Multimedia information using mobile computers: accessing the digital campus and the digital library

Abstract

It is clear that the role of the information resource is changing. Major publishers have been slow to adapt to the emergence of a global digital medium, but there are now signs that a great deal of information will be delivered on-line, (although at present only about 25 databases account for 80% of usage in UK and optical publishing is still in its early stages). However, digital publishing on the Internet — with services for libraries such as just-in-time purchasing and delivery, for example — will be a driving force in creating the ‘global digital medium’. One issue that will become increasingly relevant is how the individual user accesses rich multimedia data in the most appropriate way. The ‘digital university campus’ and the ‘digital library’ are coming to be important concepts, with the aim that users of information services will receive information on-line supported by a ‘ubiquistructure’ of information technology. For the ‘digital campus’ this means that not only scholarly but also teaching activities are based on interactive access to information, and where not only the digital library but also the digital bookshop and the digital classroom are becoming possible with the development of 140Mb/s SuperJANET links. However, it is recognised that libraries will not be truly digital for the foreseeable future, and that libraries will maintain traditional and digital media side by side. In this paper, reporting on work at the University of Bristol's Educational Technology Service multimedia resources unit MRU, and the University of the West of England's Centre for Personal Information Management (in collaboration with Hewlett-Packard Research Laboratories and the University of Bristol's Centre for Communications Research), we look the ‘digital library’ and ‘digital campus’ from the perspective of the individual user and her information needs. We are particularly interested in the use of small, mobile computers as access points to the global digital medium. We suggest that, in an environment of change — where the traditional campus and the traditional library exist alongside the digital campus and digital library — the most appropriate form of access technology is based on ‘personal technology’ which allows a linking between digital information and traditional paper-based information.     

Commercial digital image libraries,digital images and digital discontent

Publications such as consumer magazines rely heavily on image libraries as sources for the images they use in their issues. Traditionally, magazine editorial staff have discussed their image requirements over the telephone with library staff and the library has conducted the search. Many libraries have now developed Web sites and their customers search them for images themselves. A minority have e-commerce capabilities, and enable customers to purchase and download digital images from their sites. This survey found that magazine staff do not often choose to search digital libraries, preferring instead to continue to contact the library by telephone. Most also choose not to buy the use of digital images, but prefer to continue to work with conventional transparencies and slides. The reasons for these preferences, and the reasons they are unlikely to change in the short term, are explored.     

An evaluation study of a digital library of ideas: Workflow Model and classroom use

The Department of Design Manufacturing and Engineering Management at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK, has been developing a digital library to support design engineering student learning through the Digital Libraries for Global Distributed Innovative Design Education and Teamwork project (, December, 2007). Previous related studies have observed and analysed how students search for, store, structure and share design engineering information (Grierson et al. in paper presented at the Network Learning Conference, pp. 572–579, 2004; Nicol et al. in Open Learning 20(1):31–49, 2005) and these studies have identified the need for the design and development of a digital library with two system components, which best suit the design process: (i) an informal shared workspace; the ‘LauLima’ Learning Environment and (ii) a repository of more formal searchable and browsable design information; the ‘LauLima’ Digital Library (McGill et al. in Br. J. Educ. Technol. 36(4):629–642, 2005). This paper focuses on the Workflow Model developed to populate the digital library and presents findings from early use of the digital library by students and staff.     

Personalisation and recommender systems in digital libraries

Widespread use of the Internet has resulted in digital libraries that are increasingly used by diverse communities of users for diverse purposes and in which sharing and collaboration have become important social elements. As such libraries become commonplace, as their contents and services become more varied, and as their patrons become more experienced with computer technology, users will expect more sophisticated services from these libraries. A simple search function, normally an integral part of any digital library, increasingly leads to user frustration as user needs become more complex and as the volume of managed information increases. Proactive digital libraries, where the library evolves from being passive and untailored, are seen as offering great potential for addressing and overcoming these issues and include techniques such as personalisation and recommender systems. In this paper, following on from the DELOS/NSF Working Group on Personalisation and Recommender Systems for Digital Libraries, which met and reported during 2003, we present some background material on the scope of personalisation and recommender systems in digital libraries. We then outline the working group’s vision for the evolution of digital libraries and the role that personalisation and recommender systems will play, and we present a series of research challenges and specific recommendations and research priorities for the field.     

