User Collaboration in Mass Digitisation of Textual Materials

This article describes the results of a case study that applies Neural Network-based Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to scanned images of books printed between 1487 and 1870 by training the OCR engine OCRopus on the RIDGES herbal text corpus (in press). Training specific OCR models was possible because the necessary ground truth is available as error-corrected diplomatic transcriptions. The OCR results have been evaluated for accuracy against the ground truth of unseen test sets. Character and word accuracies (percentage of correctly recognized items) for the resulting machine-readable texts of individual documents range from 94% to more than 99% (character level) and from 76% to 97% (word level). This includes the earliest printed books, which were thought to be inaccessible by OCR methods until recently. Furthermore, OCR models trained on one part of the corpus consisting of books with different printing dates and different typesets (mixed models) have been tested for their predictive power on the books from the other part containing yet other fonts, mostly yielding character accuracies well above 90%. It therefore seems possible to construct generalized models trained on a range of fonts that can be applied to a wide variety of historical printings still giving good results. A moderate postcorrection effort of some pages will then enable the training of individual models with even better accuracies. Using this method, diachronic corpora including early printings can be constructed much faster and cheaper than by manual transcription. The OCR methods reported here open up the possibility of transforming our printed textual cultural heritage into electronic text by largely automatic means, which is a prerequisite for the mass conversion of scanned books.

Tools, techniques and protocols necessary for building up digital libraries have now fully evolved with computing power that allows parallel processing, multitasking, parallel consultation and parallel knowledge navigation and sohare tools that facilitate artificial intelligence and interadivity. Coincided with availability of sofhvare, hardware and networking technology, the advent of world wide web 0its, ever incr easing usage and highly evolved browsers have paved the way for creation of digital libraries. With rapid developments in technologies necessary for developing digital libraries, the world of digital information resources has expanded rapidly and exponentially. Increasing number of publishers are using the internet as a global way to offer their publications to the international community of scientists and technologists. With the technology available at an effordable cost, the libraries are initiating small digitisation projects as an individual library or as a group of libraries. Building-up digital collection and the infrastructure required to access them is a challenge that every library has to deal with. The article delves into technological evolution, cultural revolution and contents enrichment that led to revolution in growth and development of digital libraries. The artide has two distinct parts, while the first part deals with various aspects of building, accessing and organising digital resources and collection, the second part elaborates on the process, technology, formats, compression techniques and tools used in digital imaging. The article describes optical character recognition (OCR) and advocates for hybrid solution for preservation of digital information. http://dx.doi.org/10.14429/dbit.21.6.3547

BackgroundThis study aimed to investigate the influence of e-health literacy on infectious disease prevention behaviors among young adults in their 20s and 40s based on the information–motivation–behavioral skills model and to test the mediating effect of infectious disease risk perception on this relationship.MethodsThis cross-sectional survey study included young adults aged 20–40 years recruited through anonymous snowball sampling using online communities and social media. Variables were measured using the Korean version of the K-eHealth Literacy Scale, infectious disease risk perception, and self-reported infectious disease prevention behaviors. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, t-tests, and Pearson’s correlation analysis, and the mediating effect of infectious disease risk perception was tested using Hayes’ PROCESS macro (Model 4).ResultsThe mean of the main variables in this study was 3.55 for e-health literacy, 3.09 for risk perception, and 3.99 for preventive behaviors. Correlation analysis showed that preventive behaviors were significantly positively related to e-health literacy (r = 0.22, p < 0.001) and risk perception (r = 0.40, p < 0.001), and that e-health literacy was significantly positively related to risk perception (r = 0.22, p < 0.001). Preventive behaviors differed significantly according to sex, employment status, diagnosis experience, and quarantine experience. In the regression analysis, e-health literacy had a significant effect on risk perception (B = 0.120, p = 0.005) and in its total effect on preventive behaviors (B = 0.103, p = 0.041). However, after controlling for risk perception, the direct effect of e-health literacy was not significant (B = 0.055, p = 0.255), and only risk perception had a significant effect on preventive behaviors (B = 0.401, p < 0.001). A significant indirect effect of e-health literacy on preventive behaviors was confirmed by the mediation analysis (B = 0.048, 95% confidence interval [0.016, 0.086]) and a full mediation effect of risk perception.Conclusione-health literacy education alone is insufficient, and interventions that combine accurate risk communication and perception enhancement are needed. Tailored programs that consider life contexts, such as the workplace, may be effective in improving preventive behaviors among young adults.

Universities and university museums are faced with numerous challenges regarding access to their collections for diverse user communities. In today’s electronic age, a new model has emerged for granting online access to collections. This paper will present some challenges and successes of current solutions in use by Carleton University’s Great Lakes Research Alliance for the Study Aboriginal Arts and Culture (GRASAC), the University of Pennsylvania Museum collaborative virtual exhibition Tipatshimuna and the McCord Museum, formerly administered by McGill University. The research and knowledge dissemination mandate of universities, together with the issues surrounding the repatriation of objects, online collaboration and access to collections, the digital form presents a real opportunity to benefits universities, researchers, students and the general public.

