Description: This paper discusses how to provide quality customer service in the face of budget cuts. Abstract: Most academic libraries have been experiencing cutbacks in staff and resources and are expected to do more with less. In response to these cutbacks, the University of North Texas (UNT) Libraries came up with a plan to reduce the number of staffed service points. By the end of the Spring 2012 semester the UNT Libraries had successfully merged nine service points into three: two service desks at our main library and one at our science library. This paper will present an overview of the steps the UNT Libraries Public Services Division took to effectively manage these mergers. It will describe the methods used to cross train library support staff, and provide suggestions for other libraries who may also be considering streamlining their service points.

Description: This paper discusses improving access to web archives through innovative analysis of PDF content. Abstract: In 2008 five United States institutions collaborated to archive the U.S. federal government Web presence: the Library of Congress, the Internet Archive, the California Digital Library, the Government Printing Office, and the University of North Texas (UNT). Their objective was to document the changes coincident with the shift in leadership of the U.S. executive branch. The five partners identified key resources from the U.S. .gov Top Level Domain and completed crawls from September 2008 until March 2009. The resulting End of Term (EOT) 2008 Web Archive, a 16 TB dataset, was distributed to partners interested in providing local services and access to the archive. The UNT Libraries investigated Portable Document Format (PDF) files, a class of content many information professionals associate with the traditional notion of “discrete documents”. Over four million unique PDF documents were extracted from the Archive and a series of metadata and information extraction processes were conducted for each document. Additionally, derivative raster images of the first page of each document were created. These metrics were ingested into a database for further analysis, which brought to light previously hidden characteristics of the ...

Description: This paper reports an exploratory study on resources and resource sharing among researchers in Intelligent Information Access (IIA). The investigation consists of two stages. In Stage One, the authors conducted a content analysis to identify resources used in 145 research papers and reports in two subfields of IIA; and in Stage Two, the authors carried out an online survey of IIA researchers to understand resource-sharing channels and the researchers' perspectives on resource sharing. The results demonstrate that IIA researchers make use of various types of resources developed by others. Most of these resources are knowledgeable sources or software systems that are freely available online. However, IIA researchers encounter various difficulties during the course of resource acquisition and use. The study suggests that a resource management system built on a well-established knowledge-management model could greatly facilitate the creation, sharing, and use of resources in the IIA community.

Description: In this paper, the authors present a schema to build one way functions from a family of Boolean gates. Moreover, the authors relate characteristics of these Boolean gate truth tables to properties of the derived one-way functions. The authors believe this to be the first attempt at establishing cryptographic properties from the Boolean cube spaces of the component gates. This schema is then used to build a family of compression functions, which in turn can be used to get block encryption and hash functions. These functions are based on reconfigurable gates. The authors prove cryptographically relevant properties for these function implementations. Various applications incorporating these one-way functions, specifically memory integrity in processor architecture, are presented.

Description: This paper discusses Africa and the global knowledge footprint. Abstract: The purpose of this panel is to discuss the global knowledge output at a macro level with a view to understand key inputs that foster scientific and research performance. Here, knowledge production is limited to scientific and technical journals and patent registrations to gauge the performance of each region and continent the world over. Greater emphasis will be placed to highlight important indicators from the input side that help spur national research and innovation systems in Africa. Defined here as "content divide," panel members focus on key variables that help build scientific and research capabilities of Africa. Closely interrelated variables that will be discussed include (1) access to the global knowledge base, (2) the role of higher education systems (3) national, regional, and global research and education networks (RENs); and (4) gross expenditure on R&D (GERD).