Ontology-based framework for personalized recommendation in digital libraries

To promote information service ability of digital libraries, a browsing and searching personalized recommendation framework based on the use of ontology is described, where the advantages of ontology are exploited in different parts of the retrieval cycle including query-based relevance measures, semantic user preference representation and automatic update, and personalized result ranking. Both the usage and information resources can be exploited to extract useful knowledge from the way users interact with a digital library. Through combination and mapping between the extracted knowledge and domain ontology, semantic content retrieval between queries and documents can be utilized. Furthermore, ontology-based conceptual vector of user preference can be applied in personalized recommendation feedback.

Resource discovery in distributed digital libraries through visual knowledge navigation

In order to support users to search and browse for various resources, digital libraries are composed of discovery systems which provide user interface and information retrieve system. Recent researches in Information Retrieval have investi- gated different techniques through improving precision and recall to enhance the effectiveness of discovery system in digital libraries. In this paper, we present our work to enhance discovery system effectiveness with a different approach, through resource discovery based on visual knowledge navigation. In our Strand Map Services project under National Science Digital Library, we introduce the visual resource discovery system called conceptual browsing interfaces, to help educators and learners to locate, comprehend and use educational resources in digital libraries. The paper begins with a short introduction of the Strand Map Services. Then we illustrate the service architecture, the design and implementation of its major components. We will focus our discussion of how the visualization system of the Strand Map Services supports the visual knowledge navigation for distributed digital libraries. This includes the knowledge acquisition of the conceptual browsing interfaces, different knowledge representa- tions in the system perspective and user interface perspective, visualization system modules, algorithm and Web services inte- gration to use visual knowledge navigation to enhance resource discovery in digital libraries.

Results Processing in Heterogeneous Digital Libraries

In the heterogeneous digital libraries, users are allowed to have access to data of different modalities, from different information sources, and ranked by different criteria. Assuming that each information retrieval model is satisfactory in its own context, this paper proposes two results processing methods including ranking by sources (RBS) and simply merging results (SMR). It defines satisfied ranking which satisfies most source ranking, and satisfied distance to indicate how a specific source ranking suits the satisfied ranking. RBS ranks sources by their satisfied distances and groups the results by sources. Using source scoring function distribution, SMR substitutes normalized scores for original scores from sources, and then merges the results using these normalized scores. The results show that they are very feasible and efficient in the heterogeneous environment.

Subject-Based Information Retrieval System in Digital Libraries

Objective: Information visualization is the study of interactive depictions of abstract and data to strengthen the human cognition. Designing an appropriate information visualization system may be very useful technique for scholars, who intent to get scientific information from digital libraries. The objective of current study was to map and visualize the key-information of dissertations in academic libraries. To achieve the aim, an information retrieval system was designed to present the interactive graphic view of dissertations’ subjects in academic. Methods: An information retrieval system was designed by information visualization toolkit that presents the related subjects of dissertations in academic libraries. In addition, the satisfaction-levels of library-users were analyzed by administrating a standard questionnaire (QUIS Questionnaire). Results: The study indicated that the designed IR system helped to provide a user-friendly environment through displaying subjective relations of dissertations, overwhelming variety of colors in displaying information. Fast and easy access to the cover-to-cover information of dissertations and user-interaction facilities are the advantages of designed IR. Analysis of data furthermore indicated that the users’ satisfaction from the system was from medium to high grade. Conclusion: Designing the IR-system revealed an excessive influence on users’ satisfaction;therefore, proposing such systems for employing in academic libraries is very suitable and its implementation is necessary.

APPLICATION OF NONLINEAR WATERMARK TECHNIQUES IN DIGITAL LIBRARIES

A digital watermark is an invisible mark embedded in a digital image that may be used for a number of different purposes including copyright protection. Due to the urgent need for protecting the copyright of digital products in digital library, digital watermarking has been proposed as a solution to this problem. This letter describes potential situations that nonlinear theory can be used to enhance robustness and security of the watermark in digital library. Some nonlinear watermark techniques have been enumerated. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme is superior to the general watermark scheme both in security and robustness in digital library.

