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Abstract:What
will it be like to work in a digital library?
We begin by browsing around the newly-formed Southern Alberta Digital
Library Centre, which includes many international collections created by the
New Zealand Digital Library project, looking at the material they contain and
how it is organized. Then we turn to
the Greenstone digital library software on which all these collections are
based. This allows the facilities that a collection provides, including the
user interface for searching and browsing, to be customized at many different
levels based on whatever document formats and metadata is available. We
briefly illustrate how browsing around a digital library can be supported by
structures derived from automatic analysis of the contents of the
library--not just the catalog, or abstracts, but the full text of the books
and journals. Greenstone is widely used in many different countries,
including developing countries, and interfaces and collections exist in many
of the world’s languages. It is open source software, distributed by UNESCO.
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Presenter: Ian
H. Witten is professor of computer
science at the University of Waikato in New Zealand where he directs the New
Zealand Digital Library research project; he is presently an iCORE visiting
professor at the University of Lethbridge. His research interests include
information retrieval, machine learning, text compression, and programming by
demonstration. He received degrees in
Mathematics, Computer Science, and Electrical Engineering from Cambridge
University, England; the University of Calgary, Canada; and Essex University,
England. He is a fellow of the ACM and
of the Royal Society of New Zealand.
He has published widely on digital libraries, machine learning, text
compression, hypertext, speech synthesis and signal processing, and computer
typography. He has authored and
co-authored several books, the latest being Managing Gigabytes (1999), Data
Mining (2000) and How to build a digital library (2003), all from Morgan Kaufmann. He will receive the
2004 IFIP Namur Award, a biennial honour accorded for outstanding
contribution with international impact to the awareness of social
implications of information and communication technology.
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