The Identification of Digital Book Content

This article analyzes current industry practices toward the identification of digital book content. It highlights key technology trends, workflow considerations and supply chain behaviors, and examines the implications of these trends and behaviors on the production, discoverability, purchasing and consumption of digital book products.

Multilingual phrase-based concordance generation in real-time

We present software that generates phrase-based concordances in real-time based on Internet searching. When a user enters a string of words for which he wants to find concordances, the system sends this string as a query to a search engine and obtains search results for the string. The concordances are extracted by performing statistical analysis on search results and then fed back to the user. Unlike existing tools, this concordance consultation tool is language-independent, so concordances can be obtained even in a language for which there are no well-established analytical methods. Our evaluation has revealed that concordances can be obtained more effectively than by only using a search engine directly.

A compressed self-index using a Ziv–Lempel dictionary

A compressed full-text self-index for a text T, of size u, is a data structure used to search for patterns P, of size m, in T, that requires reduced space, i.e. space that depends on the empirical entropy (H _k or H ₀) of T, and is, furthermore, able to reproduce any substring of T. In this paper we present a new compressed self-index able to locate the occurrences of P in O((m + occ)log u) time, where occ is the number of occurrences. The fundamental improvement over previous LZ78 based indexes is the reduction of the search time dependency on m from O(m ²) to O(m). To achieve this result we point out the main obstacle to linear time algorithms based on LZ78 data compression and expose and explore the nature of a recurrent structure in LZ-indexes, the suffix tree. We show that our method is very competitive in practice by comparing it against other state of the art compressed indexes.

Chinese Publishing Industry Going Global: Background and Performance

To put an end to the large copyright trade deficit, both Chinese government agencies and publishing houses have been striving for entering the international publication market. The article analyzes the background of the going-global strategy, and sums up the performance of both Chinese administrations and publishers.

How to manage an information state: Jean-Baptiste Colbert’s archives and the education of his son

This article examines the archival methods developed by Colbert to train his son in state administration. Based on Colbert’s correspondence with his son, it reveals the practices Colbert thought necessary to collect and manage information in his state encyclopedic archive during the last half of the 17th century.

International Investments and Acquisitions in India: Tax and Regulatory Aspects

A review and analysis of the rules and regulations including the tax aspects of making an investment in India is presented. The full range from Foreign Direct Investment to different forms of doing business with specific examples from the publishing industry is explored to help understand current policies and regulations.

Participatory archive: towards decentralised curation,radical user orientation,and broader contextualisation of records management

User perspective and user studies have received noticeably little practical attention in archives and archival science. The purpose of this article is to address the issues of communication and user participation in archival contexts. Two action research projects-based digital archives are discussed. The insights gained during the research and development work are used to formulate a new approach to a participatory archive. In spite of the historical nature of the archives discussed, the suggested ways of interacting with an archive are not specific to historical records. The fundamental characteristics of the proposed approach are decentralised curation, radical user orientation, and contextualisation of both records and the entire archival process.

Chinese Children’s Book Market and the German Experiences in Cooperation with Chinese Publishers

A summary overview of the children’s and young adult publishing industry in China with a focus on the size of the market, ten major publishing houses, copyright and trends. Special emphasis has been placed on specific transaction for the sale of translation rights from German language publishers to China and minimal activities of German rights sold to Chinese publishers.

The ADA approach: retro-archiving data in an academic environment

This article concentrates on the retro-archiving of older digital research data. The ADA approach was developed and used to retro-archive older data files, most of which were between 10 and 30 years old. The origin and main characteristics of the ADA approach are described in the second section of the article. The third section discusses two recent data-archiving pilot projects that were conducted in the Netherlands. The first of these projects, the ADA project, laid the foundation for the ADA approach, which was subsequently applied and tested again in the second project, eDNA, which focused on archaeological data. The final section of the article provides a comparison of the results of these two projects.

Australian Small and Independent Publishing: The Freeth Report

This article provides a summary of and commentary on ‘A Lovely Kind of Madness: Small and Independent Publishing in Australia’, an unpublished report by Kate Freeth, commissioned by the Small Press Underground Networking Community (SPUNC), the representative body for small and independent publishers in Australia, and released in November 2007. Freeth’s 14,000 word report constitutes the most detailed and comprehensive study of Australian small and independent publishing since the second volume of Michael Denholm’s Small Press Publishing in Australia (1991) and provides much primary material for policy makers, scholars, and people working in and around the publishing industry.

