A formulation for patenting content-based retrieval processes in digital libraries

The Information Age is fully upon us. A recent article noted that there are perhaps 50 million people using the Internet on a regular basis, and That “the current growth rate is about 15% per month (!) and this could well continue until almost all of those in the ‘developed world’ are connected” [FM94, p. 30]. In addition, the digital domain consists not only of text but increasingly of other media representations, from graphics images to audio to motion video. As the amount of information and number of users exponentially escalate, more attention focuses on the basic problems of information management: How do you digitize information? How can you then visualize it and find what you need? How do you use and manipulate it effectively? How is it stored and managed? The proliferation of technical articles and special issues addressing these questions underscore their importance; see for example the special issue on Content-based retrieval [Nar95] or digital libraries [F+95]. This chapter will survey some of that work, especially that which relates to the treatment of video and the use of digital video libraries For education.

The objective of this research is to study the issues involved in building a digital library that contains data streams and allows event-based retrieval. “Digital Libraries are storehouses of information available through the Internet that provide ways to collect, store, and organize data and make it accessible for search, retrieval, and processing” [29]. Data streams are sources of information for applications such as news-on-demand, weather services, and scientific research, to name a few. A data stream is a sequence of data units produced over a period of time. Examples of data streams are video streams, audio stream, and sensor readings. Saving data streams in digital libraries is advantageous because of the services provided by digital libraries such as archiving, preservation, administration, and access control. Events are noteworthy occurrences that happen during data streams. Events are easier to remember than specific time instances at which they occur; hence using them for retrieval is more commensurate with human behavior and can be more efficient via direct accessing instead of scanning. The focus of this research is not only on storing data streams in a digital library and using event-based retrieval, but also on relating streams and playing them back at the same time, possibly in a synchronized manner, to facilitate better understanding in research or other working situations. Our approach for this research starts by considering digital libraries for: stock market, news streams, census bureau statistics, weather, sports games, and the educational environment. For each of these applications, we form categories of possible users and the basic requirements for each of them. As a result, we identify a list of design goals that we take into consideration in developing the architecture of the library. To illustrate and validate our approach we implement a medical digital library containing actual Computed Tomography (CT) scan streams. It also contains sample medical text and audio streams to show the heterogeneity of the library. Streams are displayed in a concise, yet complete, way that makes it unproblematic for users to decide whether or not to playback a stream and to set playback options. The playback interface itself is organized in a way that accommodates synchronous and asynchronous streams and enables users to control the playback of these streams. We study the performance of the specialized search and retrieval processes in comparison to traditional search and retrieval processes. We conclude with a discussion on how to adapt the library to additional stream types in addition to suggesting other future efforts in this area.

In recent years, the rapid expansion of multimedia applications, partly due to the exponential growth of the Internet, has proliferated over the daily life of computer users (Yang & Hurson, 2006). The integration of wireless communication, pervasive computing, and ubiquitous data processing with multimedia database systems has enabled the connection and fusion of distributed multimedia data sources. In addition, the emerging applications, such as smart classroom, digital library, habitat/environment surveillance, traffic monitoring, and battlefield sensing, have provided increasing motivation for conducting research on multimedia content representation, data delivery and dissemination, data fusion and analysis, and contentbased retrieval. Consequently, research on multimedia technologies is of increasing importance in computer society. In contrast with traditional text-based systems, multimedia applications usually incorporate much more powerful descriptions of human thought—video, audio, and images (Karpouzis, Raouzaiou, Tzouveli, Iaonnou, & Kollias, 2003; Liu, Bao, Yu, & Xu, 2005; Yang & Hurson, 2005). Moreover, the large collections of data in multimedia systems make it possible to resolve more complex data operations such as imprecise query or content-based retrieval. For instance, the image database systems may accept an example picture and return the most similar images of the example (Cox, Miller, & Minka, 2000; Hsu, Chua, & Pung, 2000; Huang, Chang, & Huang, 2003). However, the conveniences of multimedia applications come with challenges to the existing data management schemes: • Efficiency: Multimedia applications generally require more resources; however, the storage space and processing power are limited in many practical systems, for example, mobile devices and wireless networks (Yang & Hurson, 2005). Due to the large data volume and complicated operations of multimedia applications, new methods are needed to facilitate efficient representation, retrieval, and processing of multimedia data while considering the technical constraints. • Semantic Gap: There is a gap between user perception of multimedia entities and physical representation/access mechanism of multimedia data. Users often browse and desire to access multimedia data at the object level (“entities” such as human beings, animals, or buildings). However, the existing multimedia retrieval systems tend to access multimedia data based on their lower-level features (“characteristics” such as color patterns and textures), with little regard to combining these features into data objects. This representation gap often leads to higher processing cost and unexpected retrieval results. The representation of multimedia data according to human’s perspective is one of the focuses in recent research activities; however, few existing systems provide automated identification or classification of objects from general multimedia collections. • Heterogeneity: The collections of multimedia data are often diverse and poorly indexed. In a distributed environment, because of the autonomy and heterogeneity of data sources, multimedia data objects are often represented in heterogeneous formats. The difference in data formats further leads to the difficulty of incorporating multimedia data objects under a unique indexing framework. • Semantic Unawareness: The present research on content-based multimedia retrieval is based on feature vectors—features are extracted from audio/video streams or image pixels, empirically or heuristically, and combined into vectors according to the application criteria. Because of the application-specific multimedia formats, the feature-based paradigm lacks scalability and accuracy.

