ALBERT

Description: This paper is intended to help librarians and archivists who are involved in digitization work choose optical character recognition (OCR) software. The paper provides an introduction to OCR software for digitization projects, and shares the method we developed for easily evaluating the effectiveness of OCR software on resources we are digitizing. We tested three major OCR programs (Adobe Acrobat, ABBYY FineReader, Tesseract) for accuracy on three different digitized texts from our archives and special collections at the University of Western Ontario. Our test was divided into two parts: a word accuracy test (to determine how searchable the final documents were), and a test with a screen reader (to determine how accessible the final documents were). We share our findings from the tests and make recommendations for OCR work on digitized documents from archives and special collections.

Description: Some musings on the difficulty of wanting to know our users' secrets and simultaneously wanting to not know them.

Description: PA Digital is a Pennsylvania network that serves as the state’s service hub for the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). The group developed a homegrown aggregation system in 2014, used to harvest digital collection records from contributing institutions, validate and transform their metadata, and deliver aggregated records to the DPLA. Since our initial launch, PA Digital has expanded significantly, harvesting from an increasing number of contributors with a variety of repository systems. With each new system, our highly customized aggregator software became more complex and difficult to maintain. By 2018, PA Digital staff had determined that a new solution was needed. From 2019 to 2021, a cross-functional team implemented a more flexible and scalable approach to metadata aggregation for PA Digital, using Apache Airflow for workflow management and Solr/Blacklight for internal metadata review. In this article, we will outline how we use this group of applications and the new workflows adopted, which afford our metadata specialists more autonomy to contribute directly to the ongoing development of the aggregator. We will discuss how this work fits into our broader sustainability planning as a network and how the team leveraged shared expertise to build a more stable approach to maintenance.

Description: Digital libraries at research universities make use of a wide range of unique tools to enable the sharing of eclectic sets of texts, images, audio, video, and other digital objects. Presenting these assorted local treasures to the world can be a challenge, since text is often siloed with text, images with images, and so on, such that per type, there may be separate user experiences in a variety of unique discovery interfaces. One common tool that has been developed in recent years to potentially unite them all is the Apache Solr index. Texas A&M University (TAMU) Libraries has harnessed Solr for internal indexing for repositories like DSpace, Fedora, and Avalon. Impressed by frameworks like Blacklight at peer institutions, TAMU Libraries wrote an analogous set of tools in Java, and thus was born SAGE, the Solr AGgregation Engine, with two primary functions: 1) aggregating Solr indices or “cores,” from various local sources, and 2) presenting search facility to the user in a discovery interface.

Description: DC Public Library has long held digital copies of the full run of local alternative weekly, Washington City Paper, but had no official status as a rights grantor to enable use. That recently changed due to a full agreement being reached with the publisher. One condition of that agreement, however, was that issues become available with usable descriptive metadata and subject access in time to celebrate the upcoming 40th anniversary of the publication, which at that time was in six months. One of the most time intensive tasks our metadata specialists work on is assigning description to digital objects. This paper details how we applied Python’s Natural Language Toolkit and OpenRefine’s reconciliation functions to the collection’s OCR text to simplify subject selection for staff with no background in programming.

Description: This paper reviews the main theoretical principles underlying the nascent field of decentralized justice and the early empirical experience in real life use cases. Part of the Blockchain & Procedural Law seminars (Max Planck Institute Luxembourg for Procedural Law).〈div class="enclosure"〉〈/div〉