Internet Access in School Library Media Centers

SUMMARY

Internet access in schools should be provided via the school library media center. School library media specialists have sets of skills that allow the connection to the Internet to be made and utilized to its full potential. These skills include technical expertise in establishing and maintaining networks, experience in promoting and integrating new technologies in the educational process, and the ability to identify and evaluate information resources. Additionally, school library media specialists have knowledge and training in dealing with the issues of censorship and equity of access that accompany use of the Internet by school children.     

Gender differences in digital music distribution methods

This study examines gender differences among Greek Internet users in using digital music distribution methods. First, a Web-based questionnaire was developed and placed on most popular Greek forums. Then, 300 Greek Internet users stated their opinions regarding digital music and the following downloading methods: 1) Http downloading, 2) P2P downloading, 3) Torrent downloading, and 4) Combined iTunes method. The results revealed that P2P programs are the first choice for downloading mp3. The responders were satisfied with the P2P’s easiness of use, the variety of songs and the no need to pay. However, they worried about P2P’s safety. Gender differences were identified in several areas. Music industry managers could consider these findings in their strategies to reach the consumers. Advertising companies could use the results to target differently male or female consumers.     

Shelves from bits [digital libraries]

Digital library is a broad term traditionally describing an online archive of documents. With the emergence of the Internet and Web, the concept of a digital library finally found its raison d'etre, and so today just about every academic institution and publisher on the planet is planning, or has implemented, some form of Web-based archive. The author looks at how the digital library concept today is useful not only to publishers but also for anyone wanting to create an online information archive     

Linguistic and architectural requirements for personalized digital libraries

information tokens as supplied by information providers on the net; value is added to such tokens by individually constructing information artifacts over them with the goal of information consumer satisfaction; (2) the services required for artifact construction and use – on the information level as well as on the level of the software artifacts required for these processes – rely heavily on powerful binding environments for multi-medial, persistent and networked information; (3) the processes of artifact construction and use are in themselves valuable sources of information about artifacts; for the exploitation of such process information, digital libraries employ advanced tracing environments. We derive linguistic and architectural requirements for digital libraries from these above essentials. On the language level we concentrate on generalized requirements for the typing, binding and scoping of library entities and services. On the system level we discuss architectural requirements in terms of orthogonal persistence, open extensibility, platform independence, mobility and reflection. We present Tycoon, a polymorphic, higher-order language and its system, and demonstrate its potential for digital libraries. We evaluate Tycoon's rich conceptual basis (data, functions and threads), library-based extensibility, powerful binding mechanisms, its orthogonal persistence and its capability of network-wide data, code and thread migration. We conclude by referring to an interdisciplinary digital library project in Art History Research based on icons, texts and data. Here, Tycoon effectively supports the process of individually customizing and scaling library services thus generalizing the notion of a query language into that of a persistent personal reference library. Received: 1 August 1996 / Accepted: 15 November 1996     

The Internet revolution in law: teaching in new ways

The Internet is revolutionizing the law, legal institutions, and the roles of lawyers and law schools. Legislatures and courts all over the world are discovering how a $3,000 Internet-connected computer can be a remarkably cheap printing press for legal publishing, through which to instantly communicate new statutes, court decisions and administrative regulations. Law schools have an important role to play in connection with this revolution. They should support electronic publishing and virtual library initiatives by public institutions. They must continue to generate intellectual and human capital in the form of scholarship and well-educated graduates, accounting for new and substantive legal issues that the Internet presents. Finally, it is increasingly clear that the Internet provides a new set of educational tools for distance learning that more schools must begin to understand and use to improve teaching quality. Distance learning extends to all uses of computer, telecommunications, and digital networking technologies that permit education to occur outside a conventional classroom. Thus defined, it includes preparation of video taped lectures, preprogrammed computer-assisted legal instruction (CALI) exercises, and use of the Web to deliver these and other materials. The paper focuses on distance learning in law.     

