Journal of Digital Information (Texas Digital Library - TDL E-Journals)
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252 research outputs found
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Web Page Layout: A Comparison Between Left- and Right-justified Site Navigation Menus
No full textThe usability of two Web page layouts was directly compared: one with the main site navigation menu on the left of the page, and one with the main site navigation menu on the right. Sixty-four participants were divided equally into two groups and assigned to either the left- or the right-hand navigation test condition. Using a stopwatch, the time to complete each of five tasks was measured. The hypothesis that the left-hand navigation would perform significantly faster than the right-hand navigation was not supported. Instead, there was no significant difference in completion times between the two test conditions. This research questions the current leading Web design thought that the main navigation menu should be left justified
MatDL: Integrating Digital Libraries into Scientific Practice
No full textDigital repositories can be catalysts for new knowledge by providing information space and tools to facilitate the work of students, educators, or scientists. The NSF NSDL Materials Digital Library (MatDL) is adapting existing open source "tools", such as an image gallery and a version control system, to meet the needs of users within the materials science community. The tools are being modified to make submission to MatDL an easy step within a user\u27s existing workflow and to avoid redundant effort. These satellite services provided by MatDL are intended to become an integral part of the user\u27s "laboratory or workspace". The paper investigates whether digital repositories can expand their communities and collections by building tools that integrate a digital repository into researchers\u27 workspaces. In the long term, it is anticipated that making submissions to MatDL an easy part of users\u27 regular workflow will increase the likelihood that users will submit resources to the repository. Ultimately, the goal of integrating a repository into users\u27 workspaces is to enhance the impact between research and education. Initial experience of providing these tools and responding to user feedback through MatDL is discussed
Managing Content with Automatic Document Classification
No full textNews articles and Web directories represent some of the most popular and commonly accessed content on the Web. Information designers normally define categories that model these knowledge domains (i.e. news topics or Web categories) and domain experts assign documents to these categories. The paper describes how machine learning and automatic document classification techniques can be used for managing large numbers of news articles, or Web page descriptions, lightening the load on domain experts. The paper uses two datasets, one with with more than 800,000 Reuters news stories and another with over 41,000 Web sites, and classifies them using a Naïve Bayes algorithm, into predefined categories. We discuss the different parameters and design decisions that normally appear when building automatic classifiers, including, stemming, stop-words, thresholding, amount of data and approaches for improving performance using the structure in XML documents. The methodology developed would enable Web based applications or workflow systems to manage information more efficiently, i.e. by assigning documents to topics automatically or assisting humans in the process of doing so
The Power of Partnering: The Cooperative Creation of Digital Collections
No full textThe use of consortia and partnerships has increased significantly over the past decade as a result of the increasing complexity of developing projects in a digital world. Funding agencies have acknowledged this by directing support to multi-institutional projects. Some agencies have gone so far as to establish categories that require multi-institutional applicants. Partnerships of disparate institutions provide opportunities for learning and growth. The paper describes one such partnership, Connecticut History Online, and investigates the value and significance that partnering plays in creating a successful digital product
Conflict Management in Multi-model Adaptive Hypermedia
No full textNew adaptive hypermedia systems are employing multiple independent models in order to better guide their adaptation mechanisms by considering relevant factors in addition to user characteristics. This approach promises an enhanced system responsiveness and functionality. However, it also entails the possibility of conflicts as different models can suggest adapting the document in contradicting ways. Finding mechanisms capable of automatically managing these conflicts is a key issue in the development of this new generation of adaptive hypermedia systems. This work provides an approach that delivers a context-sensitive solution to this issue within the field of adaptive spatial hypermedia. The paper reports how this approach was instantiated and included in the WARP system. Details about its architecture, adaptation process and key features are discussed in order to inform and enable the design of the next generation of multi-model adaptive systems
Bridging the Gap: A Conceptual Model of the Access of Digital Libraries
No full textThis paper proposes a general conceptual model for the access of digital libraries based
on relevant research in information retrieval, information seeking and foraging, and activity
based design theory. The authors reveal that a gap exists in current digital library design
