In this thesis I present Noosphere, a system for the collaborative production of digital libraries. Further, I describe the special features of Noosphere which allow it to support mathematical and scientific content, and how it applies an encyclopedic organizational style. I also describe how Noosphere frees the digital library maintainer from a heavy administrative burden by implementing the design pattern of zero content administration. Finally, I discuss evidence showing that Noosphere works and is sustainable, both in the a priori and empirical senses. / Master of Science

The Digital Library Research Laboratory (DLRL) has collected over 1.5 billion tweets for the Integrated Digital Event Archiving and Library (IDEAL) and Global Event Trend Archive Research (GETAR) projects. Researchers across varying disciplines have an interest in leveraging DLRL's collections of tweets for their own analyses. However, due to the steep learning curve involved with the required tools (Spark, Scala, HBase, etc.), simply converting the Twitter data into a workable format can be a cumbersome task in itself. This prompted the effort to build a framework that will help in developing code to analyze the Twitter data, run on arbitrary tweet collections, and enable developers to leverage projects designed with this general use in mind. The intent of this thesis work is to create an extensible framework of tools and data structures to represent Twitter data at a higher level and eliminate the need to work with raw text, so as to make the development of new analytics tools faster, easier, and more efficient. To represent this data, several data structures were designed to operate on top of the Hadoop and Spark libraries of tools. The first set of data structures is an abstract representation of a tweet at a basic level, as well as several concrete implementations which represent varying levels of detail to correspond with common sources of tweet data. The second major data structure is a collection structure designed to represent collections of tweet data structures and provide ways to filter, clean, and process the collections. All of these data structures went through an iterative design process based on the needs of the developers. The effectiveness of this effort was demonstrated in four distinct case studies. In the first case study, the framework was used to build a new tool that selects Twitter data from DLRL's archive of tweets, cleans those tweets, and performs sentiment analysis within the topics of a collection's topic model. The second case study applies the provided tools for the purpose of sociolinguistic studies. The third case study explores large datasets to accumulate all possible analyses on the datasets. The fourth case study builds metadata by expanding the shortened URLs contained in the tweets and storing them as metadata about the collections. The framework proved to be useful and cut development time for all four of the case studies. / Master of Science / The Digital Library Research Laboratory (DLRL) has collected over 1.5 billion tweets for the Integrated Digital Event Archiving and Library (IDEAL) and Global Event Trend Archive Research (GETAR) projects. Researchers across varying disciplines have an interest in leveraging DLRL’s collections of tweets for their own analyses. However, due to the steep learning curve involved with the required tools, simply converting the Twitter data into a workable format can be a cumbersome task in itself. This prompted the effort to build a programming framework that will help in developing code to analyze the Twitter data, run on arbitrary tweet collections, and enable developers to leverage projects designed with this general use in mind. The intent of this thesis work is to create an extensible framework of tools and data structures to represent Twitter data at a higher level and eliminate the need to work with raw text, so as to make the development of new analytics tools faster, easier, and more efficient. The effectiveness of this effort was demonstrated in four distinct case studies. In the first case study, the framework was used to build a new tool that selects Twitter data from DLRL’s archive of tweets, cleans those tweets, and performs sentiment analysis within the topics of a collection’s topic model. The second case study applies the provided tools for the purpose of sociolinguistic studies. The third case study explores large datasets to accumulate all possible analyses on the datasets. The fourth case study builds metadata by expanding the shortened URLs contained in the tweets and storing them as metadata about the collections. The framework proved to be useful and cut development time for all four of the case studies.

L'association entre un métal de transition et des cyclodextrines est d'un grand intérêt pour développer de nouveaux catalyseurs, mimes enzymatiques, capteurs ou fils moléculaires. L'interaction entre un complexe métallique et une cyclodextrine ouvre de nouvelles opportunités dans la chimie de coordination où de nouvelles réactivités et sélectivités sont attendues. Dans ce contexte, plusieurs composés totalement originaux de type cobalt(II)-cyclodextrines et cuivre(II)-cyclodextrines ont été synthétisés et caractérisés par voie électrochimique. La réactivité des espèces bas-valentes électrogénérées a été également étudiée vis-à-vis de dérivés halogénés alkyles et aromatiques. Il a été démontré que la dualité stabilité / réactivité des espèces transitoires pouvait être modulée en fonction de la nature du ligand greffé sur la cyclodextrine. Des études spectrophotométriques UV-Visible et spectroscopiques on été associées à ce travail, afin d'étudier la structure en solution d'un de ces complexe métallo-cyclodextrines. Ce travail original ouvre de nouvelles opportunités dans l'utilisation d'effets supramoléculaires biomimétiques dans les processus catalytiques afin de les rendre plus efficaces et sélectifs aussi bien en solvants organiques qu'en milieu aqueux (chimie verte).

