Description: This paper discusses assessing descriptive substance in free-text collection-level metadata. Abstract: Collection-level metadata has the potential to provide important information about the features and purpose of individual collections. This paper reports on a content analysis of collection records in an aggregation of cultural heritage collections. The findings show that the free-text Description field often provides more accurate and complete representation of subjects and object types than the specified fields. Properties such as importance, uniqueness, comprehensiveness, provenance, and creator are articulated, as well as other vital contextual information about the intentions of a collector and the value of a collection, as a whole, for scholarly users. The results demonstrate that the semantically rich free-text Description field is essential to understanding the context of collections in large aggregations and can serve as a source of data for enhancing and customizing controlled vocabularies.

Description: This paper discusses building contextual mass in digital aggregations for scholarly use. Abstract: At present there are no established collection development methods for building large-scale digital aggregations. However, to realize the potential of the collective base of digital content and advance scholarship, aggregations must do more than provide search of sizable bodies of content. Informed by empirical understanding of scholarly information practices, the IMLS Digital Collections and Content project developed an aggregation strategy for building Opening History, one of the largest digital cultural heritage aggregations in the country. The strategy applied policy-driven collecting based on the principle of contextual mass, and conspectus-style evaluation of collection-level metadata to identify strong subject areas within the aggregation. Analysis of density, interconnectedness, diversity, and small/large collection complementary determined subject concentrations and thematic strengths to be prioritized for future collection development and used as organizational structures for browsing and visualization. The approach models how scholars build their own personal research collections, as they follow leads from collection to collection across institutions near and far, and adds value that cannot be achieved through conventional retrieval and browsing at the item-level.

Description: Abstract: This paper describes our participation in the NTCIR-5 CLQA task. Three runs were officially submitted for three subtasks: Chinese Question Answering, English-Chinese Question Answering, and Chinese-English Question Answering. We expanded their TREC experimental QA system EagleQA this year to include Chinese QA and Cross-Language QA capabilities. Various information retrieval and natural language processing tools were incorporated with their home-built programs such as Answer Type Identification, Sentence Extraction, and Answer Finding to find answers to the test questions. Future development will focus on investigating effective question translation and answer finding solutions.

Description: This paper discusses digital curation in the academic library job market. With the increasingly important role librarians play in the fast-paced and data-intensive digital curation movement, there is a need to identify the qualifications and responsibilities expected by employers. An investigation of 110 recent job advertisements was conducted to identify competencies required of individuals working in the digital curation field. The job ads analysis serves as an important indicator of the emerging requirements for a qualified workforce in the field of digital curation in the academic library job market.

Description: This paper discusses extraction and parsing of herbarium specimen data. Abstract: Herbaria around the world house millions of plant specimens; botanists and other researchers value these resources as ingredients in biodiversity research. Even when the specimen sheets are digitized and made available online, the critical information about the specimen stored on the sheet are not in a usable (i.e., machine-processible) form. This paper describes a current research and development project that is designing and testing high-throughput workflows that combine machine- and human-processes to extract and parse the specimen label data. The primary focus of the paper is the metadata needs for the workflow and the creation of the structured metadata records describing the plant specimen. In the project, the authors are exploring the use of the new Dublin Core Metadata Initiative framework for application profiles. First articulated as the Singapore Framework for Dublin Core Application Profiles in 2007, the use of this framework is in its infancy. The promises of this framework for maximum interoperability and for documenting the use of metadata for maximum reusability, and for supporting metadata applications that are in conformance with Web architectural principles provide the incentive to explore and add implementation experience regarding this new ...