Millions of books from public libraries and private collections have been scanned by various organizations in the last decade. The motivation is to preserve the written human heritage in electronic format for durable storage and efficient access. The information buried in these large book collections has always been of major interest for scholars from various disciplines. Several interesting research problems can be defined over large collections of scanned books given their corresponding optical character recognition (OCR) outputs. At the highest level, one can view the entire collection as a whole and discover interesting contextual relationships or linkages between the books. A more traditional approach is to consider each scanned book separately and perform information search and mining at the book level. Here we also show that one can view each book as a whole composed of chapters, sections, paragraphs, sentences, words or even characters positioned in a particular sequential order sharing the same global context. The information inherent in the entire context of the book is referred to as "global information" and it is demonstrated by addressing a number of research questions defined for scanned book collections. The global sequence information is one of the different types of global information available in textual documents. It is useful for discovering content overlap and similarity across books. Each book has a specific flow of ideas and events which distinguishes it from other books. If this global order is changed, then the flow of events and consequently the story changes completely. This argument is true across document translations as well. Although the local order of words in a sentence might not be preserved after translation, sentences, paragraphs, sections and chapters are likely to follow the same global order. Otherwise the two texts are not considered to be translations of each other. A global sequence alignment approach is therefore proposed to discover the contextual similarity between the books. The problem is that conventional sequence alignment algorithms are slow and not robust for book length documents especially with OCR errors, additional or missing content. Here we propose a general framework which can be used to efficiently align and compare the textual content of the books at various coarseness levels and even across languages. In a nut-shell, the framework uses the sequence of words which appear only once in the entire book (referred to as "the sequence of unique words") to represent the text. This representation is compact and it is highly descriptive of the content along with the global word sequence information. It is shown to be more accurate compared to the state of the art for efficiently i) detecting which books are partial duplicates in large scanned book collections (DUPNIQ), and, ii) finding which books are translations of each other without explicitly translating the entire texts using statistical machine translation approaches (TRANSNIQ). Using the global order of unique words and their corresponding positions in the text, one can also generate the complete text alignment efficiently using a recursive approach. The Recursive Text Alignment Scheme (RETAS) is several orders of magnitude faster than the conventional sequence alignment approaches for long texts and it is later used for iii) the automatic evaluation of OCR accuracy of books given the OCR outputs and the corresponding electronic versions, iv) mapping the corresponding portions of the two books which are known to be partial duplicates, and finally it is generalized for v) aligning long noisy texts across languages (Recursive Translation Alignment - RTA). Another example of the global information is that books are mostly printed in a single global font type. Here we demonstrate that the global font feature along with the letter sequence information can be used for facilitating and/or improving text search in noisy page images. There are two contributions in this area: (vi) an efficient word spotting framework for searching text in noisy document images, and, (vii) a state of the art dependence model approach to resolve arbitrary text queries using visual features. The effectiveness of these approaches is demonstrated for books printed in different scripts for which there is no OCR engine available or the recognition accuracy is low.

This study is concerned with the attitudes and perceptions of the current elementary school library media centers in Taiwan, Republic of China. Elementary school students, principals, library staff, and prospective elementary school teachers in teacher colleges were interviewed and surveyed. Dissatisfaction about the physical layout, the collections, the user/circulation service, and the personnel of elementary school libraries was reported by the four targeted groups. Responses to this investigator's field studies and surveys were compared with the recommendations suggested in the Chinese standards of practice: Elementary School Facilities Standards (Ministry of Education, Taiwan, 1981), and the most updated American standards: Information Power: Guidelines for School Library Media Programs (AASL, 1988). Literature that studied cases in Taiwan, Canada, Great Britain, and the United States was reviewed to provide reference and support for this study. The results of the study indicate that, in most cases, elementary classroom teachers in Taiwan are assigned the responsibility for library operation, in addition to their major teaching responsibility, despite the fact that few had any library training prior to this assignment. The finding suggests that Taiwan has not yet concluded that the library and librarians are an important adjunct of the learning process. That prospective teachers should receive adequate library training in their preparation program, as other surveys had suggested, was also affirmed by this study. Library training for prospective teachers can help them not only to possess the necessary background to help their future students but also to help themselves, as prospective teachers, become better (and more capable) library users. The study recommends the revision, updating, and reinforcement of the Chinese elementary school library standards. Programs should be established to train and certify people who are interested in working at elementary school libraries. A technical service center should be established so that direct contacts with users by library staff can be their primary concern.

