Search results

Online community sites devoted to RPG Maker, an inexpensive software for creating role‐playing video games, have emerged as spaces where young people are developing valuable competencies with digital media. This study seeks to examine the largest of these communities.

The study uses a mix of qualitative methods including a survey, interviews and analysis of the structure of the site. The study uses discourse analysis and is grounded in work on situated learning.

The study suggests that the site and community are scaffolding young people into deeper understanding of digital production and the development of practical skills, like programming, as individuals take on identities associated with different roles in game design.

This study reinforces the value of research focused on young people's social media creation and also suggests that there is still much to be learned about technologically simple but socially rich platforms like web forums. As qualitative research it does not generate statistical generalizations.

This research suggests three implications for the design of online learning environments focused on media production. Designers should: start with learners' interests and basic skills will evolve; support a diverse range of production roles and identities; and offer simple technical systems that can support sophisticated digital learning communities.

While there is much work on learning in online communities, little of that work has focused on the importance of the role‐taking of young people in those communities and on implications of these spaces for designing online learning environments.

Library and information science (LIS) and the digital humanities are both interested in studying recorded information and often share institutional frameworks. The purpose of this paper is to go beyond outlining these similarities by examining the perceived and real strengths and weaknesses of both disciplines.

Epistemologies and methods of both disciplines are analysed, principally in the light of the growing importance of data-intensive research, taking into consideration that there is a tension about the academic status of these disciplines.

Epistemologies and methods of both disciplines are analysed, principally in the light of the growing importance of data-intensive research, taking into consideration that there is a tension about the academic status of these disciplines.

The paper intends to be an add-on to the recent discussions and the evolving body of knowledge about the relationship of these disciplines with the hope of indicating a possible new direction in the development of LIS.

This paper re-examines the ontology of documents, especially digital ones, in the context of preservation, which presumes the actual existence of things. It also explores which aspects of documents are retained or lost over the course of time.

This study detangles the complexities of existential dependence relations of documents, by selectively reviewing literature on digital preservation, document theory, John Searle's social ontology, Maurizio Ferraris' documentality, and Amie Thomasson's categorial ontology.

The author argues that (1) existing objects can be documents, insofar as perceivers regard them as such; (2) documents are social objects as they depend on other objects, including creators, perceivers, and other documents; and (3) preserving digital documents entails the curation of dependence relations since they inherently have technologically dependent relations.

A clarification of the existential dependence relations of documents can aid documentary heritage institutions in determining preservation goals and strategies. Future research must address how, and to what extent, such dependence relations can be curated.

This paper clarifies that the preservation of documents entails the curation of dependence relations, and the critical issue in preservation is how to best preserve the dependence relations of documents, especially since digital documents available on the Internet inherently have technological and dynamic dependence relations.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the emergence of digital reformatting as a technique for preserving information within the cultural heritage preservation community by reviewing historical trends in modern preservation research.

This paper analyzes secondary sources, reviews and historical texts to identify trends in the intellectual and technological histories of preservation research, beginning with the first applications of the scientific method to combating book decay in the early nineteenth to the emergence of digitization techniques in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

This paper identifies five major historical periods in the development of preservation knowledge: the early experimental era; era of microfilm experimentation; era of professionalization; era of digital library research; and the era of digital reformatting and mass digitization; and identifies three major trends in its development: empirical inquiry, standardization and centralization.

Findings reflect broad trends in the field of preservation, primarily in a United States context and are limited to the modern era of preservation research.

This paper's broad historical overview provides a reference for preservation professionals and students in library science or archives programs. Identifying historical trends enables practitioners to critically examine their own preservation techniques and make better decisions when adopting and using new preservation technologies.

This paper provides a unique perspective on the history of preservation knowledge that synthesizes existing historical research in order to identify periods and trends that enable a clearer understanding of digital reformatting in its historical emergence.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on selected presentations from the 29th Computers in Libraries (CIL) conference that took place at Washington Hilton hotel, Washington, DC. In addition to its content, the CIL (2014) conference provided opportunities to discuss best practices and emerging issues with IT professionals, vendors and “techno” librarians, especially from North America. There was a conference within a conference – the Internet@Schools track integrated into CIL 2014 as Track E on Monday, April 7, and Tuesday, April 8.