A study on service quality evaluation of digital libraries in China based on tetra-class model

Purpose: This study intends to evaluate the service quality of academic digital libraries(DLs)in China. By utilizing tetra-class model which concentrates on categorizing services according to their contributions to user satisfaction, this paper attempts to visually categorize the specific DL service elements to reveal their present performances, and then further explain the categorizing variations among different groups of users to discover the user preference.Design/methodology/approach: This paper carries out a survey to evaluate user experience on 27 typical DL services summarized from our investigations of representative Chinese university DLs. Based on the five-point Likert-type scale evaluation, the users’ attitudes toward specific service element are divided into negative and positive dimensions. Afterwards,a correspondence analysis is applied to calculate the contributions to satisfaction and dissatisfaction of each service element based on tetra-class model. As a result, the DL service elements of Chinese academic libraries are classified into four categories(i.e. Basic, Secondary,Plus, and Key). Finally, we compared the categorizing variations.Findings: The results show that the DL service elements of Chinese academic libraries are all distributed in Basic and Key services regarding information retrieval and informationorganizing; 80% of the interaction services elements are Plus services, while 50% of the Secondary services are information-providing services. The results also reveal that service categorization is obviously influenced by the users’ education background, especially their disciplines. Furthermore, the users who are older, more highly-educated, or studying in higher reputation universities are more likely to evaluate DL services as either critical or useless.Research limitations: Tetra-class model cannot reveal the interplay among the DL service elements. In addition, the user segmentation in our studies is limited to the sample structure.Practical implications: This empirical study focuses on the evaluation of DL services of academic libraries in China, the analyses of their current performances could provide useful reference for the assessment of other types of Chinese DLs. Moreover, the consideration of user characteristics(gender, age, and education background, etc.) in the DL evaluation would help librarians improve DL services to meet the users’ various needs in teaching and doing scientific research.Originality/value: Different from the frequently-used factor analysis which focuses on the relationship among factors and user satisfaction, this paper tries to use and compare element distributions of different user segments while focusing on various service objectives. Factor analysis shows some flaws as used to measure the element with selected indicators, for it ignores the fact that the indicators which measure the same factor would have different degrees of impacts on user satisfaction. However, the tetra-class model can better visually analyze the performance of each DL service element from its contributions to satisfaction and dissatisfaction, which would help librarians to better understand users’ need and offer DL services more efficiently.

A framework for basic administrative metadata in digital libraries

Administrative metadata means the expansion of the metadata research to the administrative level of resource development. Based on the basic administrative sections in the information resource lifecycle(IRL), the framework for basic administrative metadata(FBAM) is helpful in constructing open interoperable platforms for acquisition, processing and services of information resources in digital libraries. It facilitates the seamless communication, the cooperative construction and management, and the sharing of digital resources.The formulation of FBAM follows the principles of modularity and openness that promote interoperability in resource management. It also adopts the structured methodology of information system design, with which the FBAM data model is developed in conformity with <indecs> and PREMIS. The capabilities of FBAM are driven by a metadata repository with administrative information that is contained in FBAM records.

Enhancing the usage pattern mining performance with temporal segmentation of QPop Increment in digital libraries

The convergence of next-generation Networks and the emergence of new media systems have made media-rich digital libraries popular in application and research. The discovery of media content objects’ usage patterns, where QPop Increment is the characteristic feature under study, is the basis of intelligent data migration scheduling, the very key issue for these systems to manage effectively the massive storage facilities in their backbones. In this paper, a clustering algorithm is established, on the basis of temporal segmentation of QPop Increment, so as to improve the mining performance. We employed the standard C-Means algorithm as the clustering kernel, and carried out the experimental mining process with segmented QPop Increases obtained in actual applications. The results indicated that the improved algorithm is more advantageous than the basic one in important indices such as the clustering cohesion. The experimental study in this paper is based on a Media Assets Library prototype developed for the use of the advertainment movie production project for Olympics 2008, under the support of both the Humanistic Olympics Study Center in Beijing, and China State Administration of Radio, Film and TV.

Towards a self healing information system for digital libraries

An important area of focus in complex systems development is the capability to adapt to variable runtime environmental resources and to accommodate runtime system failures. The research in this area is broadly termed as “Self Healing” and has recently aroused increasing attention to complex systems. Digital libraries have gained popularity because of the richer features they provide compared to traditional libraries. As more users begin to use digital libraries, addressing downtimes of these valuable resources has become a high priority. Operating and providing access to digital content to anyone, anytime from anywhere in the world, results in a continued rise of administrative overhead for system monitoring and needs continuous human intervention. Given the volume of information and the huge infrastructure of modem libraries, continuous manual system administration is quite costly and not feasible. In this paper we propose a self healing digital library system as the solution to this problem and present the approach of adding self healing capabilities to an existing digital library project, the Digital Library of India （DLI）. We also propose a self healing framework that enables successful reuse of our approach to other architecturally similar digital library systems.

