Published by admin on 26 Oct 2009
Published by rholley on 15 Oct 2009
The definition and purpose of crowdsourcing and social engagement with users will be discussed with particular reference to the Australian Newspapers service http://newspapers.nla.gov.au, FamilySearch http://familysearchindexing.org, Wikipedia http://wikipedia.org and the Distributed Proofreaders http://www.pgdp.net. These services have harnessed thousands of digital volunteers who transcribe, create, enhance and correct text. The successful strategies which motivated users to help, engage, and develop the outcomes will be examined. How can the lessons learnt be applied more broadly across the library and archive sector and what is the future potential? Users no longer expect to be passive receivers of information and want to engage with data, each other and non-profit making organisations to help achieve what may seem to be impossible goals and targets. If libraries want to stay relevant and valued, offer high quality data and continue to have a significant social impact they are well advised to have active engagement strategies and harness crowdsourcing techniques and partnerships to enhance their services. Can libraries respond to the shift in power and control of information and do we dare give users something greater than power – freedom?
Published by iwitten on 15 Oct 2009
Wikipedia is a goldmine of information; not just for its many readers, but also for the growing community of researchers who recognize it as a resource of exceptional scale and utility. It represents a vast investment of manual effort and judgment: a huge, constantly evolving tapestry of concepts and relations that is being applied to a host of tasks.
This talk will introduce the process of “wikification”; that is, automatically and judiciously augmenting a plain-text document with pertinent hyperlinks to Wikipedia articles — as though the document were itself a Wikipedia article. We first describe how Wikipedia can be used to determine semantic relatedness, and then introduce a new, high-performance method of wikification that exploits Wikipedia’s 60 M internal hyperlinks for relational information and their anchor texts as lexical information, using simple machine learning.
The result amounts to a new semantic representation of text in terms of the salient concepts it mentions, where “concept” is equated to “Wikipedia article.” Wikification is a useful process in itself, adding value to plain text documents. More importantly, it supports new methods of document processing that exploit Wikipedia’s internal hyperlinks for relational information and their anchor texts as lexical information.
Presentation [ Open ] – (Requires Adobe Flash Player)
Published by mchantiny on 15 Oct 2009
The current status of University of Hawaii at Manoa Library Pacific-related image collections including the Steve Thomas Traditional Voyaging, George Grace and Margo Duggan collections, all posted to the web using the OAI harvestable Streetprint Digital Library software and the Henry P. Edmunds and William A. Bryan photographs of Rapanui and the venerable Trust Territory Archive photo collection will be discussed. The Pacific Collection future plans and wish lists for digitization of additional collections and their relationship with existing collections in the ODiL will be described. Hawaii-related collections of images (Save our Surf) as well as text (Hawaiian Historical Society) will be highlighted and recent experiments with updating the Annexation of Hawaii web site and the UHM Library’s participation in the U.S. National Digital Newspaper Program will also be described. Thoughts (possibly scandalous or heretical) about the ODiL portal in light of very new developments such as the World Digital Library and slightly older initiatives such as the UNESCO Memory of the World Committee for Asia/Pacific may be voiced.
Presentation [ PPT ]
Published by bmiller on 15 Oct 2009
Next-Generation Technical Services (NGTS) is an initiative developed by the University of California Libraries as an outgrowth of the UC Libraries Bibliographic Services Task Force Report and a strategic partnership with OCLC to develop a “Next-Generation Melvyl” to re-architect the systemwide OPAC in order to transform the user experience of search and retrieval. NGTS will build on and complement that work by redesigning technical services workflows across the full range of library formats in order to take advantage of new systemwide capabilities and tools, to minimize redundant activities, to improve efficiency, and to foster innovation in collection development and management to the benefit of UC library users. The results of this initiative will most likely have far-ranging impact that will extend beyond the University of California libraries.
