Evaluating a monolingual multinational digital library by using usability: An exploratory approach from a developing country

In this paper the authors present a preliminary discussion on some of the results from a survey aimed to explore, describe and explain some of the usability characteristics in digital libraries evaluation in the Mexican context. The study is framed in the evaluation of a multinational and monolingual digital library: the Miguel de Cervantes Virtual Library, from the University of Alicante in Spain. The evaluators were Mexican “expert” users (i.e. Spanish-speaking professional university librarians specialized in electronic reference services) who were asked to carry on an evaluation instrument based on usability criteria as taken from some models in developed countries. Some questions that might be answered with future research are outlined in this paper.     

合作:数字参考服务的社会选择

基于用户需求的数字参考服务必然采用社会合作形式。本文着重探讨图书馆发展数字参考服务的合作策略。     

图书馆社会责任视角下的数字鸿沟问题简

数字鸿沟日益成为影响人们工作和生活的重要问题,其实质是信息不公平。从图书馆社会责任视角出发,可采取平等服务、就业信息提供、社会包容、社群参与等措施弥合数字鸿沟,实现信息公平。     

国外数字图书馆评价研究与实践述评

本文介绍了国外数字图书馆评价的最新发展动态，着重评述了国外数字图书馆在评价对象、标准、框架等方面的研究与实践。     

Public sector readiness for digital preservation in New Zealand: The rate of adoption of an innovation in records management practices

Recent legislation in New Zealand has placed statutory obligations on its government organizations to introduce sound records management practices and to ensure long-term access to their digital records. To obtain a base level of knowledge on current digital preservation practices and on awareness of digital preservation issues, an online survey was conducted of the nation's government organizations in March 2006. The survey, which achieved a response rate of 42.4%, found that most organizations were knowledgeable about basic aspects of their digital resources but their awareness of digital preservation was generally low, and digital preservation activity was modest overall. To identify possible reasons for this situation, Rogers' (Diffusion of innovations. 5th ed. New York: Free Press. 2003) Diffusion of Innovations model is used to discuss digital preservation as an innovation and the level of readiness for digital preservation as the innovation's rate of adoption. The paper concludes by using Rogers' model as the basis for making recommendations aimed at helping the government's lead agencies to increase New Zealand's public sector readiness for digital preservation.     

Mining subtopics from text fragments for a web query

Web search queries are often ambiguous or faceted, and the task of identifying the major underlying senses and facets of queries has received much attention in recent years. We refer to this task as query subtopic mining. In this paper, we propose to use surrounding text of query terms in top retrieved documents to mine subtopics and rank them. We first extract text fragments containing query terms from different parts of documents. Then we group similar text fragments into clusters and generate a readable subtopic for each cluster. Based on the cluster and the language model trained from a query log, we calculate three features and combine them into a relevance score for each subtopic. Subtopics are finally ranked by balancing relevance and novelty. Our evaluation experiments with the NTCIR-9 INTENT Chinese Subtopic Mining test collection show that our method significantly outperforms a query log based method proposed by Radlinski et al. (2010) and a search result clustering based method proposed by Zeng et al. (2004) in terms of precision, I-rec, D-nDCG and D#-nDCG, the official evaluation metrics used at the NTCIR-9 INTENT task. Moreover, our generated subtopics are significantly more readable than those generated by the search result clustering method.     

Expedited digital appraisal for regular archivists: an MPLP-type approach

Working with a German state archives, the author developed a MPLP approach to digital appraisal/processing. Testing 10 deduplication software (80% failed), she selected a user friendly and inexpensive software. She appraised 670?GB in four days and developed a simple workflow of broad and in-depth qualitative appraisal. The author highlights the importance of appraisal factors, presents a list of desirable software features, and calls for the establishment of peer-reviewed online testing sites administered by archival organizations.     

Landscaping digital social innovation in the EU: Structuring the evidence and nurturing the science and policy debate towards a renewed agenda for social change

This paper discusses the results of analysis of mapping ICT-enabled social innovation initiatives promoting social investment across the European Union. The key goal of the research is to provide a deeper understanding of how EU Member States can make better use of ICT-enabled social innovation to implement the actions suggested in the EU Social Investment Package (SIP). The findings of the analysis shed light on the main characteristics and patterns of the initiatives assessed according to an original conceptual framework, and taking into account the characteristics of different welfare systems and service models. Building on the analysis, the paper draws conclusions in terms of the contribution made by ICT-enabled social innovation to the implementation of social investment policies. It also provides recommendations for future research, and outlines implications and possible directions for policy. The conclusions are set to help policymakers and practitioners to use ICT-enabled social innovation to modernise EU welfare systems, providing better and more efficient social services and increasing the wellbeing of citizens. At the same time, the documented research design, its proposed terminology, theoretical framework and empirical findings contribute to the growing scientific interest and debate about ICT-enabled innovation in the field of social services and social policy redesign within the scope of the emerging discussion on the renewed agenda for Social Innovation being shaped as part of the debate on the future of Europe.     

Opinion mining in social media: Modeling,simulating, and forecasting political opinions in the web

Affordable and ubiquitous online communications (social media) provide the means for flows of ideas and opinions and play an increasing role for the transformation and cohesion of society – yet little is understood about how online opinions emerge, diffuse, and gain momentum. To address this problem, an opinion formation framework based on content analysis of social media and sociophysical system modeling is proposed. Based on prior research and own projects, three building blocks of online opinion tracking and simulation are described: (1) automated topic, emotion and opinion detection in real-time, (2) information flow modeling and agent-based simulation, and (3) modeling of opinion networks, including special social and psychological circumstances, such as the influence of emotions, media and leaders, changing social networks etc. Finally, three application scenarios are presented to illustrate the framework and motivate further research.     

