Journal of Digital Information (Texas Digital Library - TDL E-Journals)
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AgEcon Search: A case study on the differences between operating a subject repository and an institutional repository
No full textAgEcon Search is a subject repository containing the full text of working papers, conference papers and small press journals in agricultural and other areas of applied economics. In existence since 1995, it contains material from 170 organizations. Comparisons are made between the operations of a subject repository and those of an institutional repository, with each having easier and more challenging aspects. The field of economics has characteristics that contribute to the success of a subject repository, such as a pre-print culture and an interest in intellectual property and the economics of publishing
Cooperation or Control? Web 2.0 and the Digital Library
No full textThe Web 2.0 trend has placed a renewed emphasis on interoperability and cooperation between systems and people. The digital libraries community is familiar with interoperability through technologies like OAI-PMH, but is disconnected from the general Web 2.0 community. This disconnect prevents the digital library from taking advantage of the rich network of data, services and interfaces offered by that community. This paper presents a case study of a collection within the Texas A&M Repository that was improved by adopting the principles of cooperation embodied by the term Web 2.0
A Longitudinal Study of Database Usage Within a General Audience Digital Library
No full textThis study reports on a longitudinal investigation of database usage available through BadgerLink, a general audience digital library available to Wisconsin residents in the United States. The authors analyzed BadgerLink database usage, including EBSCO databases sampled every two years over a six-year period between 1999 and 2005 and four years of usage for ProQuest databases between 2002 and 2005. A quantitative analysis of the transaction log summaries was carried out. Available data included database usage, title requests, session usage by institution, format requests (full-text and abstracts), and search feature usage. The results reveal changes in usage patterns, with relative requests for resources in areas such as social sciences and education increasing, and requests for resources in business/finance and leisure/entertainment decreasing. More advanced search feature usage was also observed over time. Relative usage by searchers affiliated with academic institutions has grown dramatically. Longitudinal analysis of database usage presents a picture of dynamic change of resources usage and search interactions over time. The findings of this study are more in line with results from other online database and digital library environments than Web search engine and Web page environments
Supporting Visual Problem Solving in Spatial Hypertext
No full textThis paper describes the VITE system, a spatial hypertext system that supports two-way mapping for projecting structured information to a two-dimensional workspace and updating the structured information based on user interactions in the workspace. VITE uses information visualization techniques to render structured information in the workspace and provides users an environment to interact with digital information in a spatial hypertext setting. The two-way mapping connects the objects in the workspace to the structured information and provides users direct access to the information. The spatial hypertext environment encourages users to engage more directly with the information related to their tasks. An evaluation of VITE was conducted to study how people adapt to two-way mappings and how two-way mappings can help in problem solving tasks. The results show that users could quickly design visual mappings to help their problem-solving tasks and developed more sophisticated strategies for visual problem-solving over time
Exploring Out-of-turn Interactions with Websites
No full textHierarchies are ubiquitous on the web, for structuring online catalogs and indexing multi-dimensional attributed datasets. They are a natural metaphor for information seeking if their levelwise structure mirrors the user\u27s conception of the underlying domain. In other cases, they can be frustrating, especially if multiple drill-downs are necessary to arrive at information of interest. To support a broad range of users, site designers often expose multiple faceted classifications or provide within-page pruning mechanisms. We present a new technique, called out-of-turn interaction, that increases the richness of user interaction at hierarchical sites, without enumerating all possible completion paths in the site design. Using out-of-turn interaction, the user has the option to circumvent any navigation order imposed by the site and flexibly supply partial input that is otherwise relevant to the task. We conducted a user study to determine if and how users employ out-of-turn interaction, through a user interface we built called Extempore, for information-finding tasks. Extempore accepts out-of-turn input through voice or text and we employed it in a US congressional website for this study. Think-aloud protocols and questionnaires were utilized to understand users\u27 rationale for choosing out-of-turn interaction. The results indicate that users are adept at discerning when out-of-turn interaction is necessary in a particular task, and actively interleaved it with browsing. However, users found cascading information across information-finding subtasks challenging. By empowering the user to supply unsolicited information while browsing, out-of-turn interaction bridges any mental mismatch between the user and the site. Our study not only improves our understanding of out-of-turn interaction, but also suggests further opportunities to enrich browsing experiences for users
Automatically Characterizing Salience Using Readers\u27 Feedback
No full textSalience is an important characteristic of information influencing users’ cognitive and emotional states. For example, salient parts of a document are those that readers will find moving or provoking. This article studies the salience concept and its meanings in linguistics and information retrieval. Then it analyses the main drawbacks of content-based techniques for automatic identification of salient passages in a document. A new context-based method for overcoming these difficulties is subsequently presented. Our method identifies passages that readers have reacted to by analyzing their textual feedback. Our experimentation with blog posts revealed that it is effective and can be on 90% of commented posts
Text and Web Mining Approaches in Order to Build Specialized Ontologies
No full textThis paper presents a text-mining approach in order to extract candidate terms from a corpus. The relevant candidates are selected using a web-mining approach.
The terms (i.e. relevant candidate terms) found by this process are the instances of specialized ontologies built. The experiments based on real data - Human Resources corpus - show the quality of our text and web mining approaches
The Pedagogical Value of Papers: a Collaborative-Filtering based Paper Recommender
No full textIn this paper we discuss the pedagogical features necessary to make appropriate recommendations of papers to students in an e-learning domain. Analyzing data collected in a human subject study several characteristics of learners and of papers are found that are important to making good recommendations. These pedagogical features distinguish e-learning domains from many commercial domains where the only key factor is a user’s likes and dislikes
Introduction to the Special Issue of the Journal of Digital Information Digital Libraries and User-Generated Content
No full textTagging, Folksonomy and Art Museums: Early Experiments and Ongoing Research
No full textTagging has proven attractive to art museums as a means of enhancing the indexing of online collections. This paper examines the state of the art in tagging within museums and introduces the steve.museum research project, and its study of tagging behaviour and the relationship of the resulting folksonomy to professionally created museum documentation. A variety of research questions are proposed and methods for answering them discussed. Experiments implemented in the steve.museum research collaboration are discussed, preliminary results suggested, and further work described