Initial specification of the evaluation tasks "Use cases to bridge validation and benchmarking" PROMISE Deliverable 2.1

Evaluation of multimedia and multilingual information access systems needs to be performed from a usage oriented perspective. This document outlines use cases from the three use case domains of the PROMISE project and gives some initial pointers to how their respective characteristics can be extrapolated to determine and guide evaluation activities, both with respect to benchmarking and to validation of the usage hypotheses. The use cases will be developed further during the course of the evaluation activities and workshops projected to occur in coming CLEF conferences

Digital information support for concept design

This paper outlines the issues in effective utilisation of digital resources in conceptual design. Access to appropriate information acts as stimuli and can lead to better substantiated concepts. This paper addresses the issues of presenting such information in a digital form for effective use, exploring digital libraries and groupware as relevant literature areas, and argues that improved integration of these two technologies is necessary to better support the concept generation task. The development of the LauLima learning environment and digital library is consequently outlined. Despite its attempts to integrate the designers' working space and digital resources, continuing issues in library utilisation and migration of information to design concepts are highlighted through a class study. In light of this, new models of interaction to increase information use are explored

BlogForever D3.2: Interoperability Prospects

This report evaluates the interoperability prospects of the BlogForever platform. Therefore, existing interoperability models are reviewed, a Delphi study to identify crucial aspects for the interoperability of web archives and digital libraries is conducted, technical interoperability standards and protocols are reviewed regarding their relevance for BlogForever, a simple approach to consider interoperability in specific usage scenarios is proposed, and a tangible approach to develop a succession plan that would allow a reliable transfer of content from the current digital archive to other digital repositories is presented

Library Resources: Procurement, Innovation and Exploitation in a Digital World

The possibilities of the digital future require new models for procurement, innovation and exploitation. Emma Crowley and Chris Spencer describe the skills staff need to deliver resources in hybrid and digital environments. The chapter demonstrates the innovative ways that librarians use to procure and exploit the wealth of resources available in a digital world. They also describe the technological developments that can be adopted to improve workflow processes and they highlight the challenges faced on this fascinating journey

Digital libraries and minority languages

Digital libraries have a pivotal role to play in the preservation and maintenance of international cultures in general and minority languages in particular. This paper outlines a software tool for building digital libraries that is well adapted for creating and distributing local information collections in minority languages, and describes some contexts in which it is used. The system can make multilingual documents available in structured collections and allows them to be accessed via multilingual interfaces. It is issued under a free open-source licence, which encourages participatory design of the software, and an end-user interface allows community-based localization of the various language interfaces - of which there are many

CHORUS Deliverable 3.4: Vision Document

The goal of the CHORUS Vision Document is to create a high level vision on audio-visual search engines in order to give guidance to the future R&D work in this area and to highlight trends and challenges in this domain. The vision of CHORUS is strongly connected to the CHORUS Roadmap Document (D2.3). A concise document integrating the outcomes of the two deliverables will be prepared for the end of the project (NEM Summit)

Visual collaging of music in a digital library

This article explores the role visual browsing can play within a digital music library. The context to the work is provided through a review of related techniques drawn from the fields of digital libraries and human computer interaction. Implemented within the open source digital library toolkit Greenstone, a prototype system is described that combines images located through textual metadata with a visualisation technique known as collaging to provide a leisurely, undirected interaction with a music collection. Emphasis in the article is given to the augmentations of the basic technique to work in the musical domain

Use of Subimages in Fish Species Identification: A Qualitative Study

Many scholarly tasks involve working with subdocuments, or contextualized fine-grain information, i.e., with information that is part of some larger unit. A digital library (DL) facil- itates management, access, retrieval, and use of collections of data and metadata through services. However, most DLs do not provide infrastructure or services to support working with subdocuments. Superimposed information (SI) refers to new information that is created to reference subdocu- ments in existing information resources. We combine this idea of SI with traditional DL services, to define and develop a DL with SI (SI-DL). We explored the use of subimages and evaluated the use of a prototype SI-DL (SuperIDR) in fish species identification, a scholarly task that involves work- ing with subimages. The contexts and strategies of working with subimages in SuperIDR suggest new and enhanced sup- port (SI-DL services) for scholarly tasks that involve working with subimages, including new ways of querying and search- ing for subimages and associated information. The main contribution of our work are the insights gained from these findings of use of subimages and of SuperIDR (a prototype SI-DL), which lead to recommendations for the design of digital libraries with superimposed information

Designing library tools: the (un)importance of employee involvement

The growing trend of public institutions to open up data and information to citizens encouraged archives and libraries to enhance the disclosure of their content towards end-users. This implies technical challenges as more and more information is exchanged not only between people, but also between different databases and applications which are consulted by different user groups through different devices and entry points. For libraries, the challenge lies in constructing a properly functioning catalogue which is able to combine a huge amount of information from various sources and is consultable by a large group of end-users in a user friendly manner. Based on the User Centred Design paradigm and Kaulio’s (1998) degrees of user involvement in innovation, this paper wants to consider whether involving users during the creation of metadata tools can result in more motivated library co-workers and a more appreciated tool and (hopefully) in a permanent tagging tool