Online rulemaking: a step toward E-governance

The adoption of electronic rulemaking by many federal agencies provides an opportunity for a greatly enhanced public role—both in terms of the numbers of people who might participate and the depth of their possible participation. This step towards E-governance poses several challenges for agencies: how they should structure their proceedings, how they can process the comments received and how they can foster and take part in the online communities of interest that will result from this activity. The online tools that may be applied to rulemaking and its ancillary activities—advisory committees, advanced notices of proposed rulemaking and enforcement—can also be used at earlier stages of the legislative process to increase public interest, involvement and commitment. This approach is relevant for all levels of government and for any issue on which public hearings are held or public comment solicited. It can provide an efficient and effective nonadversarial process in which officials and members of the public can mutually define problems and explore alternative solutions.     

Non-english web search: an evaluation of indexing and searching the Greek web

The study reports on a longitudinal and comparative evaluation of Greek language searching on the web. Ten engines, five global (A9, AltaVista, Google, MSN Search, and Yahoo!) and five Greek (Anazitisi, Ano-Kato, Phantis. Trinity, and Visto), were evaluated using (a) navigational queries in 2004 and 2006; and (b) by measuring the freshness of the search engine indices in 2005 and 2006. Homepage finding queries for known Greek organizations were created and searched. Queries included the name of the organization in its Greek and non-Greek, English or transliterated equivalent forms. The organizations represented ten categories: government departments, universities, colleges, travel agencies, museums, media (TV, radio, newspapers), transportation, and banks. The freshness of the indices was evaluated by examining the status of the returned URLs (live versus dead) from the navigational queries, and by identifying if the engines have indexed 32480 active (live) Greek domain URLs. Effectiveness measures included (a) qualitative assessment of how engines handle the Greek language; (b) precision at 10 documents (P@10); (c) mean reciprocal rank (MRR); (d) Navigational Query Discounted Cumulative Gain (NQ-DCG), a new heuristic evaluation measure; (e) response time; (f) the ratio of the dead URL links returned, (g) the presence or absence of URLs and the decay observed over the period of the study. The results report on which of the global and Greek search engines perform best; and if the performance achieved is good enough from a user’s perspective.     

Untangling the web of e-Research: Towards a sociology of online knowledge

e-Research is a rapidly growing research area, both in terms of publications and in terms of funding. In this article we argue that it is necessary to reconceptualize the ways in which we seek to measure and understand e-Research by developing a sociology of knowledge based on our understanding of how science has been transformed historically and shifted into online forms. Next, we report data which allows the examination of e-Research through a variety of traces in order to begin to understand how knowledge in the realm of e-Research has been and is being constructed. These data indicate that e-Research has had a variable impact in different fields of research. We argue that only an overall account of the scale and scope of e-Research within and between different fields makes it possible to identify the organizational coherence and diffuseness of e-Research in terms of its socio-technical networks, and thus to identify the contributions of e-Research to various research fronts in the online production of knowledge.     

Ranking journals using social choice theory methods: A novel approach in bibliometrics

We use data on economic, management and political science journals to produce quantitative estimates of (in)consistency of the evaluations based on six popular bibliometric indicators (impact factor, 5-year impact factor, immediacy index, article influence score, SNIP and SJR). We advocate a new approach to the aggregation of journal rankings. Since the rank aggregation is a multicriteria decision problem, ranking methods from social choice theory may solve it. We apply either a direct ranking method based on the majority rule (the Copeland rule, the Markovian method) or a sorting procedure based on a tournament solution, such as the uncovered set and the minimal externally stable set. We demonstrate that the aggregate rankings reduce the number of contradictions and represent the set of the single-indicator-based rankings better than any of the six rankings themselves.     

从公开出版到网络化生存:我们的自然选择

中国工程物理研究院主办的一种内部出版的期刊因缺乏活力而停刊,后办的一种期刊改为公开出版后获得了生机。出版工作一直与本行业的科技发展息息相关。今天他们又一次面临挑战甚至是生存危机。在可预见的将来,传统学术期刊的网络化数字化进程是新媒体时代传播信息的需要,是谋求自身发展的必然选择。     

Health communication on the web: The roles of web use motivation and information completeness

Recent articles on the evaluation of the quality of health information on the World Wide Web reveal an emphasis on the completeness of information. This paper takes a situational approach to Web usage arguing that the impact of completeness on attitude and intention toward the issue is moderated by Web use motivation. Borrowing the analogy between low–high involvement and surfing–searching, it was hypothesized that the effect of completeness would be observed in the searching situation and not observed in the surfing situation. After the initial pretests and pilot studies, 246 respondents were recruited to participate in a 2×3 study design. Not supporting the hypotheses, it was observed that the effect of completeness was significant in both surfing and searching situations. Explanations are provided for the observation, and directions for future research are suggested.     

Using web.2.0 for the information support of employees: The promise of web 2.0

The experience from web 2.0 usage in libraries is analyzed. The potential uses of web 2.0 technology (the second-generation web) at enterprises are considered. Web 2.0 technology can be used in order to improve information support for employees via “the encyclopedia of knowledge,” based on Wiki technology, to promptly inform employees about news or new arrivals based on RSS technology, to discuss problems and cooperative work on projects using an internal blog, to navigate information resources using collective bookmarks and collective catalogs, and in other ways.