candidates identified by investigating the MMV malaria box are characterized by good pharmacokinetic profiles, low cytotoxic potential and easy chemistry and therefore offer an excellent starting point for antischistosomal drug discovery and development

Index to Library Trends Volume 38

published or submitted for publicatio

Ensuring the discoverability of digital images for social work education : an online tagging survey to test controlled vocabularies

The digital age has transformed access to all kinds of educational content not only in text-based format but also digital images and other media. As learning technologists and librarians begin to organise these new media into digital collections for educational purposes, older problems associated with cataloguing and classifying non-text media have re-emerged. At the heart of this issue is the problem of describing complex and highly subjective images in a reliable and consistent manner. This paper reports on the findings of research designed to test the suitability of two controlled vocabularies to index and thereby improve the discoverability of images stored in the Learning Exchange, a repository for social work education and research. An online survey asked respondents to "tag", a series of images and responses were mapped against the two controlled vocabularies. Findings showed that a large proportion of user generated tags could be mapped to the controlled vocabulary terms (or their equivalents). The implications of these findings for indexing and discovering content are discussed in the context of a wider review of the literature on "folksonomies" (or user tagging) versus taxonomies and controlled vocabularies

Overview of the 2005 cross-language image retrieval track (ImageCLEF)

The purpose of this paper is to outline efforts from the 2005 CLEF crosslanguage image retrieval campaign (ImageCLEF). The aim of this CLEF track is to explore the use of both text and content-based retrieval methods for cross-language image retrieval. Four tasks were offered in the ImageCLEF track: a ad-hoc retrieval from an historic photographic collection, ad-hoc retrieval from a medical collection, an automatic image annotation task, and a user-centered (interactive) evaluation task that is explained in the iCLEF summary. 24 research groups from a variety of backgrounds and nationalities (14 countries) participated in ImageCLEF. In this paper we describe the ImageCLEF tasks, submissions from participating groups and summarise the main fndings

From Keyword Search to Exploration: How Result Visualization Aids Discovery on the Web

A key to the Web's success is the power of search. The elegant way in which search results are returned is usually remarkably effective. However, for exploratory search in which users need to learn, discover, and understand novel or complex topics, there is substantial room for improvement. Human computer interaction researchers and web browser designers have developed novel strategies to improve Web search by enabling users to conveniently visualize, manipulate, and organize their Web search results. This monograph offers fresh ways to think about search-related cognitive processes and describes innovative design approaches to browsers and related tools. For instance, while key word search presents users with results for specific information (e.g., what is the capitol of Peru), other methods may let users see and explore the contexts of their requests for information (related or previous work, conflicting information), or the properties that associate groups of information assets (group legal decisions by lead attorney). We also consider the both traditional and novel ways in which these strategies have been evaluated. From our review of cognitive processes, browser design, and evaluations, we reflect on the future opportunities and new paradigms for exploring and interacting with Web search results

Establishing a resource center: A guide for organizations supporting community foundations

Maintaining a resource center such as a library is a central tasks of an association to serve its members, though one of the first to be neglected. WINGS-CF commissioned this guide to assist organizations supporting community foundations to review and organize their resource items, and to propose several classification systems / taxonomies