The Saab Medical Library (SML) developed its virtual medical library site in 1997. The spread of the Internet prompted its development, in addition to continuous requests from users to provide such a service for 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The virtual library is dynamic, growing and changing continuously, and the role of the traditional reference librarian and the end‐user education programs had to change to fit this borderless library. This paper discusses the aim, preparation, problems and lessons learned after three years of the user education program in a virtual library setting, and how reference work had to change to satisfy the needs of both the system and its users. The reference librarian has to carry out a smooth transition to a virtual library and help users cope with the technological changes. Training at the SML, as in any academic library, aims at teaching how to retrieve information rather than providing answers. This training is presented in different forms such as orientation sessions, seminars, and course‐related instruction, in addition to Web‐based instruction. In a virtual setting, reference librarians should act both as educators and consultants for end‐users, advising them on the search strategy as well as the software set‐up. The “Lebanese Corner” and an e‐reference service were added to complete the picture of this virtual library. This change had advantages and disadvantages for the users.

In H. G. Well's The Island of Dr. Moreau, the sinister doctor grows bizarre creatures of flesh and bone to further his vast and evil ambitions. In Isaac Asimov's world of the near future, robots manufactured from metals and polymers are governed by rational principles and serve their human masters for more domestic reasons. In our own age we have the means to construct entities as outlandish as Moreau's and as helpful as Asimov's, made up of hardware, software and the engaged human mind. These new organisms are not motivated by an external spark or by a set of self-contained algorithms. They are animated by the direct involvement of a person or community and by human knowledge stored, accessed and shared. We are the ghost in the web machine. A website's information architecture (IA) is the framework, the skeleton upon which the whole organism of the site stands up. IA gives a site its articulation and therefore its potential to grow into whatever sort of thing it will be. A good IA can be simple and elegant, or complex and engaging. A bad or accidental IA could resemble something that lumbered out of a mad scientist's vat. Digital libraries are often grown over time out of perfectly good but originally unrelated pieces and are particularly at risk of becoming Moreauvian nightmares. To avoid such mistakes you need a good plan and a well-considered approach. IA methodology will give you the blueprints for building a much better digital library. Since the human mind animates the website, the user must be at the center of the web design process. And since design products have to move back and forth during their creation among a number of people—design team members, stakeholders, end users and developers—the web design process should be iterative. User-centered design (UCD) brings representatives from all concerned parties into the process, and iteration allows design to be refined from broad to finely detailed. These methods also help the team figure out which tasks are important to a particular project, get buy-in where needed, creatively manage the tricky parts that come up and roll out a successful web application or site. Navigation, labels and information organization Interactions between user and different parts of the website Relationships between the site and other objects in its environment (search engines, other sites that can contribute or use digital library information, enterprise-wide navigation and more) IA uses user-centered design practices in conjunction with other methods to arrive at these blueprints. An upcoming LITA guide (http://www.lita.org/) showcases projects that apply user-centered design techniques to improve public and special library websites. Edited by Tom Lehman and Terry Nikkel, Making Library