ELPUB Digital Repository
Not a member yet
774 research outputs found
Sort by
Automated Support for a Collaborative System to Organize a Collection using Facets
No full textWe are developing a system that improves access to a large, growing image collection by supporting users to collaboratively build a faceted (multi-perspective) classification schema. For collections that grow in both volume and variety, a major challenge is to evolve the facet schema, and to reclassify existing objects into the modified facet schema. Centrally managed classification systems often find it difficult to adapt to evolving collections. The proposed system allows: (a) users to collaboratively build and maintain a faceted classification, (b) to systematically enrich the user-created facet schema, and (c) to automatically classify documents into an evolving, user-managed facet schema. In this paper, we focus on (c), where we describe the approach to automatically classify documents into an evolving facet schema. We propose a learning-based system that periodically learns from manually classified images, and then classify new images accordingly
Study on the use of metadata for digital learning objects in university institutional repositories
No full textThis study analyzes the actual use of metadata describing the educational resources that some university institutional repositories (IRs) include in their collections. The goal is to test the viability of implementing value-added services by offering educational resources from IRs in addition to those available from learning object repositories (LOR), based on their metadata.We identify and analyze the different metadata models in a sample of university IRs, concentrating on: the use of one or multiple metadata schemas coexisting in the repository; the use of educational metadata schemas and application profiles such as IEEE LOM or DC-Ed; the possible extensions (qualifiers or any kind of refinements) to DC-Simple; the specific metadata elements used to describe educational features (such as audience, type of educational material, learning objectives, etc.) and the values of the metadata elements, especially the use of specific vocabularies for elements of educational interest
What Small Projects Producing Digital Resources Need to Know about Digital Preservation?
No full textLarge institutions in the cultural heritage sector are establishing preservation policies and incorporating digital preservation related activities into their everyday practice. But there are numerous small projects which produce digital resources and the issue of their products? sustainability quite often is not properly addressed. This paper will take three projects as case studies ? TEXTE, KT-DigiCult-Bg and the Parallel Archive ? and will offer scenarios based on these cases. These scenarios present three typical cases: a project which prepares stand-alone resources; a project which prepares materials for ingest into a larger repository, and a project with highly dynamic content. The risks in all three cases will be analysed and appropriate recommendations taking into account the specific situation will be drawn. The paper motivates the need to enhance existing standards in the field into the direction of preservation of dynamic resources
Electronic publishing and bibliometrics
No full textThis lecture deals with the relationships between electronic publishing and bibliometrics, the quantitative study of scientific-scholarly texts. It gives an overview of the effects of recent trends in electronic publishing upon the availability of bibliographic or bibliometric databases, indexing of publications, the construction of new bibliometric indicators, and upon the research topics in bibliometrics and quantitative studies of science. In fact, electronic publishing constitutes an important topic in bibliometric research. The lecture focuses on the effect of electronic publishing and related factors including ?Open Access? upon the citation impact of scientific-scholarly publications, and on the potentialities of ?usage? data - based on full text downloads from electronic publication archives - as indicators of research quality
IEEE 1599: a New Standard for Music Education
No full textIEEE 1559 is a new multilayer music code whose international standardisation was recently achieved. Its development follows the guidelines of IEEE P1599, "Recommended Practice Dealing With Applications and Representations of Symbolic Music Information Using the XML Language". This project proposes to represent music symbolically in a comprehensive way, opening up new ways to make both music and music-related information available to musicologists and performers on one hand, and to non-practitioners on the other. Its ultimate goal is to provide a highly integrated representation of music, where score, audio, video, and graphical contents can be enjoyed together. In this paper, two different aspects of the matter are discussed: the key features of the standard that make it suitable for both music education and training, and some examples implemented to achieve such goals
Symposium on the Institutionalisation of Openness in Universities
No full textA host of initiatives predicated on the notion of ?openness? has flourished in recent years. Open Access, Open Educational Resources, Open Source, Open Data and Open Innovation are now familiar terms, and ?openness? has been a central theme of the ELPUB conferences in recent years. Each of these activities occupy a distinct intellectual space, yet they appear to share a common set of principles and practices that are collectively transforming the ways knowledge is being produced, shared, consumed, and disseminated. While the effects of these open practices are increasingly observable in the university, the awareness of the opportunities and the consequences for both individuals and universities continues to be unevenly distributed across the institutional landscape. At the same time, these ideas and the initiatives associated with them have, for the most part, originated within the academy, and although universities continue to be a primary site of knowledge production, there is a growing tension between tradition academic values of sharing and institutional concerns about income generation and sustainability.Collectively we face a challenge. The limited and uneven uptake both by individuals and by the institutions themselves is of concern. For example, despite the demonstrated advantages of Open Access for scholarly publishing, only a small percentage of faculty members make their publications openly accessible. Open Educational Resources remain a specialised pursuit despite the benefits to faculty and learners. Computer scientists have found it difficult to integrate Open Source into their curriculum, and contributing source code to Open Source projects is rarely recognized in formal academic evaluations for tenure and promotion. At the same time, universities are more interested in finding ways to commercialise intellectual property resulting from faculty research than in finding ways to maximize the potential of Open Innovation and developing new business models to generate income and accelerate innovation. How do we move this diverse agenda forward in ways that engage faculty, students and staff as well as our institutional leaders?We propose to begin a conversation on institutionalisation, to explore the possibilities and potential challenges of more formal processes, and to consider how our experiences in our own institutions might be shared and subsequently used to leverage action elsewhere. Universities as institutions regularly compare themselves with others using a variety of published data and indicators. How might access to evidence of successful institutionalisation of open practices and processes as well as the strategies employed in these cases support members of this community in our local efforts for change?The goal of the Symposium is to explore the idea of the institutionalisation of openness both as a concept and strategically.