Digital camera and mobile document image acquisition are new trends arising in the world of Optical Character Recognition and text detection. In some cases, such process integrates many distortions and produces poorly scanned text or text-photo images and natural images, leading to an unreliable OCR digitization. In this paper, we present a novel nonparametric and unsupervised method to compensate for undesirable document image distortions aiming to optimally improve OCR accuracy. Our approach relies on a very efficient stack of document image enhancing techniques to recover deformation of the entire document image. First, we propose a local brightness and contrast adjustment method to effectively handle lighting variations and the irregular distribution of image illumination. Second, we use an optimized greyscale conversion algorithm to transform our document image to greyscale level. Third, we sharpen the useful information in the resulting greyscale image using Un-sharp Masking method. Finally, an optimal global binarization approach is used to prepare the final document image to OCR recognition. The proposed approach can significantly improve text detection rate and optical character recognition accuracy. To demonstrate the efficiency of our approach, an exhaustive experimentation on a standard dataset is presented

In today’s digital world, we are committed to digitizing thousands of handwritten transcriptions to preserve their content. Historical Arabic Handwritten Text Recognition (HAHTR) remains a challenge for computer vision systems, due to the many difficulties inherently associated with document image quality and the complexity of Arabic script. In this work, we address the problem of recognizing historical Arabic documents that adapts to different writing styles and degrees of legibility. We developed a system that is able to recognize a whole page of a historical Arabic handwritten text in two consecutive steps comprising text line detection and recognition. The proposed approach performs detection using bounding boxes followed by a neural network-based model for character-level text recognition. However, the lack of data hinders the mass digitization of Arabic historical documents. Therefore, we provide a new and freely available dataset, focusing on diverse handwriting styles to facilitate a strong generalization of the trained model. This dataset will significantly benefits researchers and practitioners by accelerating progress in the field of HAHTR. Extensive experimental work demonstrates that the recognition models are effective when trained with different sources of data, and having different writing styles does not penalize the model’s ability to generalize but rather enhances it. Additionally, we define and develop a new metric to evaluate model robustness against character misclassification, particularly for characters with similar patterns. The experiments conducted demonstrated that the proposed HAHTR pipeline is accurate and highly generalizable, as well as the validity of bounding box methods for detecting text lines. The training approach with different data sources enabled us to surpass the state-of-the-art results with 5.7% of Character Error Rate (CER) on the KHATT database.

IDEAS, “Intelligent Neighbourhood Energy Allocation & Supervision”, is a R&D project, focused on the development and operation of energy positive neighbourhoods. IDEAS aims at illustrating how communities, public authorities and utility companies across the EU can be engaged in this context. In addition, IDEAS focuses on the economic and environmental benefits of doing so. In this framework, IDEAS develops and validates different tools and business models needed for demonstrating the cost effective and incremental implementation of an energy positive neighbourhood. Energy Positive Neighbourhoods (EPNs) are those in which the annual energy demand is lower than annual energy supply from local renewable energy sources. The project includes two pilot sites: one in Bordeaux, France and another in Porvoo, Finland. The Finnish site makes extensive use of a local bio-CHP power plant. The CHP energy production power is, as typically, controlled according to district heat demand. IDEAS will demonstrate how the heat demand could be time shifted by interacting with the household heat controls for a residential neighbourhood, in order to function as a temporary heat buffer for the ESCo. This enables a more favourable energy production, which can be adapted to favour stochastic renewables as well, since the advantageous CHP energy is not as much bound to the real heat demand anymore. The Finnish pilot site includes a simulated wind turbine, a simulated battery and a simulated heat storage connected to the same Energy Management System (EMS). The French site is specific in terms of occupancy and energy usages. The IDEAS tools aims at providing real time information to the facility manager related to energy consumptions both at site and building level as well as energy production predictions so that he can optimise the energy functioning of the site. Moreover awareness tools are also developed to be used at different levels: tools dedicated to end-users’ awareness as well as pedagogical tool supporting the teaching staff in explaining and disseminating concepts underpinning the energy positive neighbourhood approach to the students or to people external to the site. The different tools have been deployed in the Finnish and French pilot sites and will be operated until autumn 2015. The work presented is part of the IDEAS Collaborative Project which is co-funded by the European Commission, Information Society and Media Directorate-General, under the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7).

