Purpose -This study aims to investigate the use of a popular portable e-reader device, the Kindle 2, among library and information science (LIS) students and its effects on individual reading practices and the potential applications for library services. Design/methodology/approach -Using journal logs and diary-interviews as methods of data collection, the study analyzes the use of the Kindle over a one-week period by a pool of 20 LIS students at Pratt Institute's School of Information and Library Science. Findings -The findings reveal four key areas that provide a framework for data interpretation: usage patterns, user interaction, effect on reading habits, and future applications. One major finding is that the portability of the device and its convenience of use anywhere and any time is pivotal for enhancing the students' reading experience and outweighs the limitations of the device's usability. Research limitations/implications -Results may not be generalizable due to the small size and homogeneity of the sample. Originality/value -The social and cultural impacts of e-book readers in everyday life have received little attention so far. In particular, questions about the effects of e-readers on individual reading practices and the potential applications for library delivery systems have yet to be examined. This study is one of the first to investigate the use of portable e-book readers.
The use of primary source materials is recognized as key to supporting history and social studies education. The extensive digitization of library, museum, and other cultural heritage collections represents an important teaching resource. Yet, searching and selecting digital primary sources appropriate for classroom use can be difficult and time-consuming. This study investigates the design requirements and the potential usefulness of a domain-specific ontology to facilitate access to, and use of, a collection of digital primary source materials developed by the Library of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. During a three-phase study, an ontology model was designed and evaluated with the involvement of social studies teachers. The findings revealed that the design of the ontology was appropriate to support the information needs of the teachers and was perceived as a potentially useful tool to enhance collection access. The primary contribution of this study is the introduction of an approach to ontology development that is user-centered and designed to facilitate access to digital cultural heritage materials. Such an approach should be considered on a case-by-case basis in relation to the size of the ontology being built, the nature of the knowledge domain, and the type of end users targeted.
Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to describe a novel approach to the development and semantic enhancement of a social network to support the analysis and interpretation of digital oral history data from jazz archives and special collections.
Design/methodology/approach
– A multi-method approach was applied including automated named entity recognition and extraction to create a social network, and crowdsourcing techniques to semantically enhance the data through the classification of relations and the integration of contextual information. Linked open data standards provided the knowledge representation technique for the data set underlying the network.
Findings
– The study described here identifies the challenges and opportunities of a combination of a machine and a human-driven approach to the development of social networks from textual documents. The creation, visualization and enrichment of a social network are presented within a real-world scenario. The data set from which the network is based is accessible via an application programming interface and, thus, shareable with the knowledge management community for reuse and mash-ups.
Originality/value
– This paper presents original methods to address the issue of detecting and representing semantic relationships from text. Another element of novelty is in that it applies semantic web technologies to the construction and enhancement of the network and underlying data set, making the data readable across platforms and linkable with external data sets. This approach has the potential to make social networks dynamic and open to integration with external data sources.
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