Description: This article discusses automating the semiotic analysis of film, including visual representation, search and retrieval, and ways of seeing.

Description: This paper describes the design and development of a learning object repository for a new statewide higher education initiative. The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board is funding the redesign of large undergraduate courses; the redesigned courses are intended to improve student learning, retention and outcomes. The learning object repository stores and provides access to content from these courses. Content has been decomposed into discrete learning object varying in levels of granularity. The paper provides details on the proof-of-concept implementation developed in Phase I of a two-phase project. Special attention is given to key aspects such as the levels of granularity, metadata, technology, and user testing. ssues that emerged in Phase I are informing all facets of the next iteration of the repository.

Description: This article discusses research on collaboration and crowdsourcing. Abstract: Purpose - This study aims to understand key features of existing multilingual digital libraries and to suggest strategies for building and/or sustaining multilingual information access for digital libraries. Design/methodology/approach - A case study approach was applied to examine four American multilingual digital libraries: Project Gutenburg, Meeting of Frontiers, The International Children's Digital Library, and the Latin American Open Archives Portal. This examination used a framework derived from digital library evaluation practice. The missions, goals, funding, partners, users, collections, services, and technologies of these digital libraries were analyzed to present their key multilingual features. The collaboration and crowdsourcing characteristics were highlighted and discussed. Findings - These four multilingual libraries benefit substantially, both in the creation of the library and in its access, from the collaboration of groups domestic and international with different language expertise. For building the multilingual collection and services, some libraries involved both staff and users. For multilingual access to the collection, however, none of the libraries used machine translation or cross-language information retrieval technologies. Research limitations/implications - The four cases are all publicly available digital libraries in the United States. Their features may not be applicable to digital libraries ...

Description: This presentation was given as an invited talk to faculty and students at Wuhan University, Beijing Normal University, Nankai University, and the Library of Chinese Academy of Sciences. The presentation discusses research on multilingual information access for digital libraries and the Metadata Records Translation (MRT) Project.

Description: This paper proposes a Retrieval Outcome Analysis Framework, or ROA Framework, to systematically evaluate retrieval performance of Cross-Language Information Retrieval systems. The ROA framework goes beyond TREC-type retrieval evaluation methodology by including procedures focusing on individual queries, especially difficult queries. The framework is comprised of four interrelated components: (1) Overall System Performance Evaluation, (2) Query Categorization, (3) Translation Analysis, and (4) Individual Query Analysis. An example of applying the framework is discussed in detail. The author believes the proposed framework would be especially useful for the development of real world Cross-Language Information Retrieval systems because the evaluation guided by the framework has the potential to discover causes behind poor retrieval performance.