Description: At the end of 2019, the Research Data Service (RDS) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) completed its fifth year as a campus-wide service. In order to gauge the effectiveness of the RDS in meeting the needs of Illinois researchers, RDS staff developed a five-year review consisting of a survey and a series of in-depth focus group interviews. As a result, our institutional data repository developed in-house by University Library IT staff, Illinois Data Bank, was recognized as the most useful service offering by our unit. When launched in 2016, storage resources and web servers for Illinois Data Bank and supporting systems were hosted on-premises at UIUC. As anticipated, researchers increasingly need to share large, and complex datasets. In a responsive effort to leverage the potentially more reliable, highly available, cost-effective, and scalable storage accessible to computation resources, we migrated our item bitstreams and web services to the cloud. Our efforts have met with success, but also with painful bumps along the way. This article describes how we supported data curation workflows through transitioning from on-premises to cloud resource hosting. It details our approaches to ingesting, curating, and offering access to dataset files up to 2TB in size--which may be archive type files (e.g., .zip or .tar) containing complex directory structures.

Description: In the study of solar-terrestrial relationships, magnetic storms and solar activity play important roles. In this paper, the intense magnetic storms in company with solar proton events occurred in October and November 2003, January 2005, December 2006, January and March 2012 have been considered. The variation of the odd nitrogen (NOy) oxides and ozone in the stratospheric layer is investigated by the effects of energetic particle precipitation. Anomaly percentage of the odd nitrogen (NOy) oxides and ozone are calculated separately for the Southern and the Northern hemispheres and geographic latitude from 60 to 80 degrees. The analyzed results of the observational data showed that the intense magnetic storms, which consist of more than 500 (particles/cm2 s sr) solar energetic proton (E〉10MeV), gave rise to the increase of the odd nitrogen (NOy) oxides in the stratosphere, from level 1 mb to 200 mb. Also, the results showed that in November 2003, January 2005, December 2006, January and March 2012 the odd nitrogen (NOy) oxides, which consist of over 500 (particles/cm2 s sr) increased in the Northern hemisphere but decreased a little in the Southern hemisphere . Among the events of the magnetic storms in the autumn and winter seasons, the only event on the October 2003, showed that the odd nitrogen (NOy) oxides increased in the Southern hemisphere. The results showed that the increase in the odd nitrogen (NOy) oxides caused a decrease of ozone in the altitude below the odd nitrogen (NOy) with a delay.

Description: The electrical properties of rock types or channel structures have been the object of intense studies for many years. The main aim of the present work is to show the frequency response of electrical properties of some Granite samples concerning chemical, minor and major composition. This may be used as a fingerprint for the characterization of some Granite rocks. Electrical measurements on Granite samples (surface, Aswan, Egypt) were measured (100 Hz up to 107 Hz). Differences in samples due to changes in texture lead to different changes in electrical properties. The changes at conductivity and dielectric constant are reflections from the texture within grains. Conductivity and dielectric constant values extend from ~10-8 to 10-4 (S/m) and 24 to 3.5, respectively. With frequency increase, conductivity increases, and dielectric constant decreases (10 kHz), and then it settles down. Differences in electrical properties between samples are small as a direct result of the homogeneity and texture of most samples. There is a high dispersion of dielectric constant for relatively low-frequency values (〈10 kHz) and no dispersion at relatively high frequencies. In conclusion, the dielectric constant decreases due to the shrinkage of energy levels for electrons and the increase of hopping particles between different particles.

Description: A strong earthquake () (34.911° N, 45.959° E, ~19 km depth) occurred on November 12, 2017, at 18:18:17 UTC (LT=UTC+03:30) in Sarpol-e Zahab, Iran. Six different Neural Network (NN) algorithms including Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP), Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU), Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM) and CNN-LSTM were implemented to survey the four months of GPS Total Electron Content (TEC) measurements during the period of August 01 to November 30, 2017 around the epicenter of the mentioned earthquake. By considering the quiet solar-geomagnetic conditions, every six methods detect anomalous TEC variations nine days prior to the earthquake. Since time-series of TEC variations follow a nonlinear and complex behavior, intelligent algorithms such as NN can be considered as an appropriate tool for modelling and prediction of TEC time-series. Moreover, multi-methods analyses beside the multi precursor’s analyses decrease uncertainty and false alarms and consequently lead to confident anomalies.