Digital libraries: A testbed for multimedia technology

A distinguishing feature of a digital library is that it has Terabyte volumes of multimedia resources. One challenge for researchers in the field of multimedia is to find a testbed for showing the potentials of multimedia technologies such as video summarization, semantic annotation, multimedia cross indexing and retrieval, and etc. Deeper research and wider applications of digital libraries revealed their indispensable role as testbed for multimedia technologies. This paper presents challenging issues of some key techniques used in digital libraries and their specific needs for multimedia technologies.

A synchronization scheme for multimedia retrieval in digital libraries over cellular radio networks

Recent advances in wireless mobile computing, digital library, and distributed multimedia technologies are stimulating the development of mobile multimedia digital library systems （ M2DLS） that allow mobile clients to access multimedia material anywhere and anytime over a cellular radio network. This paper addresses the problem of providing synchronized multimedia retrieval in these sys- tems. An efficient inter-media synchronization scheme called wireless prioritized feedback （WPF） for mobile multimedia on-demand retrieval in digital library systems over CDMA cellular radio networks in the absence of synchronized clocks is presented. In the WPF scheme, base stations use preferential lightweight message called feedback units transmitted by mobile mediaphones to detect and correct asynchronies. The algorithm is described with pseudo code, and experiments are described to demonstrate the efficiency of WPF.

Case study of perception about the copyright of the digital libraries in China's Mainland with Hong Kong and Taiwan, China as the reference system

This paper analyzes the perception of the librarians in China's Mainland about the copyright during the development of digital libraries with Hong Kong Special Administrative Region(HK SAR) and Taiwan, China as the reference system, through questionnaire survey of copyright cases of the digital libraries by investigating the digital library builders and librarians of 30 universities from China's Mainland, HK SAR and Taiwan,China ranked among the top 500 in the Academic Ranking of World Universities(SJTU Version). The report holds that: 1) The copyright law shall evolve with the times and be revised from time to time; 2) it is imperative to popularize and educate in the copyright law; 3) the guidelines for the use of the copyright law of the education industry shall be developed as soon as possible; and 4) the Collective Management of Copyright Regulations shall be enforced as early as possible.

Designing a Document Retrieval Method for University Digital Libraries Based on Hadoop Technology

With the development of big data,all walks of life in society have begun to venture into big data to serve their own enterprises and departments.Big data has been embraced by university digital libraries.The most cumbersome work for the management of university libraries is document retrieval.This article uses Hadoop algorithm to extract semantic keywords and then calculates semantic similarity based on the literature retrieval keyword calculation process.The fast-matching method is used to determine the weight of each keyword,so as to ensure an efficient and accurate document retrieval in digital libraries,thus completing the design of the document retrieval method for university digital libraries based on Hadoop technology.

Providing universal access to Japanese humanities digital libraries:an approach to federated searching system using automatic metadata mapping

We present our approach for constructing a federated searching system for Japanese humanities digital libraries using automatic metadata mapping.We discuss some achievements in the ongoing research to construct a federated searching system. The goals of this system are(1) to perform metadata mapping automatically for Japanese heterogeneous humanities digital libraries and(2) to let users access multiple humanities digital libraries by using only one query input.The proposed automatic metadata mapping method produced the average mapping precision of 94.9%.We also address the metadata-related challenges facing Japanese humanities databases.

CMSOF:a structured data organization framework for scanned Chinese medicine books in digital libraries

Organizing unstructured information from books into a well-defined structure is a significant challenge in digital libraries.Most digital libraries can provide only search services at the granularity of books and few libraries allow books to be accessed at the granularity of chapters,as manually constructing directory information for books is time-consuming.Extracting structured data from scanned books thus remains an urgent and important work.In this paper,we propose a novel structured data organization framework called CMSOF to organize scanned data automatically,and apply it to a Chinese medicine digital library. In the framework,image blocks and text blocks on the scanned page of books are separated based on the gray histogram projection method or a hybrid method of region growth and the Ada-Boosting classifier at first,and then the text structure is obtained from text blocks by text size and font type recognition.Finally,image blocks and structured OCRed text are correlated at the semantic level.By integrating the structured data into a Chinese medicine information system(CMIS) ,we can organize the Chinese medicine books well and users can access the books with flexibility,which indicates that CMSOF is an efficient framework to organize books mixed with images and text.