- Intellectually, we will explore the nature of openness and what constitutes it, asking if it is appropriate to describe openness in terms of ?dimensions? ? e.g., open access, etc., and how we might characterise the commonalities and differences across these practices.- Strategically, we will explore ways in which to move the openness agenda forward as well as identify factors that might enhance or retard its adoption by faculty, students and staff and institutions.The Symposium will take the form of an ?unconference?. By using an open participatory process that acknowledges and respects the different origins and traditions represented by the existing communities on the open landscape our goal is to provide a space for critical discussions in which we can map out both strategy and a research agenda to help move forward collectively. There will not be conventional presentations, rather opportunities to present short position statements, brief reports on ongoing projects, summaries of current research, etc. Contributions should focus on the theme of ?openness?, while keeping in mind that the phenomenon of openness is itself subject to debate and interpretation. We suggest the following questions to start the conversation; they are not meant to be exhaustive:- What constitutes openness?- Can we use these practices to open up new spaces for social and institutional change? In what ways do open practices call into question traditional notions of authority and power? Where is there support, why is there resistance?- Can we leverage examples of successful institutionalisation by working collectively, developing ?metrics? and encouraging comparative analysis?- What are the key research questions for which we need answers?By the end of the Symposium we hope to have:- developed a more nuanced understanding of the value of framing openness a multi-dimensional concept- generated a list of key research questions on the institutionalisation of openness- identified a group of people interested in exploring these ideas further- produced a list of possible themes for a future ELPUB conferenc
Marketing Issues related to Commercial and Specialised Audiobooks, including Digital Daily Newspapers
No full textAudiobooks or talking books are becoming very popular. They used to be recorded only in specialised production centres for use by people with visual impairments. Since several years ago, many commercial publishers have found an interested public which appreciates listening to these books for leisure. In this contribution, which is a follow up to my ELPUB2008 paper "A new electronic publishing trend: Audiobooks for leisure and studying", I will focus on the delicate balance between commercially published books and the role of specialised production centres. Also issues of cataloguing metadata for audiobooks are discussed
Exploring the costs and benefits of alternative publishing models
No full textThis paper reports findings from a project undertaken for the Joint Information Services Committee (JISC) in the UK which explored the Economic Implications of Alternative Scholarly Publishing Models.? The aim of the project was to examine the costs and potential benefits of the major emerging models for scholarly publishing, including subscription publishing, open access publishing and self-archiving. To ensure that cost-benefit comparisons can be made, analysis focuses on self-archiving models that include the certification and quality control functions necessary for formal scholarly publishing, namely (i) ?Green OA? self-archiving in parallel with subscription publishing and (ii) the deconstructed or overlay journals model in which self-archiving provides the foundation for overlay journal services. Adopting a formal approach to modelling the process and identifying activity costs, this paper examines scholarly communication life-cycle costs per article. It concludes that different scholarly publishing models can make a material difference to returns to R&D expenditure as well as the costs faced by various stakeholders. It seems likely that more open access would have substantial net benefits in the longer term and, while net benefits may be lower during a transitional period, they are likely to be positive for both open access publishing and self-archiving alternatives
A look at the present status of electronic publishing in Iran at the beginning of the year 2009
No full textThe present status and future of electronic publishing in Iran does not seem to be very promising. The author, trying to gain some statistics on the issue, found almost no useful statistics. This paper that tries to give a picture of electronic publishing in Iran is based structurally on an article by Zahra Seifkashani (2003) entitled: "How the Internet can Influence the Iranian Readers"; it discusses the status of electronic publishing in Iran. The problems discussed by the author, as well as other problems, will be discussed in this article along with various suggestions on how to improve the Iranian electronic publishing scene
A Journal on the Web: What We Are Not, What We Do Not Want
No full textIn this paper we discuss the experience of publishing a journal in both a traditional and an electronic edition. In particular, we take into account our journal Doctor Virtualis, devoted to the history of medieval thought, trying to understand what the limitations and problems of electronic publishing are and where the paper edition is really different from the electronic one. Starting from our experience, we then try to better understand what electronic publishing actually is. We critically discuss the usual analogy between traditional publishing and electronic publishing, by proposing a new analogy between the web and the medieval cultural environment. This new analogy helps in understanding some complex processes on the web and in proposing new approaches to transform paper texts into electronic products. To this end, we show how rhetoric plays a crucial role in adapting the text to the medium and how new paradigms for text editing could help in finding a (preliminary) definition of electronic publishing