ITAL Information Technology and Libraries (E-Journal)
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Stateful Library Analysis and Migration System (SLAM): ETL System for Performing Digital Library Migrations
Get PDFInteroperability between research management systems, especially digital libraries or repositories, has been a central theme in the community for the past years, with the discussion focused on means of enriching, linking, and disseminating outputs. This paper considers a frequently overlooked aspect, namely the migration of records across systems, by introducing the Stateful Library Analysis and Migration system (SLAM) and presenting practical experiences with migrating records from DSpace and Digital Commons repositories to Figshare
Accessibility of Tables in PDF Documents: Issues, Challenges and Future Directions
Get PDFPeople access and share information over the web and in other digital environments, including digital libraries, in the form of documents such as books, articles, technical reports, etc. These documents are in a variety of formats, of which the Portable Document Format (PDF) is most widely used because of its emphasis on preserving the layout of the original material. The retrieval of relevant material from these derivative documents is challenging for information retrieval (IR) because the rich semantic structure of these documents is lost. The retrieval of important units such as images, figures, algorithms, mathematical formulas, and tables becomes a challenge. Among these elements, tables are particularly important because they can add value to the resource description, discovery, and accessibility of documents not only on the web but also in libraries if they are made retrievable and presentable to readers. Sighted users comprehend tables for sensemaking using visual cues, but blind and visually impaired users must rely on assistive technologies, including text-to-speech and screen readers, to comprehend tables. However, these technologies do not pay sufficient attention to tables in order to effectively present tables to visually impaired individuals. Therefore, ways must be found to make tables in PDF documents not only retrievable but also comprehensible. Before developing such solutions, it is necessary to review the available assistive technologies, tools, and frameworks for their capabilities, strengths, and limitations from the comprehension perspective of blind and visually impaired people, along with suitable environments like digital libraries. We found no such review article that critically and analytically presents and evaluates these technologies. To fill this gap in the literature, this review paper reports on the current state of the accessibility of PDF documents, digital libraries, assistive technologies, tools, and frameworks that make PDF tables comprehensible and accessible to blind and visually impaired people. The study findings have implications for libraries, information sciences, and information retrieval
Peer Reading Promotion in University Libraries: Based on a Simulation Study about Readers' Opinion Seeking in Social Network
Get PDFUniversity libraries use social networks to promote reading; however, there are challenges to increasing the use of these library platforms, such as poor promotion and low reader participation. Therefore, these libraries need to find ways of dealing with the behavior characteristics of social network readers. In this study, a simulation experiment was developed to explore the behaviors of readers seeking book reviews and opinions on social networks. The study draws on social network theory to find the causes of students’ behavior and how these affect their selection of information. Finally, it presents strategies for peer reading promotion in university libraries
Alexa, Are You Listening? : An Exploration of Smart Voice Assistant Use and Privacy in Libraries
Get PDFSmart voice assistants have expanded from personal use in the home to applications in public services and educational spaces. The library and information science (LIS) trade literature suggests that libraries are part of this trend, however there are few empirical studies that explore how libraries are implementing smart voice assistants in their services, and how these libraries are mitigating the potential patron data privacy issues posed by these technologies. This study fills this gap by reporting on the results of a national survey that documents how libraries are integrating voice assistant technologies (e.g., Amazon Echo, Google Home) into their services, programming, and checkout programs. The survey also surfaces some of the key privacy concerns of library workers in regard to implementing voice assistants in library services. We find that although voice assistant use might not be mainstreamed in library services in high numbers (yet), libraries are clearly experimenting with (and having internal conversations with their staff about) using these technologies. The responses to our survey indicate that library workers have many savvy privacy concerns about the use of voice assistants in library services that are critical to address in advance of library institutions riding the wave of emerging technology adoption. This research has important implications for developing library practices, policies, and education opportunities that place patron privacy as a central part of digital literacy in an information landscape characterized by ubiquitous smart surveillant technologies
Algorithmic Literacy and the Role for Libraries