Presentation [ PPT ]
Published by rfelsing on 30 Sep 2009
This presentation analyzes the nine-year experience of an academic digital library, e-Asia, which now holds over 4,000 items. In many respects, the e-Asia library is a long-running experiment. Yet the project is mature enough to provided lessons in what to do (and what not to do) when digital text is the focus of collection building. Unlike traditional libraries where, over time, books migrate to and from their shelves, digital libraries hold content that remains relatively immobile while it is the digital “shelves” that change and migrate over time.
The issues to be highlighted in this presentation are from an “in-the-trenches” perspective. Issues include: workflows, scanning procedures and choices, software use, OCR and (cooperative) proofreading, non-Roman character recognition, ebook formats, and finished product presentation. Other sundry concerns such as storage/archiving, the mobile web, and the impact of Google books, e-ink, and Amazon.com will be discussed in the contect of the academic digital library.
Presentation [ PPT ]
Published by cquinlan on 30 Sep 2009
The new University of Southern California Digital Library is the outcome of significant transformations in the USC Libraries’ digitization philosophy, practice, and infrastructure. The new entity unites digitization processes, collection-development strategies, metadata services, distributed content creation, and a platform for new modes of intellectual investigation and outreach. It builds upon the libraries’ previous digital archive to engage the archival and research communities through more active channels, including content-contribution tools, digital-exhibition programs, and thematic visualizations as investigative pathways through the archives.
The session presents the USC Libraries’ Basel Mission image collection—a recently completed addition to the Internet Mission Photography Archive—as an end-to-end, philosophy-to-outreach case study of the USC Digital Library. The archives, global in scope, preserve a photographic record of 19th- and 20th-century European missionary contacts—some that are among the first such interactions—with Asia and Africa. The session will cover: the digital library’s contributor module that enables global partners to create content and descriptions; a pilot program with CHNM’s open-source Omeka exhibition platform; and a REST API pilot project that encourages mash-ups, social-media experimentation, and other means of building communities and enhancing discoverability.
Presentation [ PPT ]
Published by jcheng on 30 Oct 2008
In April 2008, the University of California, San Diego sent its first shipment of books to be digitized as part of the Google Book Search Library Project, a global effort launched in 2004 to digitize collections from the world’s top universities and libraries to make them searchable and discoverable online. The UC San Diego Libraries will contribute thousands of volumes from its East Asia collection and from its International Relations & Pacific Studies Library, in such diverse subject areas as history, literature, political science, public policy and economics. Speakers will discuss the project background, estimated future impacts, local processes, applied standards, technical features, and lessons learned.
Published by psidorko on 15 Oct 2008
The University of Hong Kong Libraries has begun two initiatives this year employing IT to improve its services to readers:
Rare Book Digitisation Project. The Libraries have allowed the iGroup to set up a scanning shop in its Main Library. Initially it will be used to scan 4,000 western language monographs in its rare book collection dealing mainly with China. It will then be used for other special collections projects. Ultimately it is expected that this shop will be used to create e-books for other libraries in Hong Kong and southeast Asia. In this presentation examples of books scanned and the types of products which will then be produced from these images will be included.
RFID: The Libraries have partnered with the university’s own E-Business Technology Institute (ETI), IBM, and Tagsys to employ RFID technology in 1.3 million volumes in its Main Library. In this presentation information will be given on the challenges which have been overcome in this project and the benefits we hope to achieve from this significant expenditure of funding.
Published by xliu on 14 Oct 2008
The Repository of Special Collections (RSC) is a sub-project of China Academic Library & Information System (CALIS) during China’s tenth Five-years Plan. It is headed by Wuhan University Library and follows unified Digital Library standards and protocols such as Metadata Standards, OAI Protocol, OpenURL and METS. Fifty-two academic libraries have joined the project. Within three years of development, 58 of 63 sub-projects passed the peer review of Project Expert Board in 2007 and began to serve the public.
The presentation will give a comprehensive introduction to this digital library project,
including the following issues: 1) principles, methods & contents, 2) project management & organization, 3) project implementation, 4) project achievement, and 5) further work