ECDL 2010 – Day 1 (#ecdl2010)

I am extremely lucky to have been offered a student place helping out at ECDL 2010, the European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries. The following are the highlights from day 1 of the conference for this archivist let loose in the virtual stacks:

Susan Dumais‘ keynote presented recent Microsoft research into the temporal dynamics of the web, analysing both changes to content and how people revisit web pages, checking for new content or looking for previously found information. She argued that the current generation of web browsers offer only a static, snapshot view, and went on to illustrate a browser plugin called DiffIE which highlights what has changed on a web page since the user’s last visit. She also presented some initial evaluation of this tool, which indicated that although perceptions of revisitation frequency remained constant, in practice users of the plugin increased their revisitation rate. There are lots of potential applications for this kind of tool for archives – from the presentation of web archives to the user interactions/annotations/ratings examples that Dumais herself gave. She also spoke about the implications of her research to the ranking and presentation of search results, illustrating how the pertinency and hence relevancy of certain terms can decline over time – for example, a user searching for ‘US Open’ this week is more likely to looking for information on the tennis grand slam than the golf tournament. Again, there are some interesting implications here for archival catalogue and document search systems.

Christos Papatheodorou from the Ionian University on Corfu spoke about the mapping of disparate cultural heritage (archives, museums, libraries) XML-based metadata schema to the CIDOC CRM ontology, and went on to describe the transformation of XPath queries submitted to a local (XML) data source into equivalent queries suitable to be submitted to other data sources, via the CIDOC CRM ontology. Having travelled up to Glasgow on the sleeper, arriving at 7 in the morning, I confess I got a bit lost in the technicalities from this point onwards, but the basic idea is to use CIDOC CRM as a mediator between disparate cultural heritage sources marked up in different XML schema. There was an extended worked example using EAD, which was nice to hear. In general, it has been interesting to observe a large number of papers at this conference which report experiments based upon data from cultural heritage rather than scientific domains. All of which tends to reinforce my thoughts after the Society of Archivists’ Conference about attracting technology experts to work in the archives sector: cultural heritage data is complex and thus, it seems, fascinating and intrinsically motivating to work with. We should be more proactive about promoting archival data to this kind of digital research community.

I’d been particularly looking forward to the paper on User-Contributed Metadata for Libraries and Cultural Institutions, although this turned out to be a Drexel University re-working of the Library of Congress flickr Commons experience, albeit concentrating more on user comments and less upon tagging. I was not quite comfortable anyway with the a priori categorization of comments described in the paper (into 1. personal and historical 2. link out (eg to wikipedia) 3. corrections and translations 4. link in (eg adding images to flickr groups) – seems to me that category 1. includes a particularly wide range of possible comment types), plus all the things I wanted to ask about seemed to be listed as ‘future research’. These include a fuller categorization, exploring motivations for adding comments, the presentation of comments in the user interface, and librarians’ (or archivists’) role in moderating user interaction.

I also enjoyed a couple of papers which presented ideas to do with improving information visualisation and user judgement using colours, layout and social navigation, all of which have some potential relevancy to the question of how best to present user-generated content.

Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries, Proceedings of the 14^th European Conference, ECDL 2010, Glasgow, UK, September 2010 is published as Lecture Notes in Computer Science 6273, available via SpringerLink, for those of you who have access.

And I have travelled twice on Glasgow’s baby underground train 🙂

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