Reports from the viewpoint of a first-time attendee of CIL (2014) present a summary of the selected presentations with more detail on networking events and the exhibition. The CIL (2014) conference attracted librarians from 13 countries other than the USA. It is difficult to document the entire conference happenings in a single report because of several tracks (A-E) and number of speakers; therefore, a selective approach is used.

The CIL (2014) in Washington, DC, is considered a major North American library technology conference for librarians and information managers. As a first-time attendee, the author found that CIL (2014) is informative; it covered technology applications in libraries and strategies to enhance communication – useful to librarians and information professionals both in the USA and internationally. The conference was full of innovative ideas and revealed the diversity of current developments in library service delivery, especially in North America.

Today, more and more library users are using various innovative technologies including mobile apps, data visualization, application programming interfaces, open-source and multimedia. Phones (smart phones) and tablets are emerging as popular choices to access content. This report is a summary of selected educational sessions/presentations in CIL (2014) on diverse technology-related topics, especially mobile technology in libraries that will be of particular interest to readers and useful for professionals who did not attend CIL (2014) in Washington, DC.

The purpose of this paper is to report on the Spring 2013 MARAC Conference.

This report focuses on the use of technology in archives, libraries, and museums, as presented in various sessions at the Spring 2013 MARAC Conference.

Archives, libraries, and museums are utilizing various technologies including QR codes, data visualization, open‐source platforms, and single search boxes to better reach and serve the demands and expectations of today's users.

The paper condenses the author's notes from various sessions.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how archivists, records managers and scholarly literature in the field(s) analyse how “participation” is discussed in the context of archives and records management, and to explore practical and theoretical implications of the disclosed discursive practices.

The analysis is based on a discourse analysis of a body of archival literature and a sample of posts collected from the archival and records management blogosphere.

The analysis shows that instead of discussing one notion of participation, the archival science literature is referring to nine different and partly conflicting types of participation from three broad perspectives: management, empowerment and technology. The discourses have also conflicting ideas of the role of engagement and enthusiasm, and of that what do the different stakeholder communities see as real options.

The analysed material consists of a limited sample of mainly English language texts that may not capture all the nuances of how participation is discussed in the archival literature.

A better understanding of how different claims of the benefits and threats endorsing “participation” in archives helps to develop effective and less contradictory forms of collaboration between different stakeholders.

In spite of the popularity of the notion of “participation”, there little, especially critical, research on how participation is conceptualised by archives professionals and researchers.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a knowledge extraction framework to extract knowledge, including entities and relationships between them, from unstructured texts in digital humanities (DH).

The proposed cooperative crowdsourcing framework (CCF) uses both human–computer cooperation and crowdsourcing to achieve high-quality and scalable knowledge extraction. CCF integrates active learning with a novel category-based crowdsourcing mechanism to facilitate domain experts labeling and verifying extracted knowledge.

The case study shows that CCF can effectively and efficiently extract knowledge from multi-sourced heterogeneous data in the field of Tang poetry. Specifically, CCF achieves higher accuracy of knowledge extraction than the state-of-the-art methods, the contribution of feedbacks to the training model can be maximized by the active learning mechanism and the proposed category-based crowdsourcing mechanism can scale up the effective human–computer collaboration by considering the specialization of workers in different categories of tasks.

This research proposes CCF to enable high-quality and scalable knowledge extraction in the field of Tang poetry. CCF can be generalized to other fields of DH by introducing domain knowledge and experts.

The extracted knowledge is machine-understandable and can support the research of Tang poetry and knowledge-driven intelligent applications in DH.

CCF is the first human-in-the-loop knowledge extraction framework that integrates active learning and crowdsourcing mechanisms; he human–computer cooperation method uses the feedback of domain experts through the active learning mechanism; the category-based crowdsourcing mechanism considers the matching of categories of DH data and especially of domain experts.