Get PDFArtificial intelligence (AI) is powerful, complex, ubiquitous, often opaque, sometimes invisible, and increasingly consequential in our everyday lives. Navigating the effects of AI as well as utilizing it in a responsible way requires a level of awareness, understanding, and skill that is not provided by current digital literacy or information literacy regimes. Algorithmic literacy addresses these gaps. In arguing for a role for libraries in algorithmic literacy, the authors provide a working definition, a pressing need, a pedagogical strategy, and two specific contributions that are unique to libraries
Bridging the Gap: Using Linked Data to Improve Discoverability and Diversity in Digital Collections
Get PDFThe year of COVID-19, 2020, brought unique experiences to everyone in their daily as well as their professional life. Facing many challenges of division in all aspects (social distancing, political and social divisions, remote work environments), University of South Florida Libraries took the lead in exploring how to overcome these various separations by providing access to its high-quality information sources to its local community and beyond. This paper shares the insights of using Linked Data technology to provide easy access to digital cultural heritage collections not only for the scholarly communities but also for those underrepresented user groups. The authors present the challenges at this special time of the history, discuss the possible solutions, and propose future work to further the effort
Text Analysis and Visualization Research on the Hetu Dangse During the Qing Dynasty of China
Get PDFIn traditional historical research, interpreting historical documents subjectively and manually causes problems such as one-sided understanding, selective analysis, and one-way knowledge connection. In this study, we aim to use machine learning to automatically analyze and explore historical documents from a text analysis and visualization perspective. This technology solves the problem of large-scale historical data analysis that is difficult for humans to read and intuitively understand. In this study, we use the historical documents of the Qing Dynasty Hetu Dangse,preserved in the Archives of Liaoning Province, as data analysis samples. China’s Hetu Dangse is the largest Qing Dynasty thematic archive with Manchu and Chinese characters in the world. Through word frequency analysis, correlation analysis, co-word clustering, word2vec model, and SVM (Support Vector Machines) algorithms, we visualize historical documents, reveal the relationships between functions of the government departments in the Shengjing area of the Qing Dynasty, achieve the automatic classification of historical archives, improve the efficient use of historical materials as well as build connections between historical knowledge. Through this, archivists can be guided practically in historical materials’ management and compilation
Off-campus Access to Licensed Online Resources through Shibboleth
Get PDFInstitutions of advanced education and research, through their libraries, invest substantially in licensed online resources. Only authorized users of an institution are entitled to access licensed online resources. Seamless on-campus access to licensed resources happens mostly through Internet Protocol (IP) address authentication. Increasingly, licensed online resources are accessed by authorized users from off-campus locations as well. Libraries will, therefore, need to ensure seamless off-campus access to authorized users. Libraries have been using various technologies, including proxy server or virtual private network (VPN) server or single sign-on, to facilitate seamless off-campus access to licensed resources. In this paper, authors share their experience in setting up a Shibboleth-based single sign-on (SSO) access management system at the JRD Tata Memorial Library, Indian Institute of Science, to enable authorized users of the institute to seamlessly access licensed online resources from off-campus locations
Personalization of Search Results Representation of a Digital Library
Get PDFThe process of discovering appropriate resources in digital libraries within universities is important, as it can have a big effect on whether retrieved works are useful to the requester. The improvement of the user experience with the digital library of the University of Novi Sad dissertations (PHD UNS) through the personalization of search results representation is the aim of the research presented in this paper. There are three groups of PHD UNS digital library users: users from the academic community, users outside the academic community, and librarians who are in charge of entering dissertation data. Different types of textual and visual representations were analyzed, and representations which needed to be implemented for the groups of users of PHD UNS digital library were selected. After implementing these representations and putting them into operation in April 2017, the user interface was extended with functionality that allows users to select their desired style for representing search results using an additional module for storing message logs. The stored messages represent an explicit change in the results representation by individual users. Using these message logs and ELK technology stack, we analyzed user behavior patterns depending on the type of query, type of device, and search mode. The analysis has shown that the majority of users of the PHD UNS system prefer using the textual style of representation rather than the visual. Some users have changed the style of results representation several times and it is assumed that different types of information require a different representation style. Also, it has been established that the most frequent change to the visual results representation occurs after users perform a query which shows all the dissertations from a certain time period and which is taken from the advanced search mode; however, there is no correlation between this change and the client’s device used