Indigenous languages shaping multi-lingual interfaces

This paper reports on an investigation into the indigenous language usage of two bilingual/multilingual digital libraries. Results show that the indigenous language was significantly used by clients and indicate why clients chose to use the indigenous language. Feedback from clients has suggested how the interface should be improved to assist both indigenous and non-indigenous language usage. These results serve as an example of how indigenous languages are shaping multilingual interfaces

Breaking the browsing barrier for historic search of newspaper texts

Traditionally, to find information in a newspaper collection it has been necessary to painstakingly browse through the individual issues hoping that relevant words will catch your eye. Researchers of New Zealand’s encounter history received a boost when, in 1996, the Alexander Turnbull Library produced a collection on microfiche totaling almost 18,000 pages and covering a printing period from 1842 to 1933. While having all the newspapers in a single collection was a large step forward, browsing or searching for information in this microfiche collection was still time consuming. By incorporating the collection into a digital library with an Internet interface, and by enabling full-text search, we have broken this browsing barrier. Making the information available this way is even more significant as the majority of the collection is written in the Māori language; we have created a Māori language resource that is sorely needed by education and research institutes, and one that provides quick and accurate access to the previously obscure source. The process involved in developing this unique digital library collection, the advantages of traditional newspaper stored in this medium, and the possibilities that we intend to investigate in the future, will be discussed in this paper

Language Preference in a Bi-language Digital Library

This paper examines user choice of interface language in a bi-language digital library(English and Maori, the language of the indigenous people of New Zealand)/ the majority of collection documents are in Maori, and the interface is available in both Maori and English. Log analysis shows three categories of preference for interface language: primarily English, primarily Maori and bilingual(switching back and forth between the two)

Is the web being used to speak our language?

This paper presents results from extensive surveys of the usage of Maori language on the World Wide Web(www, Web) conducted in 1998 and 2002. Issues both supportive and detrimental relating to the use and publication of indigenous languages in the WWW will be highlighted. Specifically: how is the WWW being used to articulate the Maori language

Mining social media to create personalized recommendations for tourist visits

International audiencePhoto sharing platforms users often annotate their trip photos with landmark names. These annotations can be aggregated in order to recommend lists of popular visitor attractions similar to those found in classical tourist guides. However, individual tourist preferences can vary significantly so good recommendations should be tailored to individual tastes. Here we pose this visit personalization as a collaborative filtering problem. We mine the record of visited landmarks exposed in online user data to build a user-user similarity matrix. When a user wants to visit a new destination, a list of potentially interesting visitor attractions is produced based on the experience of like-minded users who already visited that destination. We compare our recommender to a baseline which simulates classical tourist guides on a large sample of Flickr users

Language switching in a digital library; does it make a difference if the default language is set to Maori?

In this paper we investigate the effect of default interface language on usage patterns of the Niupepa digital library (a collection of historic Māori language newspapers), by switching the default interface language between Māori and English in alternate weeks. Transaction analysis of the Niupepa collection logs indicates that changing default language affects the length of user sessions and the number of actions within sessions, and that the English language interface was used most frequently

The European Union and the Final Status for Kosovo

\u27This Article presents the current policy of the European Union toward the final status for Kosovo— Standards before Status -and analyzes potential future developments of the EU\u27s final status position. The March unrests in Kosovo caused a split among the EU institutions, and the reactions of the EU institutions in response to the unrests have varied. Nonetheless, the March unrests may have been the catalyst for a new discussion within the EU about Kosovo. This Article asks which of the EU institutions is the most important decision maker and determines that, of all of the EU institutions that assume different powers within EU\u27s Common Foreign and Security Policy, the European Council enjoys the most authority. This Article then analyzes seven potential statuses for Kosovo and evaluates the pros and cons, from an EU perspective, of each solution. Finally, the national positions of Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and Greece are taken into consideration in order to determine what statuses are the most probable for the short and long term

Delivering the Maori-language newspapers on the Internet

Although any collection of historical newspapers provides a particularly rich and valuable record of events and social and political commentary, the content tends to be difficult to access and extremely time-consuming to browse or search. The advent of digital libraries has meant that for electronically stored text, full-text searching is now a tool readily available for researchers, or indeed anyone wishing to have asscess to specific information in text. Text in this form can be readily distributed via CD-ROM or the Internet, with a significant impact on accessibility over traditional microfiche or hard-copy distribution. For the majority of text being generated de nouveau, availability in electronic form is standard, and hence the increasing use of full-text search facilities. However, for legacy text available only in printed form, the provision of these electronic search tools is dependent on the prior electronic capture of digital facsimile images of the printed text, followed by the conversion of these images to electronic text through the process of optical character recognition (OCR). This article describes a project undertaken at the University of Waikato over the period 1999 to 2001 to produce a full-text searchable version of the Niupepa or Maori- language newspaper collection for delivery over the Internet