Rita Wong——City University of Hong Kong Library Presentation[PDF]

David Palmer (Hong Kong University) has published an article in Serials Review describing the development of the Pacific Rim Library and its effectiveness in revealing objects in digital collections that are hidden in the Deep Web.

The definition and purpose of crowdsourcing and social engagement with users will be discussed with particular reference to the Australian Newspapers service, FamilySearch, Wikipedia and the Distributed Proofreaders. 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.

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 current status of University of Hawaii at Manoa Library Pacific-related image collections, 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.