Adoption of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) for Librarians’ Professional Development in Africa

Librarian development is the process of constantly strengthening professional attainment, broadening academic knowledge, and enhancing skills. This chapter explores how Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), can be used as continuing professional development of a librarian. This chapter narrates how MOOCs may offer a librarian an opportunity to upgrade their skills or further their education. It explains the benefits and challenges of the adoption of MOOCs for continuing professional development in developing countries and how this can be applied in developing economies. The major benefits of MOOCs to librarians are to help in professional and personal learning, but most librarians who wish to experience progressive career-development are yet to ascertain this fact. The chapter concludes that librarians have the opportunity to leverage this technology to improve their relevant professional skills in the 21st century. It is also established that the adoption and use of MOOCs among professional librarians in Africa is low as in advanced countries

Client-Side Relevance Feedback Approach for Image Retrieval in Mobile Environment

During the last decade, high quality (i.e. over 1 megapixel) built-in cameras have become standard features of handheld devices. Users can take high-resolution pictures and share with friends via the internet. At the same time, the demand of multimedia information retrieval using those pictures on mobile devices has become an urgent problem to solve, and therefore attracts attention. A relevance feedback information retrieval process includes several rounds of query refinement, which incurs exchange of images between the mobile device and the server. With limited wireless bandwidth, this process can incur substantial delay, making the system unfriendly to use. This issue is addressed by considering a Client-side Relevance Feedback (CRF) technique. In the CRF system, Relevance Feedback (RF) is done on client side along. Mobile devices\u27 battery power is saved from exchanging images between server and client and system response is instantaneous, which significantly enhances system usability. Furthermore, because the server is not involved in RF processing, it is able to support more users simultaneously. The experiment indicates that the system outperforms the traditional server-client relevance feedback systems on the aspects of system response time, mobile battery power saving, and retrieval result