Publishing in Scotland: Reviewing the Fragile Revival

A comparison of analyses of the Scottish publishing industry carried out in 1992, 2002 and 2007 underscores the fragility of the sector within a small country within the English-language community. A number of indices reveal either stability or stagnation and the picture emerges of the remarkable tenacity of publishing in Scotland. Although there is already a significant and vital element of state support for publishing in Scotland, further intervention will be necessary to ensure fulfilment of its potential.

A comparison of extrinsic clustering evaluation metrics based on formal constraints

There is a wide set of evaluation metrics available to compare the quality of text clustering algorithms. In this article, we define a few intuitive formal constraints on such metrics which shed light on which aspects of the quality of a clustering are captured by different metric families. These formal constraints are validated in an experiment involving human assessments, and compared with other constraints proposed in the literature. Our analysis of a wide range of metrics shows that only BCubed satisfies all formal constraints. We also extend the analysis to the problem of overlapping clustering, where items can simultaneously belong to more than one cluster. As Bcubed cannot be directly applied to this task, we propose a modified version of Bcubed that avoids the problems found with other metrics.

On rank-based effectiveness measures and optimization

Many current retrieval models and scoring functions contain free parameters which need to be set—ideally, optimized. The process of optimization normally involves some training corpus of the usual document-query-relevance judgement type, and some choice of measure that is to be optimized. The paper proposes a way to think about the process of exploring the space of parameter values, and how moving around in this space might be expected to affect different measures. One result, concerning local optima, is demonstrated for a range of rank-based evaluation measures.

Smoothing document language models with probabilistic term count propagation

Smoothing of document language models is critical in language modeling approaches to information retrieval. In this paper, we present a novel way of smoothing document language models based on propagating term counts probabilistically in a graph of documents. A key difference between our approach and previous approaches is that our smoothing algorithm can iteratively propagate counts and achieve smoothing with remotely related documents. Evaluation results on several TREC data sets show that the proposed method significantly outperforms the simple collection-based smoothing method. Compared with those other smoothing methods that also exploit local corpus structures, our method is especially effective in improving precision in top-ranked documents through “filling in” missing query terms in relevant documents, which is attractive since most users only pay attention to the top-ranked documents in search engine applications.

A new unsupervised method for document clustering by using WordNet lexical and conceptual relations

Text document clustering provides an effective and intuitive navigation mechanism to organize a large amount of retrieval results by grouping documents in a small number of meaningful classes. Many well-known methods of text clustering make use of a long list of words as vector space which is often unsatisfactory for a couple of reasons: first, it keeps the dimensionality of the data very high, and second, it ignores important relationships between terms like synonyms or antonyms. Our unsupervised method solves both problems by using ANNIE and WordNet lexical categories and WordNet ontology in order to create a well structured document vector space whose low dimensionality allows common clustering algorithms to perform well. For the clustering step we have chosen the bisecting k-means and the Multipole tree, a modified version of the Antipole tree data structure for, respectively, their accuracy and speed.

Writing from the archive: Henry Garnet’s powder-plot letters and archival communication

Through a reading of the archived letters of Henry Garnet (1555–1606), Superior of the Jesuit order in England and suspected Gunpowder plotter, this article investigates the nature of the archive in relation to narrative theory. Figuring the archive as one of the number of narrating voices accrued by the individual record, I argue that models of communication such as those put forward by Roman Jakobson, Wayne C. Booth and Seymour Chatman afford useful insights into the ways in which power is inscribed and reinscribed in the record through successive acts of reading and rewriting.

Current research issues and trends in non-English Web searching

With increasingly higher numbers of non-English language web searchers the problems of efficient handling of non-English Web documents and user queries are becoming major issues for search engines. The main aim of this review paper is to make researchers aware of the existing problems in monolingual non-English Web retrieval by providing an overview of open issues. A significant number of papers are reviewed and the research issues investigated in these studies are categorized in order to identify the research questions and solutions proposed in these papers. Further research is proposed at the end of each section.

Bestsellers in the British Book Industry 1998–2005

Bestsellers are an important commercial and social phenomenon. The paper defines and analyses bestsellers in the UK between 1998 and 2005, following on earlier work by one of the authors. It is concluded that there is a core groups of genres and authors dominating the bestseller lists, although there are also unexpected successes, especially at Christmas time. There is some evidence of long-term changes in taste, including the apparent decline in the popularity of romantic fiction and the growth of fantasy literature. It is also shown that media and movie adaptations and spin-offs are now an integral part of this dimension of the book industry.