Explores the techniques that assist users in obtaining information by harnessing other users' expert knowledge or search experience.

The book focuses on content recognition in text. It elaborates on the past and current most successful algorithms and their application in a variety of domains (e.g., news filtering, mining of biomedical text, intelligence gathering, competitive intelligence, legal information searching, and processing of informal text). An important part discusses current statistical and machine learning algorithms for information detection and classification and integrates their results in probabilistic retrieval models. The book also reveals a number of ideas towards an advanced understanding and synthesis of textual content.

The emergence of open access, web technology, and e-publishing has slowly transformed modern libraries into digital libraries. With this variety of technologies utilized, cloud computing and virtual technology has become an advantage for libraries to provide a single efficient system that saves money and time. Cloud Computing and Virtualization Technologies in Libraries highlights the concerns and limitations that need addressed in order to optimize the benefits of cloud computing to the virtualization of libraries. Focusing on the latest innovations and technological advancements, this book is essential for professionals, students, and researchers interested in cloud library management and development in different types of information environments.

Information retrieval (IR) aims at defining systems able to provide a fast and effective content-based access to a large amount of stored information. The aim of an IR system is to estimate the relevance of documents to users' information needs, expressed by means of a query. This is a very difficult and complex task, since it is pervaded with imprecision and uncertainty. Most of the existing IR systems offer a very simple model of IR, which privileges efficiency at the expense of effectiveness. A promising direction to increase the effectiveness of IR is to model the concept of "partially intrinsic" in the IR process and to make the systems adaptive, i.e. able to "learn" the user's concept of relevance. To this aim, the application of soft computing techniques can be of help to obtain greater flexibility in IR systems.

Collections of digital documents can nowadays be found everywhere in institutions, universities or companies. Examples are Web sites or intranets. But searching them for information can still be painful. Searches often return either large numbers of matches or no suitable matches at all.

Such document collections can vary a lot in size and how much structure they carry. What they have in common is that they typically do have some structure and that they cover a limited range of topics. The second point is significantly different from the Web in general.

The type of search system that we propose in this book can suggest ways of refining or relaxing the query to assist a user in the search process. In order to suggest sensible query modifications we would need to know what the documents are about. Explicit knowledge about the document collection encoded in some electronic form is what we need. However, typically such knowledge is not available. So we construct it automatically.

The development of online digital libraries has enhanced the availability of printed materials. By implementing these systems, this ensures the access of material to universities, students, and bibliophiles. Digitizing the Modern Library and the Transition from Print to Electronic is a pivotal reference source for the latest techniques and initiatives needed to transition libraries into the digital age. Featuring extensive coverage on relevant areas such as electronic resource management, library management software, and semantic web, this publication is an ideal resource for faculty members, research scholars, students, information specialists, and librarians in universities and in academic, public, and special libraries.

The world has comparatively little knowledge of the Republic of Korea, and only in recent years has the West acquired a knowledge of Korean society and culture. So too, Korean librarianship has been a largely obscure topic. There has been little previous effort to inform the international library community about libraries and librarianship in Korea, and even interested scholars have had trouble obtaining information. This book is the first informative, comprehensive guide to the topic. The volume describes the present state of library development and library services available at the various types of libraries in the Republic of Korea, along with the historical backgrounds of the country and librarianship. Also included are discussions of the activities related to bibliographic control, professional associations and training, and library automation. By examining the operations of some representative libraries, the book further demonstrates how Korean librarianship is a mix of American librarianship and Chinese and Japanese cultural influences.

Text Retrieval and Filtering: Analytical Models of Performance is the first book that addresses the problem of analytically computing the performance of retrieval and filtering systems. The book describes means by which retrieval may be studied analytically, allowing one to describe current performance, predict future performance, and to understand why systems perform as they do. The focus is on retrieving and filtering natural language text, with material addressing retrieval performance for the simple case of queries with a single term, the more complex case with multiple terms, both with term independence and term dependence, and for the use of grammatical information to improve performance. Unambiguous statements of the conditions under which one method or system will be more effective than another are developed. Text Retrieval and Filtering: Analytical Models of Performance focuses on the performance of systems that retrieve natural language text, considering full sentences as well as phrases and individual words. The last chapter explicitly addresses how grammatical constructs and methods may be studied in the context of retrieval or filtering system performance. The book builds toward solving this problem, although the material in earlier chapters is as useful to those addressing non-linguistic, statistical concerns as it is to linguists. Those interested in grammatical information should be cautioned to carefully examine earlier chapters, especially Chapters 7 and 8, which discuss purely statistical relationships between terms, before moving on to Chapter 10, which explicitly addresses linguistic issues. Text Retrieval and Filtering: Analytical Models of Performance is suitable as a secondary text for a graduate level course on Information Retrieval or Linguistics, and as a reference for researchers and practitioners in industry.

