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International Children's Digital Library: A Library for the World's Children

Today visual search tools are being used by children in Canada and Mongolia, and college students in the US. These diverse users each have their own needs, expectations, and uses for visual search and the results of such searches. This panel will address issues relating to visual search in diverse environments with various ages of users. The technologies studied are the International Children's Digital Library (ICDL), the children's portal, History Trek, and three web search engines (one visual–KartOO, one hybrid–Quintura, and one text‐based‐‐Google). Panelists will discuss users that range from children of ages 8 to 12, to college students and working adults in Canada, Germany, Honduras, Mongolia, New Zealand, and the United States.Title: Visual Search Can Lead to Cultural UnderstandingAuthor: Allison Druin

There has been an explosion of Internet users throughout the world. Low-cost computing options are now emerging for developing countries that are changing the world's educational landscape. Given these conditions, there is a critical need to understand the obstacles and opportunities in designing and deploying technologies for children worldwide. This paper discusses seven years of strategies and methods learned in co-designing and deploying the International Children's Digital Library (www.childrenslibrary.org) with children in multiple countries. Our experience with iterative, international co-design and developing world deployment shows that acquiring site-specific knowledge is critical to adapting the methods needed for success. In the case of co-design, a combination of face-to-face and email collaboration is important for building on-going partnerships. With deployment activities, it is important to be prepared for the unexpected—managing complex technologies in rural settings is very difficult. The more site-specific knowledge that can be acquired the more likely there will be a successful outcome.

research-article Share on FEATUREExperiencing the International Children's Digital Library Author: Benjamin B. Bederson University of Maryland (UMD) University of Maryland (UMD)View Profile Authors Info & Claims InteractionsVolume 15Issue 6November + December 2008 pp 50–54https://doi.org/10.1145/1409040.1409053Published:01 November 2008Publication History 3citation820DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations3Total Downloads820Last 12 Months137Last 6 weeks19 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my Alerts New Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access

This study investigated into the effects of the "Advanced search" feature of three digital libraries on users' search performance and search efforts. Three operational digital libraries, i.e., the ACM digital library, the IEEE Computer Society digital library, and the IEEE Xplore digital library, were used in this study. Thirty-five students participated in an experiment and completed the assigned search task, using their preferred search feature(s). The results demonstrate that for ACM and IEEE CS, the use of Advanced search did not have a significant effect on improving search performance. Only in Xplore, the use of Advanced search significantly improved search performance. The search efforts increased significantly for the combined-use of Advanced search and Basic search in ACM and IEEE CS. The reasons leading to the results are discussed.

Automatic assessment of pain based on deep learning methods: A systematic review

PurposeThis paper aims to explore the role of institutional and national policies in the design process of educational digital libraries developed collaboratively with key stakeholders within the African higher education context.Design/methodology/approachA qualitative research project based on three case studies of universities in Africa (Uganda, Kenya, Uganda) was carried out; comprising a retrospective review of the design process of ten innovative digital libraries through 38 in‐depth interviews with key design stakeholders. The interviews were conducted between September and December, 2009, while the data were triangulated with observations and documentary evidence from key policies.FindingsInstitutional and national policies were found to have tremendous impact on the design process of digital libraries as well as on their sustainability. Their absence in the design process was found to stifle innovation.Research limitations/implicationsThis research was limited to the design process of digital libraries in African higher education. The research findings suggest that policy makers are important design gatekeepers and as such digital library designers should actively review relevant national and institutional policies, incorporate the implications of policies into design processes, and help to develop relevant policies.Originality/valueThe paper provides an understanding of the critical impact policies have with respect to supporting the design of educational digital libraries that are developed collaboratively with stakeholders. The retrospective review of completed digital library design processes carried out offers a different methodological approach for obtaining a high level understanding of the phenomenon under investigation.

