G. Sayeed Choudhury

A Framework for Evaluating Digital Library Services

This article provides an overview of evaluation studies for libraries, a brief introduction to the CAPM Project, a description of the theoretical background for the CAPM methodology and, finally, a discussion of the implementation of the methodology for the CAPM Project.

A robotic library system for an off-site shelving facility

This paper describes a unique robotics project, Comprehensive Access to Printed Materials (CAPM), within the context of libraries. As libraries provide a growing array of digital library services and resources, they continue to acquire large quantities of printed material. This combined pressure of providing electronic and print-based resources and services has led to severe space constraints for many libraries, especially academic research libraries. Consequently, many libraries have built or plan to build off-site shelving facilities to accommodate printed materials. An autonomous mobile robotic library system has been developed to retrieve items from bookshelves and carry them to scanning stations located in the off-site shelving facility. In subsequent stages, remote users will be able to trigger this process through a web interface in order to achieve real-time browsing of printed materials. Enhanced commercial robot systems are used in this project. The developments of the robot design, control systems, simulations, experiments and results are presented.

Document Recognition for a Million Books

As initiatives such as Google Book Search (http://books.google.com/) and the Open Content Alliance (http://www.opencontentalliance.org/) advance efforts to digitize millions of books, there is great potential to make available vast amounts of information. To truly unlock this knowledge, however, it will be necessary to process the resulting digital page images to recognize important content, including both the semantic and structural aspects. Given the vast diversity of fonts, symbols, tables, languages and a host of other elements, it will be necessary to create flexible, modular, scalable document recognition systems. Document recognition involves extracting features from the images and even transcriptions of other documents in order to group diverse content.

Development and application of data collection forms for post-earthquake surveys of structural damage and human casualties

To reduce loss of life and injury resulting from earthquakes, the relationship between earthquake-induced building failure and injury severity and distribution needs to be clarified. For this purpose, a series of data collection forms were developed to collect pertinent data for post-event analysis and to provide a basis for structural triage in the field shortly following an earthquake for search and rescue purposes. A companion paper described the identification of variables affecting the outcome of an occupant of a damaged building and the classification of these variables into three levels of priority for data collection. This paper continues the development by describing the design of the data collection forms and the application of the forms to damaged buildings from past earthquakes. These forms represent a significant departure from existing forms in that they consider both casualties and building damage jointly, and in a consistent format.

Identifying best practices and skills for workforce development in data curation

The nature of science and scholarship is being transformed by the ability to collect and integrate vast quantities of information. Some sciences such as ecology and environmental science are inherently integrative, requiring the combination of many types of information from many sources in order to answer more complex questions than has been previously possible. This new information and the information management tools designed to deal with this volume of data will help us make informed decisions that will impact human health and prosperity. To enable this cross-scale, interdisciplinary integration for the coming generations of scholars, data must be managed to facilitate interoperability, preservation, and sharing. This panel will explore best practices in data curation and models of education for new data curation professionals.

The Archive Ingest and Handling Test: The Johns Hopkins University Report

From very early in its existence, the Digital Knowledge Center (DKC) in the Sheridan Libraries at Johns Hopkins University (JHU) has focused on using automated and semi-automated processes to create workflows for the creation and ingestion of digital objects. What was missing was a place to put these objects, a standard way to put them there, and a way to preserve them. This has begun to change over the past two years.

Comprehensive access to printed materials (CAPM)

The CAPM Project features the development and evaluation of an automat ed, robotic on-demand scanning system for materials at remote locations. To date, we have developed a book retrieval robot and a valuation analysis framework for evaluating CAPM. We intend to augment CAPM by exploring approaches for automated page turning and improved valuation. These extensions will results in a more fully automated CAPM system and a valuation framework that will not only be useful for assessing CAPM specifically, but also for library services and functions generally.

Identification and prioritization of data for collection in post-earthquake surveys

During an earthquake, buildings which are vulnerable to seismic loads will be damaged, resulting in property loss and the potential for casualties. To reduce loss of life and injury, the relationship between earthquake-induced building failure and injury severity and distribution needs to be clarified. To this end, a methodology and a series of data collection forms were developed to collect pertinent data for post-event analysis and to provide a basis for structural triage in the field shortly following an earthquake for search and rescue purposes. The forms were developed in four steps: (1) identifying the variables which affect the outcome of an occupant in a damaged building; (2) classifying the variables into three levels of priority for data collection; (3) designing the forms; and (4) applying the forms to damaged buildings from past earthquakes. These forms represent a significant departure from existing forms in that they consider both casualties and building damage jointly in a consistent format. This paper describes the first two steps of the development process; a companion paper outlines the latter components.