Thesis (M. Arch.)--University of Pretoria, 2003. / Title from opening screen (viewed June 14, 2004). Includes bibliographical references.

M. Tech. Business Information Systems / The major objective of this study was to conceptualize a framework needed to guide effective usage of digital library. This study was motivated by the fact that, much as several studies have been conducted to inform digital library usage ; the determinants of the effective usage are still not clearly articulated. The study utilized the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) to guide the flow and collection of data. By using a close ended questionnaire data was collected from three campuses of Tshwane University of Technology (TUT) namely ; Pretoria, Soshanguve and Garankwa. The Statistical Package for Social Scientist (SPSS) v21 was used to conduct univariate and bivariate analyses.

Sponsored by the National Science Foundation, this project is the first phase of the National Civil Engineering Education Resources Library (NCERL). The aim is to provide high-quality educational resources in the field of civil engineering and meet the needs of a diverse audience by developing Interactive Learning Objects that are easy to use, measured, and meet learning objectives.

Information finding is changing in a world of digital information and associated search systems, with particular focus on methods of locating information that are distinct from, but complementary to, established practices of bibliographic description. A full understanding of these developments is essential in re-thinking bibliographic control in the new millennium, because they fundamentally change the roles and importance of bibliographic metadata in information discovery processes. There are three major approaches to finding information: through bibliographic surrogates, that represent an intellectual description of aspects and attributes of a work; through computational, content-based techniques that compare queries to parts of the actual works themselves; and through social processes that consider works in relationship to the user and his or her characteristics and history, to other works, and also to the behavior of other communities of users.

National Informatics Centre had established a subject repository in May 2005. It is meant for Medical and Allied Sciences and named as OpenMED@NIC <http://openmed.nic.in>. It has MeSH® based subject categorization and this makes it one of its own kind. Taking OpenMED@NIC as a case â this paper discusses key issues in establishing and maintaining an open access repository. Librarians and information science professionals can play active role in providing access and exposure to quality research and academic content generated in their institutions. Mature and standard open sources softwares are now available for setting up repositories. Libraries can install one of these on existing institutional or library servers to setup repositories. However to ensure better access and faster response time dedicated hardware and reliable connectivity would be required. Librarians and information science professional can play important role in exposing intellectual content produced by their organizations. They can take of various roles like â generating awareness among staff, researchers and students about benefits of self arching in institutional or subject repositories; training them in uploading their articles and other documents in such repositories; acting as meta-data editors and repositories managers. Establishing a repository, administrating and inviting authors to deposit their articles and other works in it is golden opportunity available to librarians and information science professionals. This opportunity should be grabbed with open hands.

Very few Indian biomedical journals have found place in international databases due to various reasons like delayed / irregular publishing, lack of quality articles, etc. The National Library of Medicineâ s (NLM, USA) MEDLINE database covers approximately 50 Indian journals. As far as the full-text of these journals are concerned, MEDLINE has only covered three Indian journals. The ICMR-NIC Centre for Biomedical Information, the 17th International MEDLARS Centre has been catering to the biomedical information needs of the medical professionals since 1986. One of the tasks undertaken by the Centre is to meet the glaring and obvious â unavailabilityâ of Indian biomedical research literature. Hence, the Centre took up the challenging task to develop databases of Indian biomedical journals and provide a platform for making this literature available to the Indian as well as international medical community. One such database developed is the IndMED, which covers the bibliographic details from 75 peer reviewed Indian biomedical journals. IndMED has received a lot of recognition and the Centre strives to keep this database at par with the MEDLINE database. The 2nd database being developed is the Online full-text database of Indian biomedical journals, medIND, which would cover the full-text of IndMED journals and serve as one vital resource for all Indian biomedical literature.

This is an unpublished and longer version of a short paper that was submitted (and not accepted) to JCDL 2003. In this paper we describe our initial goals for DLIST, a digital library for Library and Information Science Research and Practice and for Information Technology as it relates to LIS. DLIST is built upon the open access eprints model, but extends materials in the collection beyond the formal, scholarly literature to include other types of content created by researchers and practitioners. DLIST is intended to promote resource sharing in LIS and IT and to attempt to bridge the gap between research and practice. The notion of open access is briefly discussed as a central tenet for the development of the intellectual commons as an interactive space for learning.