Library history provides a biographical account of libraries, which includes information concerning the establishment, benefactors, significant collections, services rendered, outstanding achievements, and other points of interest. However, records of library service to African Americans in the South prior to 1900 are rare or non-existent. Not until the early 20th century did the Julius Rosenwald Fund Library Program begin to offer library service to the black and white residents in the rural South. Through the analysis of archival documents, this dissertation explores the impact of the library program on Southern libraries and the role of the library in the life of the African-American user. In its attempt to educate the reader about the early African-American struggle for library access, this study highlights the lack of emphasis on library history research in the field of Library and Information Science (LIS) and its risk of losing a valuable sub-discipline. In addition, the field potentially forfeits invaluable insight and understanding of library service to African Americans in the 20th century. This could jeopardize future planning for adequate service to underrepresented populations. Using archival analysis, the study utilizes preset categories to investigate library practices of Rosenwald-funded libraries with anticipation for unanticipated concepts to emerge. This exploratory, archival analysis unveils the variety of approaches and practices the Julius Rosenwald Fund Library Program incorporated to improve library service not only to African-Americans users, but to the entire American South. / A Dissertation submitted to the School of Information in partial fulfillment of the Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester, 2015. / April 3, 2015. / Includes bibliographical references. / Paul Marty, Professor Directing Dissertation; Suzanne Sinke, University Representative; Kathy Burnett, Committee Member; Gary Burnett, Committee Member.

This study examines the publication, review and collection of fiction and poetry titles written by African-American women, published between 1980-1990 by Association of Research Libraries member academic libraries located in the United States. It is an examination of institutionalized legitimizing social forces and their influence on the collection and sanctioning of knowledge as expressed through academic library collections. An analysis of discourse of a small set of titles reveals how expressions of social reality by a marginalized social group inform the discourse of larger society inherent in such library collections. A statistical analysis reveals that 70% of the titles written by African-American women during this time frame were poetry and that over half of these titles were published by small publishers. It was determined that there was no statistical relationship between the size of the publisher and the number of these titles a publisher produced. Approximately 40% of the titles received at least one book review, but the six core library professional and book trade review journals did not proportionately review these titles. The factors that were related to holdings of these titles include the total number of book reviews a title received, the number of titles the author published, the presence of an African-American Studies Department at the member institution, and the total number of volumes held by the library. / A Dissertation submitted to the School of Information Studies in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Fall Semester, 2003. / July 31, 2003. / Black Women, Feminism, Small Press, Discourse Analysis / Includes bibliographical references. / Ronald Blazek, Professor Directing Dissertation; Maxine Montgomery, Outside Committee Member; Jane Robbins, Committee Member; Thomas Hart, Committee Member.

In July 2013, the social media Facebook campaign, Save the Miami-Dade Public Libraries (SMDPL) sought to influence the Miami-Dade County Mayor and Board of County Commissioners to reverse proposed budget cuts and maintain existing library funding levels. In this study, I examined the SMDPL campaign by conducting a discourse analysis of Facebook discussions that included posts, comments and any artifacts referenced such as other websites, mainstream media, public official memoranda and public documents, among others. I examined the expressions of value and the policymaking process using Moore's Creating Public Value Theory. This study found that Creating Public Value offered an examination of public institutions as subsets of public sector governance. The study found that discourse is an element of the public value created that resulted in expression of public value outcomes and operational capacity for communities. However the study also found that public library advocates missed opportunities to demonstrate rather than assert, specific public library values. Information sharing using social network sites can be important sources of what a community values in their libraries and their public sector institutions. Future research could examine how these values influence the actions of public officials and the discourse can become a source of examining what all types of communities' value in libraries. / A Dissertation submitted to the School of Information in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester 2016. / April 4, 2016. / advocacy, discourse analysis, Facebook, public libraries, public policy, social network sites / Includes bibliographical references. / Lorraine Mon, Professor Directing Dissertation; Stephen McDowell, University Representative; Charles R. McClure, Committee Member; Marcia A. Mardis, Committee Member.

No description available.

No description available.

The study investigated what must be altered in the intellectual property system to avoid obstructing collaborative research between academe and industry. The methodology for the inquiry was to solicit persons with knowledge regarding the impact of technology on society's institutions, the idiosyncracies of collaboration, or both. The individuals selected to participate in this inquiry were drawn from a variety of backgrounds. Fifty academic deans were sampled in an effort to collect the opinions of those individuals most likely wanting to defend the traditional value system of the university. Another group included 90 individuals with knowledge of industry-academe alliances or technology transfer. A third group of surveys were sent to 20 individuals whom the committee regarded as "visionaries." This group was expected to be capable of addressing the questions from a more philosophical basis. All groups supported the generalization that technological advances have overrun the boundaries of definition. The concepts of fair use and derivative need to be adjusted in order to balance the rights of the innovator and society. Furthermore, the findings pointed out that incentives to innovate will come from forces that lie outside our system of intellectual property protections. Industry and academe recognized that basic science is essential for society because it is the basis of our technological growth. Furthermore, all groups noted that (a) collaboration is beneficial to the curriculum, (b) a reasonable delay in publication is acceptable, and (c) the entrepreneurial spirit of the faculty should be recognized. The treatment of ideas as property is controversial. Neither the courts nor philosophers have converged the numerous justifications into a single unified theory. Universities have spent insufficient resources to develop a conscious research strategy of their own that is consistent with the institutions mores and tradition. The university is the home of basic research and must accommodate many other things, including applied research. Inefficiencies exist in the process of knowledge and technology transfer. Academe needs to commit resources to the management of transactions of technology and knowledge across institutional boundaries.

No description available.

No description available.