BackgroundThe Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) has been a critical tool in biomedical and health informatics, and the year 2021 marks its 30th anniversary. The UMLS brings together many broadly used vocabularies and standards in the biomedical field to facilitate interoperability among different computer systems and applications.ObjectiveDespite its longevity, there is no comprehensive publication analysis of the use of the UMLS. Thus, this review and analysis is conducted to provide an overview of the UMLS and its use in English-language peer-reviewed publications, with the objective of providing a comprehensive understanding of how the UMLS has been used in English-language peer-reviewed publications over the last 30 years.MethodsPubMed, ACM Digital Library, and the Nursing & Allied Health Database were used to search for studies. The primary search strategy was as follows: UMLS was used as a Medical Subject Headings term or a keyword or appeared in the title or abstract. Only English-language publications were considered. The publications were screened first, then coded and categorized iteratively, following the grounded theory. The review process followed the PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) guidelines.ResultsA total of 943 publications were included in the final analysis. Moreover, 32 publications were categorized into 2 categories; hence the total number of publications before duplicates are removed is 975. After analysis and categorization of the publications, UMLS was found to be used in the following emerging themes or areas (the number of publications and their respective percentages are given in parentheses): natural language processing (230/975, 23.6%), information retrieval (125/975, 12.8%), terminology study (90/975, 9.2%), ontology and modeling (80/975, 8.2%), medical subdomains (76/975, 7.8%), other language studies (53/975, 5.4%), artificial intelligence tools and applications (46/975, 4.7%), patient care (35/975, 3.6%), data mining and knowledge discovery (25/975, 2.6%), medical education (20/975, 2.1%), degree-related theses (13/975, 1.3%), digital library (5/975, 0.5%), and the UMLS itself (150/975, 15.4%), as well as the UMLS for other purposes (27/975, 2.8%).ConclusionsThe UMLS has been used successfully in patient care, medical education, digital libraries, and software development, as originally planned, as well as in degree-related theses, the building of artificial intelligence tools, data mining and knowledge discovery, foundational work in methodology, and middle layers that may lead to advanced products. Natural language processing, the UMLS itself, and information retrieval are the 3 most common themes that emerged among the included publications. The results, although largely related to academia, demonstrate that UMLS achieves its intended uses successfully, in addition to achieving uses broadly beyond its original intentions.

Interdisciplinary, collaborative teaching and learning is recognised as important for twenty-first century tertiary education that seeks to build students’ critical thinking, cultural competence and global understanding. However, the core elements needed for truly successful collaboration are little understood. This article presents a critical case study of a teaching team’s reflections on experiences in collaborating over two years to deliver a new interdisciplinary undergraduate course focused on culture and society. The findings highlight the importance of building a robust team culture built upon shared leadership, mutual trust and commitment, grounded by strong institutional support, to give any collaboration integrity and sustainability.

Evolution is a fundamental, organising concept in biology, yet there is widespread resistance to evolution among US students and there are rising creationist challenges in Europe. Resistance to evolution is linked to lack of understanding of the age of the Earth. An understanding of deep time is thus essential for effective biology education. Landmarks – well-known events of known absolute age – are important in developing a mental framework for deep time. ‘Collective landmarks’ are important events of which a group of students has accurate and precise knowledge. The collective landmarks for time were determined in several semesters of an interdisciplinary undergraduate course at a US public research university. A written survey was employed that asked students to select the appropriate ten-fold time range for ten important cosmological, biological and historical events. The collective landmarks were very similar across classes, including the Big Bang and the Cold War, and there was progress developing additional landmarks. No statistically significant differences in accuracy of estimation were detected across science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) and social sciences majors. The potential utility of collective landmarks within a single biology course, and across a university biology programme, is described.

With the rising popularity of digital games, a growing number of universities are developing programmes in various areas of digital design and interactive media to meet the needs for game‐related courses. Faculty of this emerging field are grappling with the complexity of developing curricula which integrate art, design and technology and of finding methods of integrating students from these diverse fields. The purpose of this article is to present a case study of an interdisciplinary undergraduate course in game design and to highlight some of the unforeseen challenges and issues that arose when attempting to integrate diverse students from various art, design and media fields with students from computer science. Specifically, this article addresses issues of (a) power, (b) conflict and (c) gender that arose among students during the development of a student‐created game.

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.

No abstract available.

We are very happy to present the proceedings of the 4th Augmented Human International Conference (Augmented Human 2013). Augmented Human 2013 focuses on augmenting human capabilities through technology for increased well-being and enjoyable human experience. The conference is in cooperation with ACM SIGCHI, with its proceedings to be archived in ACM's Digital Library. With technological advances, computing has progressively moved beyond the desktop into new physical and social contexts. As physical artifacts gain new computational behaviors, they become reprogrammable, customizable, repurposable, and interoperable in rich ecologies and diverse contexts. They also become more complex, and require intense design effort in order to be functional, usable, and enjoyable. Designing such systems requires interdisciplinary thinking. Their creation must not only encompass software, electronics, and mechanics, but also the system's physical form and behavior, its social and physical milieu, and beyond.

No abstract available.