In the 2000s an interconnected set of elite projects in the United States sought to digitize “all books in all languages” and make them available online. These mass digitization projects were efforts to absorb the print book infrastructure into a new one centered in computer networks. Mass book digitization has now faded from view, and here I trace its setbacks through a curious figure—the “orphan”—that emerged from within these projects and acted ultimately as an agent of impasse. In legal policy debates, an “orphan” refers to a copyrighted work whose owner cannot be found, but its history, range of meanings, and deployments reveal it to be considerably more complex. Based on fieldwork conducted at a digital library engaged in mass digitization, this paper analyzes the “orphan” as a personifying metaphor that digital library activists embraced in order to challenge and/or disrupt the social relations that adhere in and around books. The figure of the orphan haunts the techno-cultural infrastructural project of mass digitization, and stands, I argue, as a disenchanted emblem for “the book” in suspension between a disfavored past and a fantasized future.

Text detection in images is an important research area that has attracted the attention of many researchers. Due to the growing image databases, information retrieval from databases in less time and with maximum precision is more important. The low level features which are extracted from the images and videos include metrics of color, texture and shape, although these features can easily be obtained, they do not have enough accuracy to extract the content. Today, text retrieval in images is an important part of content recovery. Detection of vehicle plates, text ads or video frames, book title and addresses in mailing envelopes are among text mining applications. In the current article a method for combing image processing and neural networks for text detection in images is presented. In this approach, after detecting text location in image using MLP (Multiple Layer Perception) neural network structure, the text in the images is detected. Finally, the performance of two neural network MLP and LVQ (Learning Vector Quantization) for text detection are compared. The results show that the MLP neural network with suggested implemented algorithm in this network has a better performance.

PurposeThe idea of “best practice” is very much built into information systems and the ways in which they organise and structure work. The purpose of this paper is to examine how “best practice” may be identified (produced) through a community-based evaluation process as opposed to traditional expert-based evaluation frameworks. The paper poses the following research questions: how does “best practice” (e)valuation in online communities differ depending on whether they are produced by community members or experts? And what role play these two practices of valuation for online community performance?Design/methodology/approachThe paper is based on a three-year ethnographic study of a large-scale online community initiative run by the European Commission. Participant observation of online and offline activities (23 events) was complemented with 73 semi-structured interviews with 58 interviewees. The paper draws on Science and Technology Studies, and in particular actor-network theory.FindingsPromoting the idea of “best practice” is not just an exercise about determining what “best” is but rather supposes that best is something that can travel across sites and be replicated. The paper argues that it is crucial to understand the work performed to coordinate multiple practices of producing “best practice” as apparatuses of valuation. Hence if practices are shared or circulate within an online community, this is possible because of material-discursive practices of dissociation and association, through agential cuts. These cuts demarcate what is important – and foregrounded – and what is backgrounded. In so doing new “practice objects” are produced.Research limitations/implicationsThe research was conducted in the European public sector where participants are not associated through shared organisational membership (e.g. as employees of the same organisation). An environment for determining “best practice” that is limited to an organisation’s employees and more homogeneous may reveal further dynamics for “best practice” production.Practical implicationsThis paper sheds light on why it is so difficult to reach commensuration in crowd-sourced environments.Originality/valueThe paper provides an analysis of how online community members collaborate in order to identify relevant and meaningful user-generated content. It argues that “best practice” is produced through a process of commensuration.

Unhealthy behaviors, such as tobacco use, increase individual health risk while also creating a global economic burden on the healthcare system. Social ties have been seen as an important, yet complex factor, to sustain abstinence from these modifiable risk behaviors. However, the underlying social mechanisms are still opaque and poorly understood. Digital health communities provide opportunities to understand social dependencies of behavior change because peer interactions in these platforms are digitized. In this paper, we present a novel approach that integrates theories of behavior change and Exponential Random Graph Models (ERGMs) to understand structural dependencies between users of an online community and the behavior change techniques that are manifested in their communication using an affiliation network. Results indicate population specific traits in terms of individuals’ engagement in peer communication embed behavior change techniques in online social settings. Implications for personalized health promotion technologies are discussed.