SemWebDL: A privacy-preserving Semantic Web infrastructure for digital libraries

Recent advances in digital libraries have been closely intertwined with advances in Internet technologies. With the advent of the Web, digital libraries have been able to reach constituencies previously unanticipated. Because of the wide deployability of Web-accessible digital libraries, the potential for privacy violations has also grown tremendously. The much touted Semantic Web, with its agent, service, and ontology technologies, is slated to take the Web to another qualitative level in advances. Unfortunately, these advances may also open doors for privacy violations in ways never seen before. We propose a Semantic Web infrastructure, called SemWebDL, that enables the dynamic composition of disparate and autonomous digital libraries while preserving user privacy. In the proposed infrastructure, users will be able to pose more qualitative queries that may require the ad hoc collaboration of multiple digital libraries. In addition to the Semantic Web-based infrastructure, the quality of the response would rest on extraneous information in the form of a profile. We introduce the concept of communities to enable subject-based cooperation and search speedup. Further, digital libraries heterogeneity and autonomy are transcended by a layered Web-service-based infrastructure. Semantic Web-based digital library providers would advertise to Web services, which in turn are organized in communities accessed by users. For the purpose of privacy preservation, we devise a three-tier privacy model consisting of user privacy, Web service privacy, and digital library privacy that offers autonomy of perspectives for privacy definition and violation. We propose an approach that seamlessly interoperates with potentially conflicting privacy definitions and policies at the different levels of the Semantic Web-based infrastructure. A key aspect in the approach is the use of reputations for outsourcing Web services. A Web service reputation is associated with its behavior with regard to privacy preservation. We developed a technique that uses attribute ontologies and information flow difference to collect, evaluate, and disseminate the reputation of Web services.     

Measuring critical components of digital literacy and their relationships with learning

The growing prominence of the Internet, and other digital environments, as educational tools requires research regarding learners' digital literacy. We argue that two critical aspects of digital literacy are the ability to effectively plan and monitor the efficacy of strategies used to search and manage the wealth of information available online, and the knowledge to appropriately vet and integrate those information sources. Therefore, digital literacy requires effective self-regulated learning (SRL) skills, and availing epistemic cognition (EC). Although numerous researchers and scholars have examined the role of SRL in online learning (e.g., Efklides, 2011; Lee and Tsai, 2010, Williams and Hellman, 2004, Winters et al., 2008), there is a need for additional empirical research on how SRL and EC interact, and relate to learning in digital environments. In this study, we used a powerful, but little-used data collection methodology, think-aloud protocol (TAP) analysis, to investigate the relations among SRL, EC, and learning gains with 20 college students who studied vitamins on the Internet. We also contributed to the literature by exploring alternative techniques for preparing, analyzing, and representing these data, accounting for the strengths and challenges of TAPs. We found that, on average, participants did increase their understanding as a result of learning with the Internet, and that a data-driven approach to understanding relations among SRL, EC, and learning yielded the most powerful representation of these phenomena. Our study has implications for future research on digital literacy using TAPs, as well as the relative contribution of SRL and EC, as aspects of digital literacy, to online learning.     

User interaction in digital libraries: coping with diversity through adaptation

User interface adaptations can be used to address several user interaction challenges in the development of digital library systems. This paper: (a) examines some of the intrinsic characteristics of digital library systems; (b) identifies some of the key Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) challenges in relation to design and architectural abstraction for user interfaces to digital library systems; and (c) develops an argumentation for adaptations in digital library systems. By drawing parallels to recent HCI research into adaptable and adaptive user interaction, the paper illustrates potential areas in which user interface adaptation can provide a useful technique for advancing the quality of human interaction with a digital library system. Received: 18 December 1998 / Revised: 31 May 1999     

数字签名在公文传输中的应用

随着各种网上办公系统的应用,公文传输,网上审批等操作的安全性已经越来越引起人们的重视,数字签名的开发与研究为这种新的网上办公系统提供了安全有效的解决方案。介绍利用MD5算法与RSA算法实现公文传输的数字签名。防止公文在传输中被他人修改或顶替,从而确保公文的原始有效性和真实性。利用发送方与接受方之间比较严密的应答协议,克服了单纯利用数字签名带来的弊端,比较适用于当前的B／S架构的OA产品。提供了安全可靠的MD5算法与RSA算法,并指出两者单独使用的不足。     

The use of online digital resources and educational digital libraries in higher education

This paper summarizes results from a national survey of 4,678 respondents, representing 119 institutions of higher education in the United States regarding their use of digital resources for scholarly purposes. This paper presents the following results: (1) demographics commonly used in higher education to categorize populations such as institution type or level of teaching experience could not reliably predict use of online digital resources, (2) valuing online digital resources corresponds with only higher levels of use for certain types of digital resources, (3) lack of time was a significant barrier to use of materials while, paradoxically, respondents indicated that they used them because they save time, (4) respondents did not tend to intentionally look to the Internet as a trusted resource for learning about teaching.     