Websites Usable, will offer methodologies and case studies to put powerful tools into the right hands. I contributed a case study describing a website redesign for a corporate knowledge services department. As I organized my thoughts for that article I saw that most problems were not unique to digital libraries or knowledge services organizations. Also, the UCD and IA practices we followed can be applied to any complex information space. However, two issues emerged that do pertain specifically to digital libraries. They are designing good interfaces for lists and crafting the user experience when target objects lie outside the digital library. Digital library listings follow various models. Some look like Google results pages. Some replicate card catalogs. Others are bulleted lists or tables. In each case the person designing the list interface has to select which attributes to display for each information object. This decision should not be primarily technological (“all these fields are available in the database, so let's show them”) nor even a cultural one (“we're used to seeing bulleted lists, so we'll do it that way”). Rather, the design should revolve around the user's situation and tasks. The key to designing a useful digital library listing lies in understanding which combination of attributes will help your audience find the resources they're looking for. UCD techniques are effective means to gaining this understanding. The IA challenge is then to arrange an optimal layout and navigation of digital library listings so users can find the resources they need. Imagine you're browsing the magazine racks at your favorite local bookstore. You reach out to pick up an issue of Sunset magazine. You don't expect to find yourself suddenly transported to the publisher's offices in Menlo Park, California. You count on staying right there in the bookstore—otherwise you'd find yourself stumped if what you really needed was a copy of Wired. When browsing in a digital library, the work you ultimately wish to reach might reside anywhere. It may be inside the current collection or somewhere else on the corporate intranet, or it could be behind the login page of a service to which your digital library subscribes. The link you see in the listing might be a link to the thing itself or it might be a jump-off page for yet another digital library with its own navigation scheme and listing style. What lies beyond your home digital library page is an unpredictable and generally frustrating treasure hunt. How do we design the user experience to include smooth transitions between the digital library home page, a filtered list of results and the new interface that may arise when clicking through? Should we—or can we—bring target objects into the sphere of our own digital library? Can we subsume subscription login under the corporate or library login? Or must users be on their own once they reach for certain sorts of information objects? And if they must, how do we ease the path for them? These questions arise out of a user-centered design approach and move us some distance towards a workable solution. But until service-oriented architectures are widely in place, workarounds need to start with a square look at the problem. Each design team must proceed to make considered decisions on how best to smooth the way for their users. Websites are becoming more responsive to the impulses of individuals and communities. The best-behaved sites react to users' actions in natural ways. They anticipate needs in a non-intrusive manner, play nicely with other web and non-web tools, let users do interactive things like add and tag content and work collaboratively in groups, and don't force users into awkward positions in order to work with the site. People are coming to expect websites to be shaped to fit them, and digital libraries need to live up to this promise. Fortunately, with information architecture methodologies, a user-centered design approach and sensible project management, you have the tools to build fully articulated frameworks for all kinds of web creations. All that remains to animate your site is the spark of your inspiration—and the eager participation of your delighted users.