This comprehensive manual of operations for managing local history material within the administrative framework of a library covers issues of administration, acquisitions, access, and use of all formats of material. Information on continually changing areas such as preservation, copyright and other legal concerns, computer applications, and national databases is also addressed, along with public relations roles and outreach activities for local history collections. Guidelines for administration of nontraditional library material (e.g., manuscripts) will be especially helpful to librarians. Archivists will value the manual as one of continuing practical education and theoretical development as exemplified by the Society of American Archivists' Basic Manual Series and Archival Fundamental Series. Manuscript curators, students, and administrators will also benefit from this book.

Using database-driven web pages or web content management (WCM) systems to manage increasingly diverse web content and to streamline workflows is a commonly practiced solution recognized in libraries to-day. However, limited library web content management models and funding constraints prevent many libraries from purchasing commercially available WCM systems. And, the lack of much needed technical expertise in building in-house WCM systems presents a great challenge for libraries of all types. Content and Workflow Management for Library Websites: Case Studies provides practical and applicable web content management solutions through case studies. It contains successful database-to-web applications as employed in a variety of academic libraries. The applications vary in scope and cover a range of practical how-to-do-it examples from database-driven web development, locally created web content management systems, systems for distributing content management responsibilities, dynamic content delivery, to open source tools, such as MySQL and PHP to manage the content. Issues and challenges associated with the development process are discussed. Authors will also discuss detours, sand traps, and missteps necessary to a real learning process.

Extracting content from text continues to be an important research problem for information processing and management. Approaches to capture the semantics of text-based document collections may be based on Bayesian models, probability theory, vector space models, statistical models, or even graph theory. As the volume of digitized textual media continues to grow, so does the need for designing robust, scalable indexing and search strategies (software) to meet a variety of user needs. Knowledge extraction or creation from text requires systematic yet reliable processing that can be codified and adapted for changing needs and environments. This book will draw upon experts in both academia and industry to recommend practical approaches to the purification, indexing, and mining of textual information. It will address document identification, clustering and categorizing documents, cleaning text, and visualizing semantic models of text.

Searching Multimedia Databases by Content bridges the gap between the database and signal processing communities by providing the necessary background information for the reader and presenting it along with the intuition and mechanics of the best existing tools in each area. The first half of Searching Multimedia Databases by Content reviews the most successful database access methods, in increasing complexity, reaching up to spatial access methods and text retrieval. In all cases, the emphasis is on practical approaches that have been incorporated in commercial systems, or that seem very promising. The second half of the book uses the above access methods to achieve fast searching in a database of signals. A general methodology is presented, which suggests extracting a few good features from each multimedia object, thus mapping objects into points in a metric space. Finally, the book concludes by presenting some recent successful applications of the methodology on time series and color images. Searching Multimedia Databases by Content is targeted towards researchers and developers of multimedia systems. The book can also serve as a textbook for a graduate course on multimedia searching, covering both access methods as well as the basics of signal processing.

This book introduces a new approach to designing E-Librarian Services. With the help of this system, users will be able to retrieve multimedia resources from digital libraries more efficiently than they would by browsing through an index or by using a simple keyword search. E-Librarian Services combine recent advances in multimedia information retrieval with aspects of human-machine interfaces, such as the ability to ask questions in natural language; they simulate a human librarian by finding and delivering the most relevant documents that offer users potential answers to their queries. The premise is that more pertinent results can be retrieved if the search engine understands the meaning of the query; the returned results are therefore logical consequences of an inference rather than of keyword matches. Moreover, E-Librarian Services always provide users with a solution, even in situations where they are unable to offer a comprehensive answer.

The future of reference librarianship as a viable and essential part of the library depends on developing a proactive, participatory, and hands-on approach to automation. This book pulls together the most important elements of change likely to influence library information services and explains them clearly. It covers both the conceptual context and practical real-life implementations of current automation in reference services. The automation technologies include OPACs, CD-ROM, international networks, expert systems, natural language processing, and virtual reality. In addition to helping people find information, reference librarians also perform another service: the comprehension and understanding of the operative connections between and route to information. It necessitates an unrelenting exploration and immersion within the world information matrix to maintain currency and knowledge. The author shows how reference librarians have in the past and will in the future take a leading role in adapting automation to reference services.