Construction of cloud platform for personalized information services in digital library based on cloud computing data processing technology

Digital library has begun to enter a new era of cloud computing after Internet era, Web era, Grid era and Web 2.0 era. Combined with cloud computing technology, this thesis constructed a cloud service platform of digital library and described the service process and operating mechanism of digital library cloud service platform.     

Non-existence of systematic education on computerized writing in Japanese schools

In Japanese schools, from elementary to college levels, digital technologies are not widely used for writing education. It sounds paradoxical that computer use in writing education is not flourishing in a country where ordinary people, especially the youth, actively use the Internet and cellular phones to exchange written (or typed) messages, where schools are well-equipped with computer technologies, and where the government shows guidelines and rationales for using information and communication technologies in teaching and learning at schools. This article analyzes the background behind this paradoxical situation. After analyzing how much research on and the practice of digital writing education has been made in the country, this paper discusses the nature of writing education and digital discourse in the Japanese culture and its possible relations to the lack of computerized writing education in Japanese schools.     

Assessing effects of information architecture of digital libraries on supporting E-learning: A case study on the Digital Library of Nature & Culture

Modern digital libraries not only contain rich digital resources, they are also required to provide an environment which integrates collection provision, information services, and academic activities to support effective learning. This work chose the Digital Library of Nature and Culture established by the National Museum of Natural Science in Taiwan to investigate whether the design of the information architecture of a digital library influences learning performance and whether learners with different learning styles have different information usage behaviors and learning performance when they use the digital library to support e-learning. This work suggested that e-learning supported by a digital library resulted in excellent learning performance. Regarding the influence of information architecture on learning performance, this work found that the organization system was crucial to learning performance. Further, learners with different learning performance exhibit different behaviors when they use the information architecture of the digital library. Another finding was that the learning performance of global learners was better than that of sequential learners. Global learners and those learners with superior learning performance relied more heavily on the organization system, while sequential learners and those learners with inferior learning performance relied more heavily on the search system.     

On the bright side of the screen: Material-world interactions surrounding the socialization of outsiders to digital spaces

Internet technologies are generally characterized as deriving from Western mindsets—the assumptions, values, and beliefs that determine how individuals perceive, interpret, and communicate experience. For composition instructors, the Internet's Western accent raises concerns about how students who do not identify with IT's dominant discourse can find a voice that is their own and that also empowers them as participants in online spaces. Numerous studies have explored how outsiders adopt, transform, and resist Internet discourses; at the same time, few studies have used participant observation to explore offline interactions that support the socialization of newcomers and/or outsiders in the use of digital technologies. This essay extends existing research through reporting findings from a reflective, ethnographic study of material-world interactions surrounding the socialization of outsiders to digital spaces.     

Representing digital assets usingMPEG-21 Digital Item Declaration

Various XML-based approaches aimed at representing compound digital assets have emerged over the last several years. Approaches that are of specific relevance to the digital library community include the Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS), the IMS Content Packaging XML Binding, and the XML Formatted Data Units (XFDU) developed by CCSDS Panel 2. The MPEG-21 Digital Item Declaration (MPEG-21 DID) is another standard specifying the representation of digital assets in XML that, so far, has received little attention in the digital library community. This article gives a brief insight into the MPEG-21 standardization effort, highlights the major characteristics of the MPEG-21 DID Abstract Model, and describes the MPEG-21 Digital Item Declaration Language (MPEG-21 DIDL), an XML syntax for the representation of digital assets based on the MPEG-21 DID Abstract Model. Also, it briefly demonstrates the potential relevance of MPEG-21 DID to the digital library community by describing its use in the aDORe repository environment at the Research Library of the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) for the representation of digital assets.     

Interaction and the epistemic potential of digital libraries

This article presents a framework of micro-level interactions with visual representations of information in digital libraries. The framework is comprised of three basic interactions—conversing, manipulating, and navigating—and 13 task-based interactions: animating, annotating, chunking, cloning, collecting, composing, cutting, filtering, fragmenting, probing, rearranging, repicturing, and searching. In a typical digital library, the purpose of interaction is to locate and access relevant information. In this framework, the purpose of interaction is to help people create knowledge, develop understanding, solve problems, and acquire insight from the resources in a collection. In other words, interaction can have epistemic benefits and, consequently, it can be used to leverage the epistemic potential of digital libraries.