Keynote presentation for the 2019 Preservation Conservation Conference, hosted by UKZN Special Collections, with the theme: '<i>Disaster Prevention Preparedness, Response &amp; Recovery of Collective Collections and E-collections</i>.' <br><br><br>Precis:<i><br><br>Over the past four years, Digital Library Services at UCT Libraries have been taking an eventful journey towards making digital preservation at UCT a reality. Many small and big detours were made along the way, including exploring new soft- and hardware solutions, having engagements with many different stakeholder communities across campus, moving offices, and eventually also building an (almost) entirely new team. What has emerged strongly is that the wide variety of things needing to be addressed have little to do with technology, namely inclusive strategic planning and organisational design, inclusive conversations, and collaborative, flexible workflows. Based on these insights, we are now actively involved in rebuilding and implementing existing as well as new technologies for sustainable, standards-led end-to-end services, all the way from digitisation, digital archiving, curation and preservation to online showcasing of citable and reusable scholarly resources.<br><br></i><br>Outline:<br><br>1) Drivers for Digital Preservation:<br>Business Owners; Value Propositions; Policies &amp; Frameworks <br><br>2) Practicalities of Digital Preservation: <br>Best Practices; Tools &amp; Systems; Vendors; Roles; Activities <br><br>3) A Data Life-cycle approach to Digital Preservation: <br>Plan &amp; Design; Collect &amp; Capture; Collaborate &amp; Analyse; Discover, Reuse &amp; Cite; Share &amp; Publish; Manage, Store, Preserve <br><br>4) Digital Preservation: an all-inclusive conversation: <br>- DPC | World Digital Preservation Day (07.11.2019) <br>- Australasia Preserves | A digital preservation CoP <br>- NeDICC | Network of Data and Information Curation Communities <br>- 'RDM at UCT' Slack Workspace<br>

In the mid-1990s, the Library of the Complutense of Madrid (UCM) applied the growing body of new technologies to a pioneering project: the digitization of a valuable collection of biomedical books. The result of the project was the Dioscorides Digital Library. Up to 2006, however, the pace of digitization was very slow, resulting in only 3,000 books and 50,000 digitized engravings. In September 2006, the Complutense University and Google signed a partnership agreement for the purpose of carrying out large-scale digitization of our public domain collections. The Complutense University Library is participating in this mass-digitization project with the following goals: To improve the discovery of the cultural heritage of Complutense and increase the number of potential readers; To fulfil its public service mission; To preserve and protect the original books; To enhance students’ and faculty research. By early 2011, the Complutense Library had digitized roughly 120,000 out-of- copyright books from the 16th to the 19th centuries. All these materials are easily accessible via the Complutense Library Catalogue, Google Books and HathiTrust Digital Library. The Complutense University of Madrid joined the HathiTrust Digital Library in November 2010, which allowed books digitized by Google to be stored on HathiTrust servers. The HathiTrust Digital Library is both a digital preservation repository and a platform for access. It provides long-term preservation and access services for public domain and in-copyright content from a variety of sources, including Google, the Internet Archive, Microsoft, and in-house partner institution initiatives. In early 2011, the number of HathiTrust public domain volumes reached the two million mark and the collection exceeded eight million volumes. In addition, and complementing the above, the digital content of the Complutense University Library will be aggregated to Europeana during 2011 and 2012.

Background and Purpose: Health researchers need access to continuing education and specialized advice to improve the quality, efficiency and accessibility of health systems. The creation of communities of researchers can provide the information necessary for their daily work in addition to strengthening the links between researchers. In this context, Web 2.0 technologies can facilitate the establishment of these communities. The AFRICA BUILD project aims to promote health research through the creation of virtual communities of health researchers, educators and practitioners, and the use of Information and Communication Technologies. This paper highlights the main findings and challenges found in the development of these communities. Methods: We have developed a social platform, the AFRICA BUILD Portal (ABP), which integrates health research related didactic contents and resources, as well as tools that facilitate collaboration. This portal has been developed following three principles: (i) use of free and open source tools, (ii) adaptation of these tools to low bandwidth connections, and (iii) creation of a Euro-African community of developers for the sustainability of the ABP. Results: Several communities of users were initiated within the ABP, mainly structured in three types according to: the organization or country to which they belong, the specific area they are working in, and researchers from two pilots courses on HIV/AIDS and Reproductive Health Research. Conclusions: Project partners and associates, who form several communities of users, currently use the ABP. The main challenges faced in the creation of these communities are: the language, a need for facilitators for the discussions and interactions, and the motivation of some members to actively participate and contribute in exchanges. In future steps, we plan to develop new functionalities within the ABP and disseminate the platform to the biomedical scientific community in Africa, fostering the creation of African communities of biomedical researchers. Keywords: Community Networks, Health Research, Social Media

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to highlight the nature and policy implications of the shift from producer‐centred product and service design to innovation by the user, specifically internet‐supported collaborative design by user communities.Design/methodology/approachAn overview of the importance of innovation by individual lead users is followed by a description of collaborative innovation by user communities. The authors then focus on policies, which need to be re‐examined in the light of the shift from producer innovation to collaborative user innovation. The authors conclude by making some suggestions specifically pertinent to Chinese government policy, in a region, which is emerging as a major player in global innovation.FindingsAn important form of user innovation–Internet‐supported collaborative design of new products and services by user communities–is likely to progressively supplant producer product and service design in many fields. This shift will require changes in governments' innovation policies, for example, with respect to intellectual property rights (IPRs).Originality/valueIn line with emerging research findings, this paper takes a user‐centred view of the innovation process. It proposes applicable strategies, which will enhance the effectiveness of this novel innovation paradigm in a Chinese context.