practices in which a digital library is disconnected from its targeted user community. Search
engines have disintermediated many digital library interfaces and their related evaluation and
usability efforts. Many digital libraries are losing their users since users have learned how to use
search engines to access open Web content of collective knowledge of a wider mass instead of a
specific digital library. Accordingly the authors promote a marketing orientation of digital library
design and argue that we should sell the digital library in users’ familiar information
environment
Towards a Common Reference Architecture for Open Hypermedia
No full textThis paper contributes to an ongoing effort on standardizing open hypermedia system architectures and communication interfaces. Open hypermedia systems share the property of being able to provide non-hypermedia applications with hypermedia structuring and navigation capabilities. This support is currently provided in many different ways. To be able to standardize communication interfaces, it is necessary to develop common understanding of the different architectures of existing systems and to develop a common reference architecture for open hypermedia systems. A reference architecture should provide a common language for the design of open hypermedia systems in terms of architectural elements and interfaces. The paper identifies a number of important requirements and characteristics for open hypermedia systems and examines some of the most well known open hypermedia architectures and reference models. The analysis illuminates the commonalties and differences in terminology and architectural elements. The analytical results are used to propose common terminology and a common reference architecture for open hypermedia systems (CoReArc). CoReArc identifies several different architectural elements and communication interfaces for potential interface standardization. Interface standardization may be achieved through a single physical protocol with several suites or topics or through several independent protocols. CoReArc can be used to identify and discuss the different communication interfaces of an open hypermedia system
Performance and Scalability of a Large-Scale N-gram Based Information Retrieval System
No full textInformation retrieval has become more and more important due to the rapid growth of all kinds of information. However, there are few suitable systems available. This paper presents a few approaches that enable large-scale information retrieval for the TELLTALE system. TELLTALE is an information retrieval environment that provides full-text search for text corpora that may be garbled by OCR (optical character recognition) or transmission errors, and that may contain multiple languages. It can find similar documents against a 1 kB query from 1 GB of text data in 45 seconds. This remarkable performance is achieved by integrating new data structures and gamma compression into the TELLTALE framework. This paper also compares several different types of query methods such as tf.idf and incremental similarity to the original technique of centroid subtraction. The new similarity techniques give better performance but less accuracy
A Metadata Kernel for Electronic Permanence
No full textThis paper presents a streamlined metadata record format designed to support the permanence of network discoverable objects. It starts with the Dublin Core consensus and distills out a subset of four semantic buckets - a metadata kernel - that balances the needs for adequate identification of persistent objects and for low cost metadata generation. To minimize the burden of creating, understanding, and manipulating data in those buckets, a very simple record format has been designed, called an Electronic Resource Citation (ERC). The basic ERC can be parsed by two lines of Perl code. Beyond permanence support, the ERC design suggests quite a new path for the ongoing development of simple metadata; readers familiar with the current evolutionary challenges may find the ERC to be simpler, and yet more complete, compact, extensible,and international than the Dublin Core
Active Netlib: An Active Mathematical Software Collection for Inquiry-based Computational Science and Engineering Education
No full textThe efficient application of scientific computing techniques requires specialized knowledge of numerical methods and their implementation in mathematical software libraries that many students, scientists and engineers, working beyond the already strenuous demands of their particular field, must struggle to achieve. Active Netlib addresses this problem by creating an active collection of executable mathematical software deployed on computational servers and accessible over the network from familiar desktop client interfaces. The Netlib mathematical software collection is being extended in a number of ways to support this project. The NetSolve client-server system provides an active interface to the contents of Netlib by constructing network-accessible objects with executable content from the software packages in Netlib. The NetSolve adaptive solver interface guides the user in selecting appropriate software, in setting parameters correctly, and in interpreting numerical results. In addition, Active Netlib provides mechanisms that enable resource users to become resource providers by dynamically uploading and deploying their own software applications, which are reviewed before becoming part of the moderated publicly available collection. It is hoped that Active Netlib will grow to be a worldwide collection of executable mathematical software, as well as scientific and engineering applications, that is both drawn upon and contributed to by researchers, educators and students