Solutions to the unique problems of academic libraries in urban and metropolitan areas are provided in this professional handbook. Issues faced by the administrators of these libraries can differ markedly from those encountered by their counterparts in residential college towns, with service demands emanating from both the surrounding community and their own academic community. Written by experienced urban university librarians, each chapter addresses issues unique to the "in-city" academic library. Reaching out to their communities to establish links with business, industry, and other libraries, the administrators of the urban/metropolitan libraries require a great degree of diplomacy and management skills. Service demands arising from urban high schools place additional pressures on limited resources. This handbook shows how the use of new technologies can assist the urban academic librarian in fashioning services for a nonresident faculty, as well as a usually older student body, comprised of many international and part-time students. The characteristics of city living and their impact on information-seeking behavior are discussed. Other topics covered are resource sharing, setting fees, staff and collection security, environmental pollution and space requirements.

Though computers have become more common, many academic libraries still lack automation of any kind. With the growing importance of the Internet and the proliferation of electronic databases, automation is likely to be an important part of the future of every library. Fortunately, enough libraries have implemented automated systems so that their experiences can inform those libraries only about to engage in automation projects. This professional reference is a guide to the forecasting, planning, implementing, and monitoring necessary for the successful management of academic library automation.

While novices will benefit from this book, the volume will be of special interest to librarians presently engaged in automation projects. The authors of the book's chapters come from all types of academic libraries and offer a wide range of experience and perspectives. The volume focuses on two major areas of librarianship, public service and technical services; and contributors stress the importance of planning, teamwork, and clear objectives. Each chapter cites sources of additional information, and the volume closes with two bibliographic essays.

The theme of this meeting was the management of technologies in the context of developing countries, and in the light of recent developments concerning especially open source software and applications. Speakers from various countries debated in English and in French over the importance of changing the rules concerning library management systems, as well as related implications. Results show that open source software might be a solution, although some conditions apply. Reunis sous le theme de la gestion des systemes automatises de bibliotheques dans les pays en developpement, conferenciers et participants discuterent des changements recents dans ce domaine, notamment de l'apport des logiciels a code source ouvert. Les conferenciers, provenant de differents pays, presenterent en anglais et en francais leurs differents points de vue et experiences sur cette question importante pour l'avenir, de meme que sur les implications qui y sont liees. Les resultats demontrent que les logiciels a code source ouverts peuvent etre une solution, mais a certaines conditions.

Written from both the librarian's and scientist's point of view, this book is a comprehensive guide to conducting searches of scientific, agricultural, and technological literature. The beginning user will find the work a valuable introduction to search and retrieval techniques, while the experienced user will welcome the volume's overview of the most recent methods and strategies. Because the library is no longer the only place where a researcher may conduct literature searches, this revised edition gives extensive attention to electronic searches from remote sites, such as computers at the home or office.

Searching for information is changing from the traditional library setting to the remote environment. Written from both the librarian's and scientist's perspectives, this comprehensive guide overviews fundamental and advanced methods of conducting scientific, technological, and agricultural literature searches from libraries and remote sites, such as computers at the home or office. Beginners will find this book a useful introduction to search and retrieval techniques. At the same time, the computerization of libraries has been so rapid that the experienced researcher will also benefit from this work.

The first part of the book overviews and discusses available information sources. The second and third parts examine ways of finding these information sources in the library, and techniques of searching and retrieving this information via computer from outside the library. The volume explains the pathway of information in literature, methods of identifying and citing literature, the usefulness of the online catalog, the special features of abstracts and indexes, the nature of online searching, and the significance of the Internet to users in scientific and research environments. The final chapter gives special attention to the electronic library and the World Wide Web. A concise bibliography directs the reader to some of the most important aids for literature searching.

The year 1997 found the members of the OCLC (Online Computer Library Center) cooperative in an expansive mood. More than 1,000 library leaders attended the OCLC President's Luncheon in San Francisco, where they celebrated OCLC's 30th anniversary. There were more than 25,000 libraries participating in the cooperative, including nearly 3,000 libraries in 62 countries outside the U.S., and the WorldCat database contained more than 37 million bibliographic records. Over the next ten years, the global digital library would indeed emerge, but in a form that few could have predicted. Against a backdrop of continuous technological change and the rapid growth of the Internet, the OCLC cooperative's WorldCat database continued to grow and was a central theme of the past decade. As the chapters in this book show, OCLC's chartered objectives of furthering access to the world's information and reducing the rate of rising library costs continue to resonate among libraries and librarians, as the OCLC cooperative enters its fifth decade. This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Library Administration.