Purpose This study aims to understand the technical and operational challenges encountered by multilingual digital libraries and their strategies to solve problems in sustaining multilinguality services for digital libraries. Design/methodology/approach Using the multiple-case method, this study investigated two digital libraries that have sustained multilinguality for over a decade: the World Digital Library and the Digital Library of the Caribbean. Findings This study identified eight factors that contributed to the success of the two multilingual digital libraries and eight technical and operational challenges they have faced. A framework for digital libraries to sustain multilinguality is proposed. This framework illustrates the challenges and strategies to address the challenges in 11 aspects: creation, leadership, collaboration, content, metadata, translation, funding, technology, preservation, staffing and copyright. Research limitations/implications This study focused on two multilingual digital libraries administered in the USA, though they do not fully represent multilingual digital libraries in the USA. Therefore, the findings from the study may not apply to multilingual digital libraries the USA or other countries. As on-site interviews of both digital libraries were conducted at the beginning of 2019, the timeframe of this study is up to that date. Practical implications With more users worldwide seeking information online, more digital libraries will be providing multilingual services. This study provides guidelines to digital library developers and archivists for building and sustaining their digital libraries or archives. The experience and lessons learned from these two digital libraries may also help to better understand challenges and use effective strategies in building and sustaining multilinguality. Social implications The users and communities of digital libraries will be able to learn the benefits and challenges as related to building and sustaining digital library services. These services always need support to better serve their users and communities. Originality/value As the first multiple-case research that investigates in-depth challenges and approaches of digital libraries in sustaining multilinguality, this study presents a general picture of how the two digital libraries have succeeded in sustaining multilinguality. Theoretically, the study enriches the literature by providing a more comprehensive sustainability framework for multilinguality. This framework specifies possible aspects to consider for gaining sustainability of multilingual digital libraries and offers useful guidelines and insights for the digital library community to build multilingual services.

The architecture of the future Digital Libraries should be able to allow any users to access available knowledge resources from anywhere and at any time and efficient manner. Moreover to the individual user, there is a great deal of useless information in addition to the substantial amount of useful information. The goal is to investigate how to best combine Artificial Intelligent and Semantic Web technologies for semantic searching across largely distributed and heterogeneous digital libraries. The Artificial Intelligent and Semantic Web have provided both new possibilities and challenges to automatic information processing in search engine process. The major research tasks involved are to apply appropriate infrastructure for specific digital library system construction, to enrich metadata records with ontologies and enable semantic searching upon such intelligent system infrastructure. We study improving the efficiency of search methods to search a distributed data space like a Digital Library. This paper outlines the development of a CaseBased Reasoning prototype system based in an ontology for retrieval information of the Digital Library University of Seville. The results demonstrate that the used of expert system and the ontology into the retrieval process, the effectiveness of the information retrieval is enhanced.

Media and Image Libraries: History, Evolution, Notable Examples

A case study on migrating large digital collections into a consolidated repository

This paper presents www.Filipiniana.NET, a research portal on Filipino history, and culture. As a premium site for historians and the researcher community, its (1) public site ­ is a fully-indexed digital library of books, manuscripts and images, (2) content management system ­ for authors, editors and contributors to the digital library, and (3) a research portal ­ which contains researchers tools to assist the researchers in collecting and organizing research finds. Filipiniana.Net was set up a year ago and put on line 6 months ago. It is manned by 12 full time writers and editors, 4 technical support staff. It has an average of 132 researchers daily and 32,000 page views per day.

This research study examines how digital library technologies are transforming access to information in educational and public settings. With the increasing shift toward online learning and digital resources, digital libraries have become essential tools for students, researchers, and general users. The study aims to understand user awareness, usage patterns, benefits, and the challenges faced while interacting with digital library platforms. Primary data were collected through a structured questionnaire, while secondary data were gathered from academic articles, reports, and case studies on digital library development. The analysis shows that digital library technologies provide easy and quick access to a wide range of resources, including e-books, journals, research papers, and multimedia content. Users appreciate the convenience, search efficiency, and 24/7 availability offered by these platforms. However, the study also identifies key challenges such as slow internet connectivity, lack of digital skills, limited device access, and occasional technical issues within digital library systems. Overall, the findings reveal that digital libraries play a significant role in improving learning and research by making information more accessible and organized. The study concludes that continued technological improvements, user training, and better digital infrastructure can further enhance the effectiveness of digital library services. Furthermore, the study highlights the growing importance of digital library technologies in bridging the gap between traditional information systems and modern user needs. As educational institutions and libraries continue to adopt digital platforms, the role of user-friendly interfaces, reliable digital infrastructure, and well-organized content becomes increasingly crucial. The findings suggest that with proper technological support and digital literacy programs, digital libraries can significantly enhance knowledge accessibility for diverse user groups. This research encourages institutions to invest in continuous upgrades, user training, and innovative digital tools to ensure that digital libraries remain effective, inclusive, and future-ready.

