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This study aims to present the digital library Galician virtual library (BVG, for “Biblioteca Virtual Galega”) in Galician.

The paper shows the objectives pursued by the BVG, its development, putting special emphasis on the main technological challenges, and presents some data about its usage.

A digital library can be used to stimulate a lesser‐used language and to promote the culture and tourism of a region.

The paper shows how a digital library can be used to strengthen the Galician language, which is currently categorised as a “Lesser Used Language” in the European Community and to contribute to the preservation and spreading of Galician culture and literary works, either from current authors or from previous documents. It also provides a digital publishing house for new authors and opens a communication channel between current authors and their readers. Finally, it helps to connect a scattered community like the Galician, offering a centralised access point to any information about Galicia. This work also presents some technological innovations included in the BVG, especially from the viewpoint of user interface design and search by content.

This paper aims to build an indoor positioning system capable of tracking residents and caregivers and feeding a novel information system with this data. This information system introduces three main interesting modules: a compact data structure to efficiently store the gathered data, an activity deduction module that add semantics to the raw captured trajectories and a user-friendly interface able to display this spatio-temporal information.

Their proposal was built following an iterative and incremental development. Nursing home managers cooperated in the requirement composition phase, while some residents and caregivers contributed testing the system with their real trajectories.

Their contribution is a functional information system that can evaluate the quality of healthcare provided to residents and assess the efficiency of the nursing home as a business. This information system includes a novel state-of-the-art compact data structure to efficiently work with the captured data.

A new system has been designed and implemented using a wide range of technologies to support the necessities of a real enterprise. The rudimentary position tracking systems were upgraded to a feasible automatic indoor positioning solution. The amount of information generated by this new strategy is dealt with compact data structures, reducing space usage without jeopardizing query times. Those compressed positions are tagged with semantic information that enables individual activity analysis. Last, a user-friendly interface lets the final user interact with the gathered and calculated information. As future work, the authors plan to improve the integration of this new information system with other systems already in use in indoor mobile workforce environments.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the hypothesis that collaboration was a key characteristic of Cuban science to maintain their scientific capacity during a period of economic restrictions and an important feature of Cuban science policy and practice for the benefit of society.

Collaboration was studied through Cuban scientific publications listed in PubMed for the period 1990-2010. The search was carried out using the advanced search engine of PubMed indicating < Cuba > in the affiliation field. To identify participating institutions a second search was performed to find the affiliations of all authors per article through the link to the electronic journal. A data set was created to identify institutional publication patterns for the surveyed period. Institutions were classified in three categories according to their scientific production as Central, Middle or Distal: the pattern of collaboration between these categories was analysed.

Results indicate that collaboration between scientifically advanced institutions (Central) and a wide range of national institutions is a consequence of the social character of science in Cuba in which cooperation prevails. Although this finding comes from a limited field of biomedical science it is likely to reflect Cuban science policy in general.

Using bibliometric tools the study suggests that Cuban science policy and practice ensure the application of science for social needs by harnessing human resources through national and international collaboration, building in this way stronger scientific capacity.