seminar
The Million Book Conundrum: What Do We Do With a Million Books?
The seminar is jointly organized by CITE and Faculty of Education, The University of Hong Kong.
Mass digitization projects, ranging from the Million Book Project to Google Books, have resulted in a rich resource: millions of books in digital formats, many of them in the public domain. Processing these digital books has raised many practical problems, from high-speed scanning to effective OCR to intellectual rights management. Once these logistical problems have been solved, providing access to the resulting digital collections raises many new and interesting questions: How do scholars use digital collections? What new tools are available to them? In what new ways can digital content be extracted and studied? One example of a new knowledge structure for exploration of digital collections is the meta-index, a structured on-line index to a digital collection, a product of the Indexer’s Legacy Project. This project is exploring ways of extracting knowledge from back-of-book indexes in digital collections. One outcome is a set of metrics which describe digital content; another is a set of meta-indexes to digital domains, which support domain-level searching and navigation of digital collections. The results from this project will be discussed in the context of large-scale digital book collections and the challenges they present for use.
<p>Dr. Edie Rasmussen is currently Professor and Chair of the Doctoral Studies Program at the School of Library, Archival and Information Studies at the University of British Columbia. She served as Director of the School from 2003 to 2009. Prior to joining UBC, she served on the faculty at the School of Information Sciences, University of Pittsburgh. She also held faculty positions at Dalhousie University, Canada and University Teknologi MARA, Malaysia, and was a Visiting Scholar at City University, London, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, University of Melbourne, Australia, and Waikato University, New Zealand. Dr. Rasmussen served as President of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, the Canadian Council for Information Studies, and as Co-Chair for the ALISE Council of Deans, Directors and Program Chairs. She has chaired the annual conferences of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, the ACM SIGIR Conference, and the ACM IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries. Her current research interests are in information retrieval for multimedia and text, bibliometrics, and indexing for digital content.</p>