Information professionals and librarians have been studying, discussing, and developing digital libraries for more than two decades, but understanding ultimate use of images from digital libraries remains a mystery for many of them. Most articles written on digital library use focus on users’ search retrieval needs and behavior. Few mention how digital library patrons use the images they request. Like many digital libraries, archives, and special collections, the University of Houston Digital Library makes high resolution images available to its patrons. Image delivery is achieved by an automated system, titled the Digital Cart Service. An unexpected benefit of the Digital Cart Service is the reporting mechanism that produces data that includes intended use information. This article discusses the analysis of this data to determine why images were used, what products were created from the images, and what implications this has on digital library management. The authors believe that answering these questions creates an environment in which digital library innovators can better promote and design digital libraries, and describe and select the content in them.

This project examines the modern trends in software patenting in India both in Section 3(k) and the backlaw cases and the transformation of exams. It is followed by the ways in which the rules and policies governing computer-related inventions have shifted to more rigid exclusion schemes to a technical effect/technical contribution mode, as represented by the 2017 and 2025 Guidelines to Examining Computer-Related Inventions (CRI). Namely the Ferid Allani case and its impact on the way software-implemented inventions are treated at the Patent Office are specially highlighted. Based on the latest government releases and the IP India Annual Report 2024-25, the study contextualizes these changes of the doctrines into a bigger frame of record patent filings, increasing local involvement, and institutional changeover. The project investigates as to whether the present rules strike a balance between the exclusion of so-called computer programs per se and safeguarding actual software-enabled technical advancement, and concludes by providing some practical proposals on how the standards can be further clarified and transparency enhanced using only a slight amount of official statistics by employing a doctrinal approach. KEYWORDS: Software patenting, Section 3(k), Computer‑related inventions, CRI Guidelines 2025, Ferid Allani, Technical effect, Patent filing trends.

In Bangladesh, Shariatpur is one of the lowest performing districts in primary education, standing near the bottom at 62 out of 64 districts based on dropout rates (BBS, 2012). It is also one of the most flood affected areas and has a high number of extreme poor. Concern Worldwide (Irish-based International Humanitarian Organization) has implemented a 3-year project from January 2013 to December 2015 namely “Digital School Library for Extreme Poor Children” with 10 schools in 2 Upazillas reached approximately 1000 children and developed a knowledge base society working with CBOs (Community-Based Organizations). The main aim of the project was to attract the extreme poor children to school and improve their education in a sustainable way through training and learning by the innovative approach of a digital school library. The author was appointed as a library consultant of that project. It was an amazing experience of the author that he had to face many challenges to get the attention because the extreme poor children were not interested at all to learn anything. They were very much fond of watching TV (television), moving here and there unnecessarily, playing in a group at riverside and jumping over the river for nothing. To attract them towards school, author in association with the research team made and presented some educational short videos namely, “Mina Cartoon (2015)” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dahl8UII3n4l (b) Increased enrolment rate; (c) Increased retention rates; (d) Increased involvement of the SMCs and PTAs in development and implementation of School Level Improvement Plans; and (e) The poorest children and their parents got a good idea on Equality, Right Based Approach (RBA), HIV and AIDS and on their Rights and Entitlements. Thus school based small digital libraries have turned into integral part in their lives. The basic aim of the paper is to share the author’s experience on how the digital school library project demonstrated access to primary school for the poorest and out-of-school children. Some interesting case studies will also be discussed in this paper. Key words: Digital libraries, school libraries, libraries for extreme poor, knowledge base society.

In addition to the problem of which image analysis models to use in digital libraries, e.g. wavelet, Wold, color histograms, is the problem of how to combine these models with their different strengths. Most present systems place the burden of combination on the user, e.g. the user specifies 50% texture features, 20% color features, etc. This is a problem since most users do not know how to best pick the settings for the given data and search problem. The paper addresses this problem, describing research in progress for a system that: (1) automatically infers which combination of models best represents the data of interest to the user; and (2) learns continuously during interaction with each user. In particular, these two components-inference and learning-provide a solution that adapts to the subjective and hard to predict behaviors frequently seen when people query or browse image libraries.