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 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).

Description: This paper accompanies a poster presentation discussing empowering digital libraries users through combining taxonomies and folksonomies. Abstract: The increase in the number and heterogeneity of digital resources has led cultural heritage institutions to develop tools, workflows, and quality assurance mechanisms that allow effective digital resource management. The poster that this paper describes assesses the current landscape in digital libraries as well as best practices and identifies emerging trends in information indexing. It also explores the potentials of and controversies surrounding user supplied tags or keywords in terms of complementing established controlled vocabularies in a diverse and collaborative environment.

Description: This paper accompanies a poster presentation discussing repurposing existing digital resources and smoothing interdisciplinary communication. Given the proliferation of scholarly digital contents, it has become increasingly difficult for researchers to find relevant contents on their own, not to mention related, disciplines. The situation is even worse in interdisciplinary fields such as environmental sciences. Many academic libraries provide services to support the creation, organization, management, use, and reuse of digital contents. This poster describes the University of North Texas (UNT) Libraries' initiative to provide digital infrastructure and stewardship in order to ensure long-term access to the resources collected. The preliminary results from usage and related statistics analysis suggest significant research and educational impact of the Environmental Policy Collection. Based on the UNT Libraries' experience in integrating heterogeneous digital resources from diverse sources and providing seamless access, this paper describes guidelines for future digital collection development, and make recommendations for further study of collection development strategies.

Description: This paper discusses the Classification of the End-of-Term Archive project. Abstract: For users, selecting relevant content from Web archives is often a daunting endeavor. This Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) funded research project, Classification of the End-of-Term Archive, investigated whether link analysis and the cluster analysis were effective techniques for classifying the materials in the EOT Archive to improve discovery. Classification of the resulting clusters by subject matter experts in government information indicated that the structural analysis was not effective at creating clusters of related websites when authored by four or fewer federal government parent agencies. The results also suggested that cluster analysis might be effective at identifying topically related websites across agency authors, which would be highly desirable to both system developers and users. To investigate this, subject matter experts applied subject tags to the websites in two sets of machine-generated clusters. The findings indicate that the cluster analysis successfully identified strongly related content in 61% of clusters.