Differentiated digital library evaluation in a hierarchical model stemming from its operational scope and complexity

Digital libraries are complex systems and this brings difficulties for their evaluation. This paper proposes a hierarchical model to solve this problem, and puts the entangled matters into a clear-layered structure. Firstly, digital libraries(DLs thereafter)are classified into 5 groups in ascending gradations, i.e. mini DLs, small DLs, medium DLs,large DLs, and huge DLs by their scope of operation. Then, according to the characteristics of DLs at different operational scope and level of sophistication, they are further grouped into unitary DLs, union DLs and hybrid DLs accordingly. Based on this simulated structure,a hierarchical model for digital library evaluation is introduced, which evaluates DLs differentiatingly within a hierarchical scheme by using varying criteria based on their specific level of operational complexity such as at the micro-level, medium-level, and/or at the macro-level. Based on our careful examination and analysis of the current literature about DL evaluation system, an experiment is conducted by using the DL evaluation model along with its criteria for unitary DLs at micro-level. The main contents resulting from this evaluation experimentation and also those evaluation indicators and relevant issues of major concerns for DLs at medium-level and macro-level are also to be presented at some length.

Mobile Agent Based Framework for Integrating Digital Library System

Few of the current approaches to achieve the integration of digital library system have considered the influence of network factors on quality of service for the integration system of digital libraries. For this reason, a mobile agent based framework for integrating digital library system is proposed. Based on this framework, a prototype system is implemented and the key technique for it are described. Compared with the current approaches, using mobile agent technique to achieve the integration of digital library system can not only avoid transmitting a lot of data on the network, lower the dependence on network bandwidth for the system, but also improve the quality of service for the integration system of digital libraries in intermitted or unreliable network connection settings.

Global Memory Net and the development of digital image information management system: Experience and practice

Global Memory Net (GMNet) is intended to be an effective gateway to the world cultural, historical, and heritage image collections from selected academic educational and research partners in the world. Much of these unique collections of great value to education and research are not currently accessible due to distance, form, and technical barriers. This project is to find new ways to enable users to access and exploit these significant research collections via global network. As GMNet is ending its first 5-year phase in October 2005, it has contributed substantially to the community building in digital library development by ac- commodating numerous collaborators and technical staff from various parts of the world to spend 3 to 5 months as a full-member of the GMNet team in Boston. They have come from different parts of China—such as Sichuan, Hainan, Shanghai and Xi’an; Croatia; and Hanoi, Vietnam. In addition to contribute to the overall system development and enhancement of system function- alities, they have brought valuable sample image collections of their own institutions/countries, and actually developed prototype collections as a part of GMNet. This paper describes the exciting and productive experience of the first of this visiting research group in developing the GMNet’s Version 2.0 PHP-based system under Prof. Chen’s overall supervision. It also describes both the system’s technical level structure—user/Web-based application/data, and complex functionalities with multi-collection, multi-lingual, multi-modal searching capabilities; system management capabilities; as well as provisions for user uploads and retrieval for our own projects. This Version 2.0 system is built on the Linux/Apache/PHP/MySQL platform. What is described in this paper is an actual case which has formed a base for further new development by others in the research group. It demonstrates fully the value of the synergistic collaboration among global partners for universal digital library development. More information can be found in http://www.memorynet.org/.

An experiment on digital library based on the method of TQM system

The principles and methods of TQM (total quality management) were applied to digital library management. TQM puts emphasis on process control and continual improvement. The TQM theories and measures explained clearly in this paper were the scientific tools used in the experiment in the Wenzhou University Digital Library. This paper deals with a very broad range of subjects related to a digital library: system model of TQM for digital library, organization structure, and tasks of Wenzhou University Digital Library, task flow chart of electronic reading room, cause and effect of electronic reading room quality man- agement, systematic model of enhancing electronic information acquisition rate, quality comparison of electronic reading room service, etc.

A text to speech interface for Universal Digital Library

The objective of Universal Digital Library (UDL) is to capture all books in digital format. A text to speech (TTS) interface for UDL portal would enable access to the digital content in voice mode, and also provide access to the digital content for illiterate and vision-impaired people. Our work focuses on design and implementation of text to speech interface for UDL portal primarily for Indian languages. This paper is aimed at identifying the issues involved in integrating text to speech system into UDL portal and describes the development process of Hindi, Telugu and Tamil voices under Festvox framework using unit selection techniques. We demonstrate the quality of the Tamil and Telugu voices and lay out the plan for integrating the TTS into the UDL portal.